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Reclaiming Accountability: Improving Writing Programs through Accreditation and Large-Scale Assessments
by Wendy Sharer, Tracy Ann Morse, Michelle F. Eble and William P. BanksReclaiming Accountability brings together a series of critical case studies of writing programs that have planned, implemented, and/or assessed the impact of large-scale accreditation-supported initiatives. The book reimagines accreditation as a way to leverage institutional or programmatic change. Contributions to the volume are divided into three parts. Part 1 considers how specialists in composition and rhetoric can work most productively with accrediting bodies to design assessments and initiatives that meet requirements while also helping those agencies to better understand how writing develops and how it can most effectively be assessed. Parts 2 and 3 present case studies of how institutions have used ongoing accreditation and assessment imperatives to meet student learning needs through programmatic changes and faculty development. They provide concrete examples of productive curricular (part 2) and instructional (part 3) changes that can follow from accreditation mandates while providing guidance for navigating challenges and pitfalls that WPAs may encounter within shifting and often volatile local, regional, and national contexts. In addition to providing examples of how others in the profession might approach such work, Reclaiming Accountability addresses assessment requirements beyond those in the writing program itself. It will be of interest to department heads, administrators, writing program directors, and those involved with writing teacher education, among others. Contributors: Linda Adler-Kassner, William P. Banks, Remica Bingham-Risher, Melanie Burdick, Polina Chemishanova, Malkiel Choseed, Kyle Christiansen, Angela Crow, Maggie Debelius, Michelle F. Eble, Jonathan Elmore, Lorna Gonzalez, Angela Green, Jim Henry, Ryan Hoover, Rebecca Ingalls, Cynthia Miecznikowski, Susan Miller-Cochran, Cindy Moore, Tracy Ann Morse, Joyce Magnotto Neff, Karen Nulton, Peggy O’Neill, Jessica Parker, Mary Rist, Rochelle Rodrigo, Tulora Roeckers, Shirley K. Rose, Iris M. Saltiel, Wendy Sharer, Terri Van Sickle, Jane Chapman Vigil, David M. Weed
Reclaiming Assia Wevill: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and the Literary Imagination
by Julie Goodspeed-ChadwickReclaiming Assia Wevill: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and the Literary Imagination reconsiders cultural representations of Assia Wevill (1927–1969), according her a more significant position than a femme fatale or scapegoat for marital discord and suicide in the lives and works of two major twentieth-century poets. Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick’s innovative study combines feminist recovery work with discussions of the power and gendered dynamics that shape literary history. She focuses on how Wevill figures into poems by Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, showing that they often portrayed her in harsh, conflicted, even demeaning terms. Their representations of Wevill established condemnatory narratives that were perpetuated by subsequent critics and biographers and in works of popular culture. In Plath’s literary treatments, Goodspeed-Chadwick locates depictions of both desirable and undesirable femininity, conveyed in images of female bodies as beautiful but barren or as vehicles for dangerous, destructive acts. By contrast, Hughes’s portrayals illustrate the role Wevill occupied in his life as muse and abject object. His late work Capriccio constitutes a sustained meditation on trauma, in which Hughes confronts Wevill’s suicide and her killing of their daughter, Shura. Goodspeed-Chadwick also analyzes Wevill’s self-representations by examining artifacts that she authored or on which she collaborated. Finally, she discusses portrayals of Wevill in recent works of literature, film, and television. In the end, Goodspeed-Chadwick shows that Wevill remains an object of both fascination and anger, as she was for Plath, and a figure of attraction and repulsion, as she was for Hughes. Reclaiming Assia Wevill reconsiders its subject’s tragic life and lasting impact in regard to perceived gender roles and notions of femininity, power dynamics in heterosexual relationships, and the ways in which psychological traumas impact life, art, and literary imagination.
Reclaiming Composition for Chicano/as and Other Ethnic Minorities
by Iris D. RuizThis book examines the history of ethnic minorities--particularly Chicano/as and Latino/as--in the field of composition and rhetoric; the connections between composition and major US historical movements toward inclusiveness in education; the ways our histories of that inclusiveness have overlooked Chicano/as; and how this history can inform the teaching of composition and writing to Chicano/a and Latino/a students in the present day. Bridging the gap between Ethnic Studies, Critical History, and Composition Studies, Ruiz creates a new model of the practice of critical historiography and shows how that can be developed into a critical writing pedagogy for students who live in an increasingly multicultural, multilingual society.
Reclaiming Critical Remix Video: The Role of Sampling in Transformative Works (Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies)
by Owen GallagherRemix is now considered by many to be a form of derivative work, but such generalizations have resulted in numerous non-commercial remixes being wrongfully accused of copyright infringement. Gallagher argues, however, that remix is a fundamentally transformative practice. The assumption that cultural works should be considered a form of private property is called into question in the digital age; thus, he proposes an alternative system to balance the economic interests of cultural producers with the ability of the public to engage with a growing intellectual commons of cultural works. Multimodal analyses of both remixed and non-remixed intertextual work, with a particular focus on examples of critical remix video, fuel the discussion, synthesizing a number of investigative methods including semiotic, rhetorical and ideological analysis.
Reclaiming Early Childhood Literacies: Narratives of Hope, Power, and Vision
by Richard J. Meyer Kathryn F. WhitmoreAt a time when literacy has become more of a political issue than a research or pedagogical one, this volume refocuses attention on work with young children that places them at the center of their literacy worlds. Drawing on robust and growing knowledge which is often marginalized because of political and legislative forces, it explores young children’s literacies as inclusive, redefined, and broadened—encompassing technologies, the arts, multiple modalities, and teaching and learning for democracy, cultural sustainability and social justice. Highlighted themes include children’s rights to grow through playful engagements with multiple literacies to interrogate their worlds; adults who expand and inspire children’s consciousness and awareness of others and the world around them; the centrality of meaning making in all aspects of language and literacy development; a deep respect for diversities, including languages, cultures, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status and more; and an expansive understanding of the nature of texts.
Reclaiming English Language Arts Methods Courses: Critical Issues and Challenges for Teacher Educators in Top-Down Times
by Jory Brass Allen WebbReclaiming English Language Arts Methods Courses showcases innovative work in teacher education that fosters teachers’ capacities as reflective practitioners and public intellectuals; extends traditional boundaries of methods courses on teaching the English language arts, literacy, children’s and young adult literature; and embodies democratic and critical politics that go beyond the reductive economic aims and traditional classroom practices sanctioned by educational policies and corporate educational reforms. Featuring leading and emerging scholars in English language arts teacher education, each chapter provides rich and concrete examples of elementary and secondary methods courses rooted in contemporary research and theory, on-line resources, and honest appraisals of the possibilities, tensions, and limits of doing teacher education differently in a top-down time of standards-based education, high-stakes testing, teacher assessment, and neoliberal education reforms. This book offers important resources and support for teacher educators and graduate students to explore alternative visions for aligning university methods courses with current trends in English and cultural studies, critical sociocultural literacy, new literacies and web 2.0 tools, and teaching the English language arts in multiethnic, multilingual, and underserved urban communities.
Reclaiming Greek Drama for Diverse Audiences: An Anthology of Adaptations and Interviews
by Melinda PowersReclaiming Greek Drama for Diverse Audiences features the work of Native-American, African-American, Asian-American, Latinx, and LGBTQ theatre artists who engage with social justice issues in seven adaptations of Sophocles’ Antigone, Euripides’ Trojan Women, Hippolytus, Bacchae, Alcestis, and Aristophanes’ Frogs, as well as a work inspired by the myth of the Fates. Performed between 1989 and 2017 in small theatres across the US, these contemporary works raise awareness about the trafficking of Native-American women, marriage equality, gender justice, women’s empowerment, the social stigma surrounding HIV, immigration policy, and the plight of undocumented workers. The accompanying interviews provide a fascinating insight into the plays, the artists’ inspiration for them, and the importance of studying classics in the college classroom. Readers will benefit from an introduction that discusses practical ways to teach the adaptations, ideas for assignments, and the contextualization of the works within the history of classical reception. Serving as a key resource on incorporating diversity into the teaching of canonical texts for Classics, English, Drama and Theatre Studies students, this anthology is the first to present the work of a range of contemporary theatre artists who utilize ancient Greek source material to explore social, political, and economic issues affecting a variety of underrepresented communities in the US.
Reclaiming John Steinbeck: Writing for the Future of Humanity
by Gavin JonesJohn Steinbeck is a towering figure in twentieth-century American literature; yet he remains one of our least understood writers. This major reevaluation of Steinbeck by Gavin Jones uncovers a timely thinker who confronted the fate of humanity as a species facing climate change, environmental crisis, and a growing divide between the powerful and the marginalized. Driven by insatiable curiosity, Steinbeck's work crossed a variety of borders – between the United States and the Global South, between human and nonhuman lifeforms, between science and the arts, and between literature and film – to explore the transformations in consciousness necessary for our survival on a precarious planet. Always seeking new forms to express his ecological and social vision of human interconnectedness and vulnerability, Steinbeck is a writer of urgent concern for the twenty-first century, even as he was haunted by the legacies of racism and injustice in the American West.
Reclaiming Karbala: Nation, Islam and Literature of the Bengali Muslims (Routledge Studies in Comparative Literature)
by Epsita HalderAnalysing an extensive range of texts and publications across multiple genres, formats and literary lineages, Reclaiming Karbala studies the emergence and formation of a viable Muslim identity in Bengal over the late-19th century through the 1940s. Beginning with an explanation of the tenets of the battle of Karbala, this multi-layered study explores what it means to be Muslim, as well as the nuanced relationship between religion, linguistic identity and literary modernity that marks both Bengaliness and Muslimness in the region.This book is an intervention into the literature on regional Islam in Bengal, offering a complex perspective on the polemic on religion and language in the formation of a jatiya Bengali Muslim identity in a multilingual context. This book, by placing this polemic in the context of intra-Islamic reformist conflict, shows how all these rival reformist groups unanimously negated the Karbala-centric commemorative ritual of Muharram and Shī‘ī intercessory piety to secure a pro-Caliphate sensibility as the core value of the Bengali Muslim public sphere.
Reclaiming Literacies as Meaning Making: Manifestations of Values, Identities, Relationships, and Knowledge
by Kathryn F. WhitmoreWhitmore and Meyer bring together top literacy scholars from around the world to introduce the concept of manifestations: evidence of meaning making in literacy events, practices, processes, products, and thinking. Manifestation are windows into literacy identities, and serve as affective and sociocultural signifiers of learners’ understanding at a point in time and in a specific context. The volume reclaims progressive spaces for understanding reading, writing, drawing, speaking, playing, and other literacies. It grounds manifestations of literacies in the discourse of meaning making and demonstrates how literacy learners and educators are active agents in this complex, social, political, emotional, and multimodal process. Ideal for preservice teachers, graduate students, and researchers in literacy education, this book shifts the conversation away from treating literacies as acquired commodities and illustrates how educators engage with learners to deepen understanding of literacy learners’ experiences. Organized by five pillars of literacy—teaching, learning, language, curriculum, and sociocultural contexts—each section covers critical and cutting-edge topics and offers examples, tools, and strategies for research and practical applications in diverse classroom settings. Each chapter includes a range of examples and is followed by a short, complementary reading extension to engage the reader.
Reclaiming Nostalgia: Longing for Nature in American Literature (Under the Sign of Nature)
by Jennifer K. LadinoOften thought of as the quintessential home or the Eden from which humanity has fallen, the natural world has long been a popular object of nostalgic narratives. In Reclaiming Nostalgia, Jennifer Ladino assesses the ideological effects of this phenomenon by tracing its dominant forms in American literature and culture since the closing of the frontier in 1890. While referencing nostalgia for pastoral communities and for untamed and often violent frontiers, she also highlights the ways in which nostalgia for nature has served as a mechanism for social change, a model for ethical relationships, and a motivating force for social and environmental justice.
Reclaiming Powerful Literacies: New Horizons for Critical Discourse Analysis (Expanding Literacies in Education)
by Rebecca RogersOffering a unique, reflexive framework for Critical Discourse Analysis focused on discourses of hope, transformation, and liberation, this book showcases a variety of powerful literacies in action. Drawing from original research in a range of public, educational spaces across the lifespan—from Kindergartners studying social justice movements, to sixth graders designing a social justice museum exhibit focused on the environment and sustainability, to teacher education students practicing racial literacy in response to the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri—Rogers makes the case that critical social theories often associated with Critical Discourse Analysis have not kept pace with a recent shift toward the positive, referred to as Positive Discourse Analysis. Encouraging readers to reconsider their understanding of concepts such as power, action, context, critique, and reflexivity, this book illustrates the potential of theorizing discourse analysis from a positive orientation.
Reclaiming Reading: Teachers, Students, and Researchers Regaining Spaces for Thinking and Action
by Kathryn Whitmore Richard MeyerInviting teachers back to the role of reflective advocates for thoughtful reading instruction, this book presents theory and pedagogical possibilities to reclaim and build upon the knowledge base that was growing when government mandates, scripted commercial programs, and high stakes tests took over as the dominant agenda for reading instruction in U.S. public schools. Focusing on literacy learners’ and their teachers’ lives as literate souls, it examines how the teaching of reading can be reclaimed via an intensive reconsideration of five pillars as central to the teaching and learning of reading: learning, teaching, curriculum, language, and sociocultural contexts. Reclaiming Reading articulates the knowledge base that was marginalized or disrupted by legislated and policy intrusions into classrooms and provides practical examples for taking good reading instruction out of the cracks and moving it back to the center of the classroom. Explaining what happens in readers’ minds as they read and how teachers can design practices to support that process, this book encourages teachers to initiate pedagogy that will help them begin or return to the stance of reflective, knowledgeable, professional decision-makers.
Reclaiming the Author: Figures and Fictions from Spanish America
by Lucille KerrThe recent fiction of Spanish America has been widely acclaimed for its experimental and revolutionary qualities. In Reclaiming the Author, Lucille Kerr studies the sources of power of this newly emergent literature in her detailed examination of the critical concept of "the author." Kerr considers how Spanish American narratives raise questions about authorial identity and activity through the different figures of the author they propose. These author-figures, she maintains, both complement and contradict notions of authority that exist outside of the world of fiction.By focusing on works by well-known Spanish American authors--Cortazar, Donoso, Fuentes, Poniatowska, Puig, and Vargas Llosa--Kerr shows how the Spanish Americans have formed a radical poetics of the author. Her readings demonstrate how exemplary Spanish American texts, such as Rayuela, Terra nostra, and El hablador, call into question the author as a unitary or uniform, and therefore unproblematical, figure. Individually and together, Kerr's readings reclaim "the author" as a complex critical concept encompassing diverse, conflicting, even competitive roles.
Reclaiming the Political in Latin American History: Essays from the North
by Gilbert M. JosephReclaiming the Political in Latin American History is a collection that embraces a new social and cultural history of Latin America that is not divorced from politics and other arenas of power. True to the intellectual vision of Brazilian historian Emilia Viotti da Costa, one of Latin America's most distinguished scholars, the contributors actively revisit the political--as both a theme of historical analysis and a stance for historical practice--to investigate the ways in which power, agency, and Latin American identity have been transformed over the past few decades. Taking careful stock of the state of historical writing on Latin America, the volume delineates current historiographical frontiers and suggests a series of new approaches that focus on several pivotal themes: the construction of historical narratives and memory; the articulation of class, race, gender, sexuality, and generation; and the historian's involvement in the making of history. Although the book represents a view of the Latin American political that comes primarily from the North, the influence of Viotti da Costa powerfully marks the contributors' engagement with Latin America's past. Featuring a keynote essay by Viotti da Costa herself, the volume's lively North-South encounter embodies incipient trends of hemispheric intellectual convergence. Contributors. Jeffrey L. Gould, Greg Grandin, Daniel James, Gilbert M. Joseph, Thomas Miller Klubock, Mary Ann Mahony, Florencia E. Mallon, Diana Paton, Steve J. Stern, Heidi Tinsman, Emilia Viotti da Costa, Barbara Weinstein
Reclaiming Writing: Composing Spaces for Identities, Relationships, and Actions
by Kathryn F. Whitmore Richard J. MeyerWith passion, clarity, and rich examples, Reclaiming Writing is dedicated to reawakening the journeys that writers take as they make sense of, think about, and speak back to their worlds in this era of high-stakes testing and mandated curricula. Classrooms and out-of-school settings are described and analyzed in exciting and groundbreaking narratives that provide insights into the many possibilities for writing that support writers’ searches for voice, identity, and agency. Offering pedagogical strategies and the knowledge base in which they are grounded, the book looks at writing within various areas of the curriculum and across modes of writing from traditional text-based forums to digital formats. Thematically based sections present the pillars of the volume’s critical transactive theory: learning, teaching, curriculum, language, and sociocultural contexts. Each chapter is complemented by an extension that offers application possibilities for teachers in various settings. Reclaiming Writing emphasizes literacy as a vehicle for exploring, interrogating, challenging, finding self, talking back to power, creating a space in the world, reflecting upon the past, and thinking forward to a more joyful and democratic future.
Recoding World Literature: Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany's Pact with Books
by B. Venkat ManiWinner, 2018 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures, Modern Language AssociationWinner, 2018 German Studies Association DAAD Book Prize in Germanistik and Cultural Studies.From the current vantage point of the transformation of books and libraries, B. Venkat Mani presents a historical account of world literature. By locating translation, publication, and circulation along routes of “bibliomigrancy”—the physical and virtual movement of books—Mani narrates how world literature is coded and recoded as literary works find new homes on faraway bookshelves. Mani argues that the proliferation of world literature in a society is the function of a nation’s relationship with print culture—a Faustian pact with books. Moving from early Orientalist collections, to the Nazi magazine Weltliteratur, to the European Digital Library, Mani reveals the political foundations for a history of world literature that is at once a philosophical ideal, a process of exchange, a mode of reading, and a system of classification.Shifting current scholarship’s focus from the academic to the general reader, from the university to the public sphere, Recoding World Literature argues that world literature is culturally determined, historically conditioned, and politically charged.
Recognition and Ethics in World Literature: Religion, Violence, and the Human (Studies In World Literature Ser. #2)
by Vincent van Bever DonkerRecognition and Ethics in World Literature is a critical comparative study of contemporary world literature, focusing on the importance of the ethical turn (or return) in literary theory. The book examines the ethical engagement of novels by Amitav Ghosh, Chimamanda Adichie, Caryl Phillips, Kazuo Ishiguro, Zadie Smith, and J. M. Coetzee, exploring the overlap and divergence between Levinasian/Derridean and Aristotelian ethics. Recognitions and emotional responses are integral to the unfolding of ethical concerns, and the ethics they explore are often marked by the complexity and impurity characteristic of the tragic. Recognition is particularly suitable for the concerns of world literature authors in its interconnection of the universal and the particular-a binary that has been crucial in postcolonialism and remains important for the wider field of world literature. This study builds its analysis around three broad themes: religion, the memory of violence, and the human.
Recognition and Revelation: Short Nonfiction Writings (Carleton Library Series #251)
by Margaret LaurenceMargaret Laurence, best known for her germinal novels set in the Canadian prairies, is one of the nation's most respected authors. She was also an accomplished essayist, yet today her nonfiction writing is largely unavailable and therefore little known. In Recognition and Revelation Nora Foster Stovel brings together Laurence's short nonfiction works, including many that have not previously been collected and some that have never before been published. These works, including over fifty essays and addresses that span Laurence's writing career from the 1960s to the 1980s, reveal her passionate concern for Canadian literature and for the land and peoples of Canada. Based on extensive archival research, Stovel's introduction contextualizes Laurence's nonfiction writings in her life as a creative artist and political activist and as a woman writing in the twentieth century. The texts range from essays on Laurence's own writings and on other works of Canadian literature to autobiographical essays, several focusing on environmental concerns, to sociopolitical essays and writing advocating for peace and nuclear disarmament. By revealing Laurence as a socially and politically committed artist, this collection of lively and provocative essays illuminates the undercurrents of her creative writing and places her fiction - often informed by her nonfiction writing - in a new light.
Recognizing Persius (Martin Classical Lectures #23)
by Kenneth J. ReckfordRecognizing Persius is a passionate and in-depth exploration of the libellus--or little book--of six Latin satires left by the Roman satirical writer Persius when he died in AD 62 at the age of twenty-seven. In this comprehensive and reflectively personal book, Kenneth Reckford fleshes out the primary importance of this mysterious and idiosyncratic writer. Reckford emphasizes the dramatic power and excitement of Persius's satires--works that normally would have been recited before a reclining, feasting audience. In highlighting the satires' remarkable honesty, Reckford shows how Persius converted Roman satire into a vehicle of self-exploration and self-challenge that remains relevant to readers today. The book explores the foundations of Roman satire as a performance genre: from the dinner-party recitals of Lucilius, the founder of the genre, through Horace, to Persius's more intense and inward dramatic monologues. Reckford argues that despite satire's significant public function, Persius wrote his pieces first and mainly for himself. Reckford also provides the context for Persius's life and work: his social responsibilities as a landowner; the interplay between his life, his Stoic philosophy, and his art; and finally, his incomplete struggle to become an honest and decent human being. Bringing the modern reader to a closer and more nuanced acquaintance with Persius's work, Recognizing Persius reinstates him to the ranks of the first-rate satirists, alongside Horace and Juvenal.
Recognizing Tone: The Jamestown Comprehension Skills Series with Writing Activities, Third Edition
by Jamestown PublishersThe Comprehension Skills Series teaches students to become stronger, efficient readers by developing ten important, specific reading comprehension skills.
Recollections (NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies)
by Ivan BuninIn this edited translation of famed writer Ivan Bunin's Recollections translator Thomas Gaiton Marullo provides an intimate look at leading political, social, cultural, and literary figures from late imperial Russia, through the First World War and the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 to the birth of the Russian diaspora and the rise of the Soviet state. Through engaging, colorful, and often idiosyncratic vignettes, Bunin (1870–1953) details his admiration for Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Sergei Rachmaninov, and Fyodor Chaliapin. He shares his love-hate relationships with Maxim Gorky, Alexei Tolstoy, and Alexander Kuprin. In addition, Marullo's translation reveals Bunin's hatred of avant-gardists, particularly Vladimir Mayakovsky, as well as his thoughts and experiences on war, revolution, and exile. Bunin's work led, in the end, to his bittersweet reception of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1933) in Stockholm, making him the first Russian and the first writer in exile ever to receive this award. Recollections reveals the author's feelings toward this unprecedented event. Bunin's Recollections stands not only as a stark summa of his passage through literature and life but also as an equally bold apologia as to his place in both.
Recommendation and Search in Social Networks
by Özgür Ulusoy Abdullah Uz Tansel Erol ArkunThis edited volume offers a clear in-depth overview of research covering a variety of issues in social search and recommendation systems. Within the broader context of social network analysis it focuses on important and up-coming topics such as real-time event data collection, frequent-sharing pattern mining, improvement of computer-mediated communication, social tagging information, search system personalization, new detection mechanisms for the identification of online user groups, and many more. The twelve contributed chapters are extended versions of conference papers as well as completely new invited chapters in the field of social search and recommendation systems. This first-of-its kind survey of current methods will be of interest to researchers from both academia and industry working in the field of social networks.
Recomposing Ecopoetics: North American Poetry of the Self-Conscious Anthropocene (Under the Sign of Nature)
by Lynn KellerIn the first book devoted exclusively to the ecopoetics of the twenty-first century, Lynn Keller examines poetry of what she terms the "self-conscious Anthropocene," a period in which there is widespread awareness of the scale and severity of human effects on the planet. Recomposing Ecopoetics analyzes work written since the year 2000 by thirteen North American poets--including Evelyn Reilly, Juliana Spahr, Ed Roberson, and Jena Osman--all of whom push the bounds of literary convention as they seek forms and language adequate to complex environmental problems. Drawing as often on linguistic experimentalism as on traditional literary resources, these poets respond to environments transformed by people and take "nature" to be a far more inclusive and culturally imbricated category than conventional nature poetry does. This interdisciplinary study not only brings cutting-edge work in ecocriticism to bear on a diverse archive of contemporary environmental poetry; it also offers the environmental humanities new ways to understand the cultural and affective dimensions of the Anthropocene.
Reconceiving Writing, Rethinking Writing Instruction
by Joseph PetragliaTo a degree unknown in practically any other discipline, the pedagogical space afforded composition is the institutional engine that makes possible all other theoretical and research efforts in the field of rhetoric and writing. But composition has recently come under attack from many within the field as fundamentally misguided. Some of these critics have been labelled "New Abolitionists" for their insistence that compulsory first-year writing should be abandoned. Not limiting itself to first-year writing courses, this book extends and modifies calls for abolition by taking a closer look at current theoretical and empirical understandings of what contributors call "general writing skills instruction" (GWSI): the curriculum which an overwhelming majority of writing instructors is paid to teach, that practically every composition textbook is written to support, and the instruction for which English departments are given resources to deliver. The vulnerability of GWSI is hardly a secret among writing professionals and its intellectual fragility has been felt for years and manifested in several ways: * in persistently low status of composition as a study both within and outside of English departments; * in professional journal articles and conference presentations that are growing both in theoretical sophistication and irrelevance to the composition classroom; and * in the rhetoric and writing field's ever-increasing attention to nontraditional sites of writing behavior. But, to date, there has been relatively little concerted discussion within the writing field that focuses specifically on the fundamentally awkward relationship of writing theory and writing instruction. This volume is the first to explicitly focus on the gap in the theory and practice that has emerged as a result of the field's growing professionalization. The essays anthologized offer critiques of GWSI in light of the discipline's growing understanding of the contexts for writing and their rhetorical nature. Writing from a wide range of cognitivist, critical-theoretical, historical, linguistic and philosophical perspectives, contributors call into serious question basic tenets of contemporary writing instruction and provide a forum for articulating a sort of zeitgeist that seems to permeate many writing conferences, but which has, until recently, not found a voice or a name.