Living Rhetoric And Composition

This collection--of the stories of scholars who have found a lifelong commitment to the teaching of writing--includes the professional histories of 19 rhetoricians and compositionists who explain how they came to fall in love with the written word and with teaching. Their stories are filled with personal anecdotes--some funny, some touching, some mundane. All of the stories are fascinating because they demonstrate how scholars' personal and professional lives intertwine. These stories also help to situate the scholars, their work, and, importantly, the development of the profession. They reveal how the field of rhetoric and composition is shaped by the confluences of various disciplines such as literary studies, creative writing, philosophy, and education. Of note are the disparate paths and backgrounds that people have taken to achieve their professional stature. The narratives, however, are most revelatory in describing the forging of a discipline as it reasserts its value within the academy and to the students it serves. Arranged in a loose chronological order, the essays reflect the progression of rhetoric and composition studies from the ad hoc scrambling of post-World War II teachers into a vibrant and growing discipline with more than 70 doctoral programs producing specialized scholars, researchers, and teachers of writing. The chapter authors represent the variety of camps that now comprise the diverse discipline of rhetoric and composition. Whether historian, researcher, theorist, or practitioner, however, what these contributors share in common is being teachers. The narratives are collected from senior members of the profession so that their stories can be preserved for future generations of scholars and teachers in the field. This collection is not only a record of their contributions and some of the benchmarks in the field, but an opportunity for the writers to provide us with their reflections and retrospection. Keep in mind as you read their stories that they are narratives for the most part, and as such, are transient. They take us to a certain point in the writer's life, but stop while the writer goes on. Still, they provide an orientation to the profession while revealing the scholar behind the scholarship.

Speaks against linear stories of success and reveals the intertwining of choice, serendipity, and kairos in the careers of diverse women in rhetoric and composition.

Winner of the 2016 CCCC Advancement of Knowledge Award and the 2016 CCCC Research Impact Award In Still Life with Rhetoric, Laurie Gries forges connections among new materialism, actor network theory, and rhetoric to explore how images become rhetorically active in a digitally networked, global environment. Rather than study how an already-materialized “visual text” functions within a specific context, Gries investigates how images often circulate and transform across media, genre, and location at viral rates. A four-part case study of Shepard Fairey’s now iconic Obama Hope image elucidates how images reassemble collective life as they actualize in different versions, enter into various relations, and spark a firework of activity across the globe. While intent on tracking the rhetorical life of a single, multiple image, Still Life with Rhetoric is most concerned with studying rhetoric in motion. To account for an image’s widespread circulation and emergent activities, Gries introduces iconographic tracking—a digital research method for tracing an image’s divergent rhetorical becomings. Yet Gries also articulates a dynamic set of theoretical principles for studying rhetoric as a distributed, generative, and unforeseeable event that is applicable beyond the study of visual rhetoric. With an eye toward futurity—the strands of time beyond a thing’s initial moment of production and delivery—Still Life with Rhetoric intends to be taken up by those interested in visual rhetoric, research methods, and theory.

Rhetoric has traditionally studied acts of persuasion in the affairs of government and men, but this work investigates the language of other, non-traditional rhetors, including immigrants, women, urban children and others who have long been on the margins of civic life and political forums.

Renewing Rhetoric’s Relation to Composition comprehensively examines the development of rhetoric and composition, using the writings of Theresa Jarnagin Enos as points of departure for studies of broader trends. Chapters explore such topics as the historical relations of rhetoric and composition, their evolution within programs of study, and Enos’s research on gender. The volume presents the growing disjunction between rhetoric and composition and paints a compelling picture of the current state of both disciplines as well as their origins. This volume acknowledges the influential role that Theresa Enos has had in the writing and rhetoric disciplines. Her career provides benchmarks for plotting developments in rhetoric and composition, including the evolving relations between the two. This collection offers a tribute to her work and to the new directions in the discipline stemming from her research. With an all-star line-up of contributors, it also represents the state of the art in rhetoric and composition scholarship, and it will serve current and future scholars in both disciplines.

"Describes an activist life of teaching and writing queerly over the past twenty years from the author's subject position as a queer immigrant scholar/teacher of color situated in the field of rhetoric and composition"--

First Published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This reference guide surveys the field, covering rhetoric's principles, concepts, applications, practical tools, and major thinkers. Drawing on the scholarship and expertise of 288 contributors, the Encyclopedia presents a long-needed overview of rhetoric and its role in contemporary education and communications, discusses rhetoric's contributions to various fields, surveys the applications of this versatile discipline to the teaching of English and language arts, and illustrates its usefulness in all kinds of discourse, argument, and exchange of ideas.