Lost Texts in Rhetoric and Composition
- Editor: Deborah H. Holdstein
- Pages: 366
- Published: 2023
- ISBN: 9781603296083 (Paperback)
- ISBN: 9781603296076 (Hardcover)
A project of recovery and reanimation, Lost Texts in Rhetoric and Composition foregrounds a broad range of publications that deserve renewed attention. Contributors to this volume reclaim these lost texts to reenvision the rhetorical tradition itself. Authors discussed include not only twentieth-century American compositionists but also a linguist, a poet, a philosopher, a painter, a Renaissance rhetorician, and a nineteenth-century pioneer of comics; the collection also features some less-studied works by authors who remain well known. These texts will give rise to new conversations about current ideas in rhetoric and composition.
Acknowledgments (xi)
Introduction: Reviving the Lost Text (1)
Part One: The Early Twentieth Century and Before
Isaac Rabinowitz’s Translation and Critical Edition of Judah Messer Leon’s The Book of the Honeycomb’s Flow (25)
A Rhetoric of Pen and Brush (33)
Understanding English Composition as a Social Problem: Finding Sterling Andrus Leonard in Rhetoric and Composition (43)
Rodolphe Töpffer and the Histories of Rhetoric (52)
Talking Teachers into Motion: Rereading William James’s Talks to Teachers (62)
Part Two: The Mid–Twentieth Century
A Composition Commons: The Stanford Language Arts Investigation, 1937–1939 (75)
Toward Social Transformation: Renewing the Burkean Theory of Identification (88)
College Composition and Communication, Volume 15, 1964: Afterglow, Childhood, Obituary? (98)
Part Three: The 1970s
On Recovering Adrienne Rich’s “Teaching Language in Open Admissions” (113)
“A Fresh Progression in Thought and Expression”: Remembering The Plural I, by William E. Coles, Jr. (122)
Reappraising Course X (133)
The Power of Mutable Structures: A Return to Ann E. Berthoff’s Forming/Thinking/Writing (143)
Humanizing and Decolonizing Composition: John Mohawk’s “Western Peoples, Natural Peoples” (152)
On Reading Roger Sale’s On Writing (161)
Part Four: 1980–1992
International Linguistics Research and the Legacy of Frédéric François (173)
Before Wireless Networks: Foundational Works in Computers and Writing (186)
William J. Vande Kopple and Syntactic Subjects (198)
Possibilities Rather Than Certainties: William Irmscher’s “Finding a Comfortable Identity” (207)
New Literacies and New Coherencies: The Relevance of Betty Bamberg’s “What Makes a Text Coherent?” (219)
Enduring Value: The Case for Beat Not the Poor Desk (231)
How the Twenty-First Century Changed Ira Shor’s Critical Teaching and Everyday Life (243)
Lingering Questions from Lynn Quitman Troyka’s “Defining Basic Writing in Context” (251)
“Bound to Sound”: Reaffirming Walter J. Ong (261)
Geneva Smitherman’s “Toward a National Public Policy on Language” (272)
Part Five: After 1992
The Importance of Being Readers Reading in Robert P. Yagelski’s Writing as a Way of Being (283)
Becoming Which Composition? James Thomas Zebroski’s “Toward a Theory of Theory for Composition Studies” (292)
Me, Myself, and All of Us: Revisiting Linda Brodkey’s “Writing on the Bias” (301)
Vernacular Scholarship and Craig S. Womack’s Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism (310)
Rediscovering Deborah Cameron’s Verbal Hygiene (321)
The Intellectual Work of Composition: James F. Slevin’s Introducing English (330)
The Radicalism of Marilyn Sternglass (341)
Notes on Contributors (347)
