Southern Illinois U. Press

The managerial unconscious in the history of composition studies.

Strickland (English, U. of Missouri-Columbia) offers a history of composition studies that draws attention to the way that the field, far more than other fields of professing English, frequently involves an informal education in managerialism on top of the formal education in composition pedagogy and rhetorical theory because of the ways that those entering the field are expected fulfill a variety of administrative roles in composition programs, noting that this managerial aspect of the field is typically ignored in the canonical texts of composition studies. In order to show how this "managerial unconscious" has developed in composition studies, she examines three prominent scholar/directors of a writing program in relation to three significant junctures in the development of the field; the founding of the Conference on College Composition and Communication in 1949, the founding of the Council of Writing Program Administrators in 1977, and the "social turn" of the field in the 1990s. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

The promise of reason; studies in The new rhetoric.

Scholars of rhetoric, literature, and communication explore current directions of the impact that Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's 1958 Traité de l'argumentation: La nouvelle rhétorique (The New Rhetoric) had after World War II. They cover conceptual understandings of the book, extensions of it, the ethical turn in Perelman and the book, and uses it is being put to. The topics include a sketch of Perelman's life, the art of style, interaction between the verbal and the visual in Darwin's Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs, Perelman on democracy as a confused notion, and essence and definition arguments in Leo Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God is Within You. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)