Leading a burgeoning self-critical moment in composition studies and writing program administration, Postcomposition is a fundamental reconsideration of the field that attempts to shift the focus away from pedagogy and writing subjects and toward writing itself. In this forceful and reasoned critique of many of the primary tenets and widely accepted institutional structures of composition studies, Sidney I. Dobrin delivers a series of shocks to the system meant to disrupt the pedagogical imperative and move beyond the existing limits of the discipline. Dobrin evaluates the current state of composition studies, underscoring the difference between composition and writing and arguing that the field's focus on the administration of writing students and its historically imposed prohibition on theory greatly limit what can be understood about writing. Instead he envisions a more significant approach to writing, one that questions the field's conservative allegiance to subject and administration and reconsiders writing as spatial and ecological. Using concepts from ecocomposition, spatial theory, network theory, complexity theory, and systems theory, Postcomposition lays the groundwork for a networked theory of writing, and advocates the abandonment of administration as a useful part of the field. He also challenges the usefulness of rhetoric in writing studies, showing how writing exceeds rhetoric. Postcomposition is a detailed consideration of how posthumanism affects the field's understanding of subjectivity. It also tears at the seams of the "contingent labor problem." As he articulates his own frustrations with the conservatism of composition studies and builds on previous critiques of the discipline, Dobrin stages a courageous-and inevitably polemical-intellectual challenge to the entrenched ideas and assumptions that have defined composition studies.

lay/Write: Digital Rhetoric, Writing, Games is an edited collection of essays that examines the relationship between games and writing – examining how writing functions both within games and the networks of activity that surround games and gameplay. The collection is organized based on the primary location and function of the game-writing relationship, examining writing about games (games as objects of critique and sites of rhetorical action), ancillary and instructional writing that takes place around games, the writing that takes place within the game, using games as persuasive forms of communication (writing through games), and writing that goes into the production of games. While not every chapter focuses exclusively on pedagogy, the collection includes many selections that consider the possibilities of using computer games in writing instruction. However, it also provides a bridge between academic views of games as contexts for writing and industry approaches to the writing process in game design, as well as an examination of a variety of game-related genres that could be used in composition courses.

Deepening and broadening our understanding of what it means to teach in times of trauma, writing teachers analyze their own responses to national traumas ranging from the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to the various appropriations of 9/11. Offering personal, historical, and cultural perspectives, they question both the purposes and pedagogies of teaching writing.

Basic composition courses have become a fundamental requirement for the major of university degrees available today. These classes allow students to enhance their critical thinking, writing, and reading skills; however, frequent use of technology and online activity can be detrimental to students’ comprehension. Engaging 21st Century Writers with Social Media is a pivotal reference source for the latest research on the integration of social media platforms into academic writing classes, focusing on how such technology encourages writing and enables students to grasp basic composition skills in classroom settings. Highlighting emerging theoretical foundations and pedagogical practices, this book is ideally designed for educators, upper-level students, researchers, and academic professionals.

This reference guide provides a comprehensive review of the literature on all the issues, responsibilities, and opportunities that writing program administrators need to understand, manage, and enact, including budgets, personnel, curriculum, assessment, teacher training and supervision, and more. Writing Program Administration also provides the first comprehensive history of writing program administration in U.S. higher education. Writing Program Administration includes a helpful glossary of terms and an annotated bibliography for further reading.

The third edition of the MLA's widely used Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures features sixteen new essays by leading scholars. Designed to highlight relations among languages and forms of discourse, the volume is organized into three sections. "Understanding Language" provides an overview of the field of linguistics, with special attention to language acquisition and the social life of languages. "Forming Texts" offers tools for understanding how speakers and writers shape language; it examines scholarship in the distinct but interrelated fields of rhetoric, composition, and poetics. "Reading Literature and Culture" continues the work of the first two sections by introducing major areas of critical study. The nine essays in this section cover textual and historical scholarship; interpretation; comparative, cultural, and translation studies; and the interdisciplinary topics of gender, sexuality, race, and migrations (among others). As in previous volumes, an epilogue examines the role of the scholar in contemporary society. Each essay discusses the significance, underlying assumptions, and limits of an important field of inquiry; traces the historical development of its subject; introduces key terms; outlines modes of research now being pursued; postulates future developments; and provides a list of suggestions for further reading. This book will interest any member of the academic community seeking a review of recent scholarship, while it provides an indispensable resource for undergraduate and graduate students of modern languages and literatures.

A friendly critique of the field, The Politics of Writing Studies examines a set of recent pivotal texts in composition to show how writing scholarship, in an effort to improve disciplinary prestige and garner institutional resources, inadvertently reproduces structures of inequality within American higher education. Not only does this enable the exploitation of contingent faculty, but it also puts writing studies—a field that inherently challenges many institutional hierarchies—in a debased institutional position and at odds with itself. Instead of aligning with the dominant paradigm of research universities, where research is privileged over teaching, theory over practice, the sciences over the humanities, and graduate education over undergraduate, writing studies should conceive itself in terms more often associated with labor. By identifying more profoundly as workers, as a collective in solidarity with contingent faculty, writing professionals can achieve solutions to the material problems that the field, in its best moments, wants to address. Ultimately, the change compositionists want to see in the university will not come from high theory or the social science research agenda; it must come from below. Offering new insight into a complex issue, The Politics of Writing Studies will be of great interest to writing studies professionals, university administrators, and anyone interested in the political economy of education and the reform of institutions of higher education in America.

In Distant Readings of Disciplinarity, Benjamin Miller brings a big data approach to the study of disciplinarity in rhetoric, composition, and writing studies (RCWS) by developing scalable maps of the methods and topics of several thousand RCWS dissertations from 2001 to 2015. Combining charts and figures with engaging and even playful prose, Miller offers an accessible model of how large-scale data-driven research can advance disciplinary understanding—both answering and amplifying the call to add replicable data analysis and visualization to the mix of methods regularly employed in the field. Writing studies has long been marked by a multitude of methods and interlocking purposes, partaking of not just humanities approaches but also social scientific ones, with data drawn from interviews and surveys alongside historical and philosophical arguments and with corpus analytics in large-scale collections jostling against small-scale case studies of individuals. These areas of study aren’t always cleanly separable; shifting modes mark the discipline as open and welcoming to many different angles of research. The field needs to embrace that vantage point and generate new degrees of familiarity with methods beyond those of any individual scholar. Not only a training genre and not only a knowledge-making genre, the dissertation is also a discipline-producing genre. Illustrating what the field has been studying, and how, Distant Readings of Disciplinarity supports more fruitful collaborations within and across research areas and methods.

Reimagining Process explores how process and attending concepts such as reflection, care, power and portfolios might play a more prominent role in emerging writing studies research.