Composition Studies Through a Feminist Lens offers students a lucid and engaging introduction to the discipline’s history, struggles, and accomplishments through the lens of feminism. By illuminating a vast array of feminist contributions to the rhetorical tradition, writing theory, and classroom pedagogy, Shari J. Stenberg shows how feminist scholars have made Composition Studies a more inclusive and innovative field.

Composition studies is a rapidly growing and constantly changing field. At present, however, graduate students new to the field and writing teachers who want to make new connections between theory and practice have little choice of current reference works that define key terms in composition studies and provide information about the scholars and researchers who have shaped and are shaping the discipline. This book supplies this information in an easily accessible format and places both scholars and terms in the context of the field's development. Included are alphabetically arranged entries for 108 individuals who have developed the field and 128 terms central to the discipline. The first part of the book provides entries for leaders in composition studies. Each entry identifies the areas in which the scholar has contributed most influentially to the field and provides both a chronological overview of the person's contributions and a bibliography of representative works. The second part includes entries for terms that are problematic both for newcomers and for those already familiar with the discipline. The entries for the terms show how the disciplinary context has shaped the ways in which they have been used. The entries also indicate how established thinkers in composition studies and other disciplines have explained or defined the terms, provide examples of the terms in context, and list scholars often associated with them. An appendix includes entries for scholars from other disciplines who have contributed to the field.

In original essays, fourteen nationally known scholars examine the practical, philosophical, and epistemological implications of a variety of research traditions. Included are discussions of historical, theoretical, and feminist scholarship; case-study and ethnographic research; text and conversation analysis; and cognitive, experimental, and descriptive research. Issues that cross methodological boundaries, such as the nature of collaborative research and writing, methodological pluralism, the classification and coding of research data, and the politics of composition research, are also examined. Contributors reflect on their own research practices, and so reflect the current state of composition research itself.

The last 25 years have witnessed extraordinary growth in the academic specialization variously described as composition studies or rhetoric and composition. What was noticeable about the field in its infancy was a preoccupation with practice, a lack of emphasis on theory, and an exclusive reliance on the writing process. As its disciplinary status has grown, the field has become far more theoretical. Composition studies has expanded its focus, reconceptualized the writing process, and embraced a wide range of critical perspectives. The result of this change is that terms such as poststructuralism, social construction, gender, and genre, which were largely unknown in 1965, now dominate discussion. This reference book is a guide to the multiplicity of theories that have emerged to form the disciplinary foundation of composition studies. The volume consists of 66 entries, each of which is written by an expert contributor and focuses on a particular theory or group of theories. While the entries show how various individuals have contributed to theoretical movements, very few concentrate on the work of a single theorist. Each entry first provides a critical summary of a particular theory or group of theories, including key elements, basic concepts and claims, and information about seminal or particularly influential works. It then reviews the theory's critical reception in composition studies and discusses its significance in the field. The bibliography at the end of each entry lists primary texts and major scholarship related to the theory and provides additional suggestions for further reading. The volume closes with a selected bibliography of important works.

This advanced analysis of gender issues in higher education represents a significant new turn in feminist thinking. Fractured Feminisms resists and reshapes boundaries by investigating how gender studies' intersection with race and ethnicity, class, postcoloniality, sexuality, globalization, interdisciplinarity, technology studies, and administration exposes the "silenced other" of feminisms themselves. These crucial conversations about feminisms depend upon facing the perplexing rhetorical problems within feminist debates, yet work within these fractures to discover newly emerging, productive feminist practices. This book contends that it's important to better understand the ways in which feminist rhetorics both empower and constrain and the kinds of identities feminisms afford as well as deny.

An essential reference for students and scholars exploring the methods and methodologies of writing research. What does it mean to research writing today? What are the practical and theoretical issues researchers face when approaching writing as they do? What are the gains or limitations of applying particular methods, and what might researchers be overlooking? These questions and more are answered by the writing research field’s leading scholars in Writing Studies Research in Practice: Methods and Methodologies. Editors Nickoson and Sheridan gather twenty chapters from leaders in writing research, spanning topics from ethical considerations for researchers, quantitative methods, and activity analysis to interviewing and communitybased and Internet research. While each chapter addresses a different subject, the volume as a whole covers the range of methodologies, technologies, and approaches—both old and new—that writing researchers use, and examines the ways in which contemporary writing research is understood, practiced, and represented. An essential reference for experienced researchers and an invaluable tool to help novices understand research methods and methodologies, Writing Studies Research in Practice includes established methods and knowledge while addressing the contemporary issues, interests, and concerns faced by writing researchers today.

Examines the relationship between theoretical and practical knowledge, within the academy in general and composition studies in particular.

This book traces the intersection of radical feminism, composition, and print culture in order to address a curious gap in feminist composition studies: the manifesto-writing, collaborative-action-taking radical feminists of the 1960s and 1970s. Long before contemporary debates over essentialism, radical feminist groups questioned both what it was to be a woman and to perform womanhood, and a key part of that questioning took the form of very public, very contentious texts by such writers and groups as Shulamith Firestone, the Redstockings, and WITCH (the Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell). Rhodes explores how these radical women's texts have been silenced in contemporary rhetoric and composition, and compares their work to that of contemporary online activists, finding that both point to a "network literacy" that blends ever-shifting identities with ever-changing technologies in order to take action. Ultimately, Rhodes argues, the articulation of radical feminist textuality can benefit both scholarship and classroom as it situates writers as rhetorical agents who can write, resist, and finally act within a network of discourses and identifications.

First Published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.