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.

This volume brings together three areas of scholarship and practice: rhetoric, material life, and ecology. The chapters build a multi-layered understanding of material life by gathering scholars from varied theoretical and critical traditions around the common theme of ecology. Emphasizing relationality, connectedness and context, the ecological orientation we build informs both rhetorical theory and environmentalist interventions. Contributors offer practical-theoretical inquiries into several areas - rhetoric’s cosmologies, the trophe, bioregional rhetoric’s, nuclear colonialism, and more - collectively forging new avenues of communication among scholars in environmental communication, communication studies, and rhetoric and composition. This book aims at inspiring and advancing ecological thinking, demonstrating its value for rhetoric and communication as well as for environmental thought and action.

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

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.

Rewriting Success in Rhetoric and Composition Careers presents alternative narratives of what constitutes success in the field of rhetoric and composition from those who occupy traditionally undervalued positions in the academy (tribal college, community colleges, postdoctoral tracks), those who have used their PhDs outside of the academy (a law firm, a textbook publisher, a community center), and those who have engaged in professionalization opportunities not typical in the field (research center, a nonprofit humanities organization).

Reinventing (with) Theory in Rhetoric and Writing Studies collects original scholarship that takes up and extends the practices of inventive theorizing that characterize Sharon Crowley’s body of work. Including sixteen chapters by established and emerging scholars and an interview with Crowley, the book shows that doing theory is a contingent and continual rhetorical process that is indispensable for understanding situations and their potential significance—and for discovering the available means of persuasion. For Crowley, theory is a basic building block of rhetoric “produced by and within specific times and locations as a means of opening other ways of believing or acting.” Doing theory, in this sense, is the practice of surveying the common sense of the community (doxa) and discovering the available means of persuasion (invention). The ultimate goal of doing theory is not to prescribe certain actions but to ascertain what options exist for rhetors to see the world differently, to discover new possibilities for thought and action, and thereby to effect change in the world. The scholarship collected in Reinventing (with) Theory in Rhetoric and Writing Studies takes Crowley’s notion of theory as an invitation to develop new avenues for believing and acting. By reinventing the understanding of theory and its role in the field, this collection makes an important contribution to scholarship in rhetorical studies and writing studies. It will be valuable to scholars, teachers, and students interested in diverse theoretical directions in rhetoric and writing studies as well as in race, gender, and disability theories, religious rhetorics, digital rhetoric, and the history of rhetoric. Publication supported in part by the Texas Tech University Humanities Center. Contributors: Jason Barrett-Fox, Geoffrey Clegg, Kirsti Cole, Joshua Daniel-Wariya, Diane Davis, Rebecca Disrud, Bre Garrett, Catherine C. Gouge, Debra Hawhee, Matthew Heard, Joshua C. Hilst, David G. Holmes, Bruce Horner, William B. Lalicker, Jennifer Lin LeMesurier, James C. McDonald, Timothy Oleksiak, Dawn Penich-Thacker, J. Blake Scott, Victor J. Vitanza, Susan Wyche

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.

The Best of the Independent Rhetoric and Composition Journals 2011 represents the result of a nationwide conversation—beginning with journal editors, but expanding to teachers, scholars and workers across the discipline of Rhetoric and Composition—to select essays that showcase the innovative and transformative work now being published in the field’s independent journals.

Describes mentoring of teachers and scholars in the field of composition and rhetoric.

Many of the ideas and insights presented in this volume emerged out of work accomplished at the University of Louisville English Department's 2010 Thomas R. Watson Conference on Rhetoric and Composition on 'Working English in Rhetoric and Composition: Global/local Contexts, Commitments, Consequences'.