College English, Vol. 67, No. 2, November 2004

Table of Contents

Issue Theme: Social Class and English Studies

• Struggling with Class in English Studies

  Sherry Lee Linkon, Irvin Peckham, and Benjamin G. Lanier-Nabors

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  Abstract: The editors place this special issue in context as part of a deepening and expanding of class-based analysis in English studies, representing a second generation of scholarship on class that builds on but also at times questions previous work in the field.

  Keywords: College

• Sexual Outlaws and Class Struggle: Rethinking History and Class Consciousness from a Queer Perspective

  Tim Libretti

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  Abstract: The essay argues that the homophobia that persists in some leftist thinking results in an impoverished and undialectical understanding of class and class consciousness. Through attention to works by John Rechy and James Baldwin, the author illustrate that categories of oppression such as class, gender, sexual orientation, and race cannot be used as analogies of one another but rather are mutually imbricated and mutually constitutive.

  Keywords: College

• Redneck and Hillbilly Discourse in the Writing Classroom: Classifying Critical Pedagogies of Whiteness

  Jennifer Beech

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  Abstract: Challenging views of working-class white students that either displace all white racism onto them or, at best, see them as having exchanged class consciousness for race privilege, the author argues for a critical race pedagogy that includes a more complex image of poor and working-class whites. She argues for both deconstructive pedagogies that can expose the role of language in maintaining racist and classist structures and reconstructive pedagogies that can provide students with the rhetorical tools for employing language transformatively.

  Keywords: College

• Class Affects, Classroom Affectations: Working through the Paradoxes of Strategic Empathy

  Julie Lindquist

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  Abstract: The essay considers how teachers might perform emotional engagements that students find authentic and valuable within scenes of literacy instruction, suggesting that instructors’ “acting” of affect might be needed to forestall the tendency for instructors either to retain a position outside the affect generated in the classroom and merely “manage” the affective work done by students, or to impose their own affective commitments on students’ inquiry. Such a pedagogy might enable students, and particularly working-class students, to locate their own affectively structured experiences of class within more integrated understandings of social structures and identity formation.

  Keywords: College

• Making Work Visible

  David Seitz

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  Abstract: In contrast to the idea that students’ instrumental views of their own education are necessarily productive of conservative middle-class values, the author describes a “work memoir” project he has developed in which working-class students reflect on and articulate their own values, memories, and expectations related to work. The students in the project, four of whom are discussed in detail in the essay, reveal far more complex concerns of identity, social capital, and acculturation.

  Keywords: College

• OPINION:The Vexation of Class

  Nick Tingle

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  Abstract: The author explores his vexation with David Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University” in terms of its assumptions about class. He suggests that it both negates his own experience as a member of the working class and of the pedagogy he employs as a teacher of writing with middle-class students, given its insistence on mimicry of a dominant discourse that involves a betrayal of self for both working-class and middle-class learners of academic discourse.

  Keywords: College

• Report of the NCTE College Section

  Dickie Selfe

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  Abstract: Abstract for this article is currently not available.

  Keywords: College

• ANNOUNCEMENTS AND CALLS FOR PAPERS

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  Abstract: Abstract for this article is currently not available.

  Keywords: College

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