College English, Vol. 67, No. 5, May 2005

Table of Contents

• Counterpublics in Public Housing: Reframing the Politics of Service-Learning

  David Coogan

  • Show Abstract
  • Hide Abstract

  Abstract: Describing a service-learning project in Chicago public housing, the author argues for a reconception of counterpublics that takes the individual (and individual development) as the primary unit of analysis. The real question for service-learning educators, he suggests, is not whether the private and the public can inform each other, but whether we are prepared to discern the ways in which they already do inform each other in the communities we wish to serve. The students in the project developed a much broader conception of themselves as members of the human family, with the consequence that, although social problems in public housing were not changed, public discourse and private convictions about race in those communities were altered, suggesting that cultural difference may be less of a problem and more of a resource in service learning courses.

  Keywords: College

• English Studies in Levittown: Rhetorics of Space and Technology in Course-Management Software

  Darin Payne

  • Show Abstract
  • Hide Abstract

  Abstract: Seconding Johnathon Mauk’s call in these pages for greater attention to the politics of space, and extending it to the increasingly ubiquitous realities of virtual space, the author argues that course-management software systems such as Blackboard naturalize certain constructions of subjectivity for us and our students in ways inimical to our pedagogical goals. He argues that we and our students should not only be critically attentive to such constructions but should also wherever possible develop our own local, discipline-specific spaces in resistance to the homogenization of space and subjectivity they represent.

  Keywords: College

• The Economics of Exposition: Managerialism, Current-Traditional Rhetoric, and Henry Noble Day

  Mark Garrett Longaker

  • Show Abstract
  • Hide Abstract

  Abstract: Through an examination of the work of the nineteenth-century American rhetorician Henry Noble Day the author suggests that the causal relationship usually identified between economic formations and genres such as exposition is not a purely one-way process. Day’s rhetorics, he argues, were not only shaped by the economies of Taylorism but also were themselves engaged in a sociohistorical process of class formation, suggesting that such a study of the connections among managerialism, current-traditional rhetoric, and class formation raises important questions for our own work today.

  Keywords: College

• REVIEW: Animated Categories: Genre, Action, and Composition

  Peter Vandenberg

  • Show Abstract
  • Hide Abstract

  Abstract: Reviewed are: Genre and the Invention of the Writer: Reconsidering the Place of Invention in Composition, by Anis Bawarshi; The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre: Strategies for Stability and Change, edited by Richard M. Coe, Lorelei Lingard, and Tatiana Teslenko; and Writing Genres, by Amy J. Devitt.

  Keywords: College

• ANNOUNCEMENTS AND CALLS FOR PAPERS

  • Show Abstract
  • Hide Abstract

  Abstract: Abstract for this article is currently not available.

  Keywords: College

* Journal articles are provided in PDF format and can be opened using the free Adobe® Reader® program or a comparable viewer. Click here to download and install the most recent version of Adobe Reader.