This contributed volume explores the functions of belief and supernatural experience within an array of cultures, as well as the stance of academe toward the study of belief and the supernatural. The essays in this volume call into question the idea that supernatural experience is extraordinary.
Among the contributors are Shelley Adler, David Hufford, Barre Toelken, and Gillian Bennett.
David Wallace argues that any understanding of writing studies must include the conception of discourse as an embodied force with real consequences for real people. Informed in important ways by queer theory, Wallace calls to account users of dominant discourses and at the same time articulates a theory base from which to interpret "alternative rhetoric."
To examine the practice of writing from varied margins of society, Compelled to Write offers careful readings of four exemplar American writers, each of whom felt compelled within their own time and place to write in response to systemic injustices in American society.
Sarah Grimké, a privileged white woman advocating for abolition, is forced to defend her right to speak as a woman; Frederick Douglass begins his public career almost as a curiosity (the articulate ex-slave) and ends it as one of the most important rhetors in American history; Gloria Anzaldúa writes not only in multiple languages and dialects but from marginalized positions related to gender, race, class, sexual identity, and physical abled-ness; David Sedaris uses his privileged position as a middle-class white male humorist to speak unabashedly of his sexuality, his addictions, and obsessive-compulsive personality disorder.
Through these writers, Wallace explores a range of strategies that comprise alternative rhetorical practice, and demonstrates how such practice is inflected by social constraints on rhetorical agency and by how writers employ alternative discourses to resist those constraints. Grounding and personalizing Compelled to Write with rich material from his own teaching and his own experience, Wallace considers a number of implications for teachers of writing.
Volume 1, Life Writings of Frontier Women series, edited by Maureen Ursenbach Beecher
Mary Richard's journals and letters record a young woman's rare, but richly detailed view of life in the temporary Mormon pioneer communities in Iowa.
When he started taking paying passengers by boat through the rapids of the Colorado River's canyons, Norman Nevills invented whitewater tourism and the commercial river business. For twelve years, from 1938 until his death in a plane crash in 1949, he safely took, without a single life lost, friends, explorers, and customers down the Colorado, Green, San Juan, Salmon, and Snake Rivers in boats he designed. National media found him and his adventures irresistible and turned him into the personification of river running. Logging seven trips through the Grand Canyon when no one else had completed more than two, he was called the Fast Water Man. Boatmen he trained went on to found their own competing operations. Always controversial, Nevills had important critics and enemies as well as friends and supporters, but no one can dispute his tremendous impact on the history of western rivers and recreation.
Nevills's complete extant journals of those river expeditions are published for the first time in High, Wide, and Handsome. They contain vivid stories and images of still untamed-by-dams rivers and canyons in the Colorado River system and elsewhere, of wild rides in wooden boats, and of the few intrepid pioneers of adventure tourism who paid Nevills so they could experience it all. They have been transcribed and edited by river historian Roy Webb, author of If We Had a Boat: Green River Explorers, Adventurers, and Runners and Call of the
Colorado.
An Alternate Pragmatism for Going Public interrogates composition’s most prominent responses to contemporary K–16 education reform. By “going public,” teachers, scholars, and administrators rightfully reassert their expertise against corporate-political standards and assessments like the Common Core, Complete College America, and the Collegiate Learning Assessment. However, author Jim Webber shows that composition’s professional imperative for self-defense only partly fulfils the broader aims of “going public,” which include fostering public participation that can assess and potentially affirm the public good of professional judgment.
Drawing on the pragmatic/democratic tradition, Webber envisions an alternate rhetoric of professionalism, one that not only reasserts compositionists’ expertise but also expands opportunities for publics to authorize this expertise. While this public inquiry and engagement may not safeguard professional standing against neoliberal reform, it reorients composition toward an equally important goal, enabling publics to gauge the adequacy of the educational standardization so often advocated by contemporary reform.
An Alternate Pragmatism for Going Public shows how public engagement can serve composition’s efforts related to “going public.”
In the face of the gradual saturation of US public education by the logics of neoliberalism, educators often find themselves at a loss to respond, let alone resist. Through state defunding and many other “reforms” fueled by austerity politics, a majority of educators are becoming casual labor in US universities while those who hang onto secure employment are pressed to act as self-supporting entrepreneurs or do more with less. Focusing on the discipline of writing studies, this collection addresses the sense of crisis that many educators experience in this age of austerity.
The chapters in this book chronicle how neoliberal political economy shapes writing assessments, curricula, teacher agency, program administration, and funding distribution. Contributors also focus on how neoliberal political economy dictates the direction of scholarship, because the economic and political agenda shaping the terms of work, the methods of delivery, and the ways of valuing and assessing writing also shape the primary concerns and directions of scholarship.
Composition in the Age of Austerity offers critical accounts of how the restructuring of higher education is shaping the daily realities of composition programs. The book documents the effects and implications of the current restructuring, examines how cherished rhetorical ideals actually leave the field unprepared to respond effectively to defunding and corporatizing trends, and establishes points of departure for collective response.
Defender is the first and only scholarly biography of Daniel H. Wells, one of the important yet historically neglected leaders among the nineteenth-century Mormons—leaders like Heber C. Kimball, George Q. Cannon, and Jedediah M. Grant. An adult convert to the Mormon faith during the Mormons’ Nauvoo period, Wells developed relationships with men at the highest levels of the church hierarchy, emigrated to Utah with the Mormon pioneers, and served in a series of influential posts in both church and state.
Wells was known especially as a military leader in both Nauvoo and Utah—he led the territorial militia in four Indian conflicts and a confrontation with the US Army (the Utah War). But he was also the territorial attorney general and obtained title to all the land in Salt Lake City from the federal government during his tenure as the mayor of Salt Lake City. He was Second Counselor to Brigham Young in the LDS Church's First Presidency and twice served as president of the Mormon European mission. Among these and other accomplishments, he ran businesses in lumbering, coal mining, manufacturing, and gas production; developed roads, ferries, railroads, and public buildings; and presided over a family of seven wives and thirty-seven children.
Wells witnessed and influenced a wide range of consequential events that shaped the culture, politics, and society of Utah in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Using research from relevant collections, sources in public records, references to Wells in the Joseph Smith papers, other contemporaneous journals and letters, and the writings of Brigham Young, Quentin Thomas Wells has created a serious and significant contribution to Mormon history scholarship.
Georgie White Clark-adventurer, raconteur, eccentric--first came to know the canyons of the Colorado River by swimming portions of them with a single companion. She subsequently hiked and rafted portions of the canyons, increasingly sharing her love of the Colorado River with friends and acquaintances. At first establishing a part-time guide service as a way to support her own river trips, she went on to become perhaps the canyons' best-known river guide, introducing their rapids to many others-on the river, via her large-capacity rubber rafts, and across the nation, via magazine articles and movies. Georgie Clark saw the river and her sport change with the building of Glen Canyon Dam, enormous increases in the popularity of river running, and increased National Park Service regulation of rafting and river guides. Adjusting, though not always easily, to the changes, she helped transform an elite adventure sport into a major tourist activity.
Winner of the 2015 CPTSC Award for Excellence in Program Assessment
Written for those who design, redesign, and assess writing programs, Very Like a Whale is an intensive discussion of writing program assessment issues. Taking its title from Hamlet, the book explores the multifaceted forces that shape writing programs and the central role these programs can and should play in defining college education.
Given the new era of assessment in higher education, writing programs must provide valid evidence that they are serving students, instructors, administrators, alumni, accreditors, and policymakers. This book introduces new conceptualizations associated with assessment, making them clear and available to those in the profession of rhetoric and composition/writing studies. It also offers strategies that aid in gathering information about the relative success of a writing program in achieving its identified goals.
Philosophically and historically aligned with quantitative approaches, White, Elliot, and Peckham use case study and best-practice scholarship to demonstrate the applicability of their innovative approach, termed Design for Assessment (DFA). Well grounded in assessment theory, Very Like a Whale will be of practical use to new and seasoned writing program administrators alike, as well as to any educator involved with the accreditation process.
Mining had an enormous role, only partly measurable, in the history of Utah. Its multidimensional impact continues today. Economically, it made a major long-term contribution to the wealth, employment, and tax base of the state and stimulated a seemingly endless range of secondary businesses and enterprises. It helped shape the state's social history, determining the location, distribution, and composition of many communities and bringing transportation systems and a wide variety of institutions to them. It developed cultural diversity by drawing to Utah miners and families from otherwise underrepresented ethnic and national backgrounds. It ignited strife, particularly between labor and management, but those issues often spread into or connected with other conflicts in and between communities, classes, and factions. It influenced political platforms, generated candidates, and helped decide elections. Throughout the state, mining dramatically transformed the landscape, most obviously at what has been called the world's largest open-pit mine, which removed much of a mountain on the west side of Salt Lake Valley, but at innumerable other places too.
Despite all mining has done and meant, there has not been, until now, a book that surveyed its history in Utah. From the Ground Up fills that gap in a collection of essays by leading experts, among them historians Thomas G. Alexander, Martha Sonntag Bradley-Evans, James E. Fell Jr., Laurence P. James, Brigham D. Madsen, Philip F. Notarianni, Allen Kent Powell, W. Paul Reeve, Raye C. Ringholz, and Janet Burton Seegmiller and geologists J. Wallace Gwynn and William T. Parry. The book is divided into three comprehensive parts. The first looks at "The Ground of Utah Mining": the geology that has produced extractable minerals, the economic history of the industry, "father of Utah mining" Patrick E. Connor, and the lore of mines and miners. Part II reviews the history of a handful of particularly significant mineral industries: salines, coal, uranium, and beryllium. The last part takes a region-by-region approach to survey the important, primarily for hard-rock mining, areas of the state, including places from Silver Reef to Alta, the East Tintic Range to the Uinta Basin, and Park City to Frisco.
This collection surveys the many houses, residences, farms, and properties of Brigham Young, leader of the Mormon pioneers, first territorial governor of Utah, and second president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The authors discuss, in addition to the buildings themselves, what went on within their walls, looking especially at the lives of Young's plural wives and their children. Their emphasis is on Young's residences as homes, not just structures. The text is heavily illustrated with photos, drawings and maps.
Volume 13 in the Swenson Award Series, Tomorrow's Living Room offers a pleasantly disorienting verbal territory. The collection is alternately wry and dark, hopeful and bleak, full of unexpected light and laugh-out-loud incongruities. We begin to see that the shape and the furniture of Jason Whitmarsh's world reflect our own (they may in fact be universal), but we're considering them through completely new terms of engagement.
Selected by, and with a foreword by, Billy Collins.
The annual Swenson competition, named for May Swenson, honors her as one of America’s most provocative and vital writers. In John Hollander’s words, she was "one of our few unquestionably major poets."
Guns hold a complex place in American culture. Over 30,000 Americans die each year from gun violence, and guns are intimately connected to issues of public health, as is evident whenever a mass shooting occurs. But guns also play an important role in many Americans’ lives that is not reducible to violence and death—as tools, sporting equipment, and identity markers. They are also central to debates about constitutional rights, as seen in ongoing discussions about the Second Amendment, and they are a continuous source of legislative concern, as apparent in annual ratings of gun-supporting legislators.
Even as guns are wrapped up with other crucial areas of concern, they are also fundamentally a rhetorical concern. Guns and gun violence occupy a unique rhetorical space in the United States, one characterized by silent majorities, like most gun owners; vocal minorities, like the firearm industry and gun lobby; and a stalemate that fails to stem the flood of the dead. How Americans talk, deliberate, and fight about guns is vital to how guns are marketed, used, and regulated. A better understanding of the rhetorics of guns and gun violence can help Americans make better arguments about them in the world. However, where guns are concerned, rhetorical studies is not terribly different from American culture more generally. Guns are ever-present and exercise powerful effects, but they are commonly talked about in oblique, unsystematic ways.
Rhetoric and Guns advances more direct, systematic engagement in the field and beyond by analyzing rhetoric about guns, guns in rhetoric, and guns as rhetoric, particularly as they relate to specific instances of guns in culture. The authors attempt to understand rhetoric’s relationship to guns by analyzing rhetoric about guns and how they function in and as rhetoric related to specific instances—in media coverage, political speech, marketing, and advertising. Original chapters from scholars in rhetorical studies, communication, education, and related fields elucidate how rhetoric is used to maintain and challenge the deadly status quo of gun violence in the United States and extend rhetoricians’ sustained interest in the fields’ relationships to violence, brutality, and atrocity.
How do definitions of literacy in the academy, and the pedagogies that reinforce such definitions, influence and shape our identities as teachers, scholars, and students? The contributors gathered here reflect on those moments when the dominant cultural and institutional definitions of our identities conflict with our other identities, shaped by class, race, gender, sexual orientation, location, or other cultural factors.
These writers explore the struggle, identify the sources of conflict, and discuss how they respond personally to such tensions in their scholarship, teaching, and administration. They also illustrate how writing helps them and their students compose alternative identities that may allow the connection of professional identities with internal desires and senses of self. They emphasize how identity comes into play in education and literacy and how institutional and cultural power is reinforced in the pedagogies and values of the writing classroom and writing profession.
As a youth in Denver, Donald Mace Williams developed an affection for high mountain country. After a journalistic career spent mostly on flat lands, he set out to rediscover what was special about country above timberline. He hiked the high alpine in four of America's major ranges-the Rockies, Sierra Nevada, Cascades, and northern Appalachians-and in his narrative of his travels, he tells us what he saw and learned and who he met. Having visited some of these areas when younger, Williams compares his psychological and physical responses as an older man and how his ideas about how to treat the environment have evolved. A recurring theme is the compromises that people such as he make between the pull of mountains and freedom and the responsibilities of making a living in the lowlands. Mainly, he observes and experiences what is distinctive about the timberline environment.
Throughout his book, Williams gently informs readers regarding timberline history, nature, weather, and archaeology; high altitude physiology; and environmental concerns. Frequently, he recounts encounters with interesting and varied people he meets on the trails: a young British hiking companion who has come back to Colorado to repeat a climb on which, a year previously, his two fellow climbers died; a pilot who climbs isolated peaks in the Sierra Nevada in search of bouillon-can scrolls signed by famous early mountaineers; a "Literate Farmer" who pauses on a mountain trail in Vermont to discuss Robert Frost.
Donald Mace Williams is a retired journalist who has worked for such newspapers as The Wichita Eagle, Newsday, and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He has a Ph.D. in English from the University of Texas, has published one previous book (Interlude in Umbarger: Italian POWs and a Texas Church); poems in Western Humanities Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, and South Dakota Review; and a short story in Southwest Review. He now lives in Texas.
Lisa William's poems are infused with what John Hollander calls "a guarded wonder." A poet of unique vision, she seems always to be "looking at," with special attention to the experience of the senses. Moreover, Williams is equally concerned with epistemology—the how of seeing. And it is perhaps this quality of attention that informs her interest in the formulations of poetry itself, in its constructed dimension. Her control of the line, of rhythmic possibilities, of structures both formal and free, is evident in every poem. Together, William's original voice and her poetic finesse allow her to create those harmonies of wonder evoked by the very instrument, the hammered dulcimer, that gives her collection its name. Judge for the 1998 May Swenson Poetry Award was John Hollander, poet, critic, professor. Long a major figure in American letters, Hollander was a personal friend to May Swenson, and has influenced the work of many of our best emerging poetic voices.
WPAs in Transition shares a wide variety of professional and personal perspectives about the costs, benefits, struggles, and triumphs experienced by writing program administrators making transitions into and out of leadership positions. Contributors to the volume come from various positions, as writing center directors, assistant writing program administrators, and WPAs; mixed settings, including community colleges, small liberal arts colleges, and research institutions; and a range of career stages, from early to retiring. They recount insightful anecdotes and provide a scholarly context in which WPAs can share experiences related to this long-ignored aspect of their work.
During such transitions, WPAs and other leaders who function as both administrators and faculty face the professional and personal challenges of redefining who they are, the work they do, and with whom they collaborate. WPAs in Transition creates a grounded and nuanced experiential understanding of what it means to navigate changing roles, advancing the dialogue around WPAs’ and other administrators’ identities, career paths, work-life balance, and location, and is a meaningful addition to the broader literature on administration and leadership.
Contributors: Mark Blaauw-Hara, Christopher Blankenship, Jennifer Riley Campbell, Nicole I. Caswell, Richard Colby, Steven J. Corbett, Beth Daniell, Laura J. Davies, Jaquelyn Davis, Holland Enke, Letizia Guglielmo, Beth Huber, Karen Keaton Jackson, Rebecca Jackson, Tereza Joy Kramer, Jackie Grutsch McKinney, Kerri K. Morris, Liliana M. Naydan, Reyna Olegario, Kate Pantelides, Talinn Phillips, Andrea Scott, Paul Shovlin, Bradley Smith, Cheri Lemieux Spiegel, Sarah Stanley, Amy Rupiper Taggart, Molly Tetreault, Megan L. Titus, Chris Warnick
As new media mature, the changes they bring to writing in college are many and suggest implications not only for the tools of writing, but also for the contexts, personae, and conventions of writing. An especially visible change has been the increase of visual elements-from typographic flexibility to the easy use and manipulation of color and images. Another would be in the scenes of writing-web sites, presentation "slides," email, online conferencing and coursework, even help files, all reflect non-traditional venues that new media have brought to writing. By one logic, we must reconsider traditional views even of what counts as writing; a database, for example, could be a new form of written work.
The authors of Writing New Media bring these ideas and the changes they imply for writing instruction to the audience of rhetoric/composition scholars. Their aim is to expand the college writing teacher's understanding of new media and to help teachers prepare students to write effectively with new media beyond the classroom. Each chapter in the volume includes a lengthy discussion of rhetorical and technological background, and then follows with classroom-tested assignments from the authors' own teaching.
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