Bücher der Reihe Studies in Writing and Rhetoric

This book develops a new theoretical approach to the study of writing by fusing key aspects of postmodern theory with the empirical sensibilities of composition studies and with that field's long-standing investment in writerly agency. Specifically, Inside the Subject describes the act of writing in terms of the event, a concept for mapping relations between the symbolic and the nonsymbolic. In addition, the book casts writers as both locations and catalysts for these relations. And finally, it develops a theory of identity to describe these relations, and these locations, in more detail than the field currently has at its disposal.

Leslie Seawright describes the journey of a police report as it travels through the criminal justice system. Tracing the path of a police report from writer, to supervisor, to prosecutor, to defense lawyer, to judge, this study exposes the way in which power, agency, and authority circulate and accrue between writers and readers. The chained literacy event, created as a report moves through the system, is highlighted and its hierarchical nature examined. The book ultimately addresses the constraints of the police report genre and seeks to expose the complex and multifaceted rhetorical situation of report writing. Due to her position as a police officer's wife, Seawright was granted access to perspectives and realities of police writing typically reserved for those inside the police profession. Seawright obtained candid interviews and perspectives from police officers and supervisors, lawyers and judges. This book analyzes the writing and reading process of the officer writing the report and the report's subsequent readers. Interlaced throughout the book are micro-chapters that offer glimpses into the day-to-day job of police officers. These vignettes, combined with Seawright's description of her own life as wife and scholar, present a compelling picture of the complexity of police writing. This study challenges the idea that arhetorical and objective documents are possible to create in many organizations.

Through a blend of African American cultural theory and literacy and rhetorical studies highlighting the intellectual and pedagogical traditions of African American people, Rhea Estelle Lathan argues that African Americans have literacy traditions that represent specific, culturally influenced ways of being in the world. She introduces gospel literacy, a theoretical framework analogous to gospel music within which to consider how the literacy activities of the Civil Rights Movement illuminate a continual interchange between secular and religious ideologies. Lathan demonstrates how gospel literacy is deeply grounded in an African American tradition of refusing to accept the assumptions underlying European American thought and institutions, including the oppression of African American people and the denial of full citizenship rights. Lathan's critical historical analysis draws on oral histories, personal interviews, and archival data, allowing her to theorize about African American literacy practices, meanings, and values while demonstrating the symbiotic relationship between literacy and the Civil Rights Movement. Central to her research are local participants who contributed to the success of citizenship education, and she illuminates in particular how African American women used critical intellectualism and individual creative literacy strategies to aid in the struggle for basic human rights.

Institutional, organized expressions of male coming-of-age encourage Americans to believe that emergent masculinity is an enduring natural phenomenon and an essential component of American identity, and that the outcomes of the transformation process from boy to man have important consequences for the United States as a nation. Leigh Ann Jones explores performances of developing young male identity in case studies from twentieth- and twenty-first-century federal and civic organizations that recruit boys and young men using appeals to American national identity, often coding these appeals as character building. Examining documents from the Boy Scouts of America during the Progressive Era, the Sigma Chi college fraternity in the 1960s, and the US Army's "Army of One" recruiting campaign in the early 2000s, Jones explicates rhetorical strategies that position the young male figure as a source of enduring national identification and as a citizen who is the product of a distinct trajectory of development and transformation. These strategies emerge from an intense interest among community leaders in the psychology of boys and are characterized by language that directs and shapes boys' consciousness of themselves as males, tying that consciousness to an American identity. Applying Kenneth Burke's concept of rhetoric as identification, particularly his understanding of constitutive rhetoric, Jones outlines a framework for understanding how such organizations for boys have endured, along with their myths about masculinity, in spite of the ways in which these stories are troubled by economics, gender, race, and sexuality.