College English - Volume 67, Issue 5, 2005

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.

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.

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.