College English - Volume 67, Issue 6, 2005

The author considers cases of literary figures whose ethics might make readers uncomfortable—Geoffrey Chaucer’s possible rape of a young woman, Flannery O’Connor’s possible racism—and argues that, even though postmodernism has “killed” the author as an object of critical inquiry, careful attention to questions of authorial and readerly ethics can still play an important role in both our students’ development as critical and engaged readers and our own.

Examining a range of visual images of executions, both legal (the executions of convicted murderers) and extralegal (the lynchings of innocent African Americans), in still photographs and in Hollywood films, the authors suggest that while such images may flatten and neutralize the popular debates and politics surrounding the issues, this is not inevitable, and that if we work at sustaining careful attention to its operations the image is neither self-evident nor doomed to obscure the political.

The author identifies possibilities of a “lost island” rhetoric that situates English department Web sites--and the profession’s defining practices--in an ambivalent relationship to global capital via the online network. The article describes how three department sites variously employ this rhetoric to assert English studies’ own forms of intellectual productivity and cultural value in dialogue with the market logic that dominates the Web.

Reviewed are Eloquent Images: Word and Image in the Age of New Media, edited by Mary E. Hocks and Michelle R. Kendrick; Defining Visual Rhetorics, edited by Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers; The Terministic Screen: Rhetorical Perspectives on Film, edited by David Blakesley; and Tuned In: Television and the Teaching of Writing, by Bronwyn T. Williams.