College English - Volume 68, Issue 5, 2006

Recognizing that many of us teach the medieval English women mystics Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich in survey courses, this essay attempts to put these writers in context for teachers who may have only a passing familiarity with the period. Focusing on passages of their writings found in the Longman and Norton anthologies of British literature, the author shows how these women responded to and shaped sociopolitical issues of their day, particularly questions of heresy and disorder as threats to Catholic institutional stability, the role of Mendicant teachings for the laity of the church, and the rise of the cult of the Eucharist.

The author reads five volumes of College English with attention to the extent to which authors account for issues of systemic difference in their writing—both in their representations of themselves as authors and in their representations of others—as one means to explore how (indeed whether) we have begun to transcend normativity in our disciplinary conversation and to identify problems in the way we deal with difference. He concludes by exploring how pedagogy and practice that deal substantively with difference are by nature transformative.

Reviewed are anniversary reissues of Writing without Teachers, by Peter Elbow; Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paulo Freire; and A Writer Teaches Writing, by Donald M. Murray.

Reviewed are That’s the Joint! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, edited by Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal; Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop, by Imani Perry; Nuthin’ but a “G” Thang: The Culture and Commerce of Gangsta Rap, by Eithne Quinn; and Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, by Jeff Chang.