College English - Volume 69, Issue 5, 2007

Letters and journals of American missionary women in early 19th century Hawai’i express conflicting desires. In some ways, the writers seek connection with the rest of the missionary community and with Native Hawaiians. In other ways, they try to separate themselves from these two groups.

For the last several years, composition scholarship has unfortunately neglected the paragraph. Theories about it, however, have a rich history. Eventually, it involved conflicts between prescriptivists and descriptivists, as well as between members of the latter group and the branch of descriptivism called functionalism. Composition researchers should study the paragraph once again, this time forging connections with similar work in other disciplines.

On various campuses, including the author’s, “safe space” stickers are used to designate offices supposedly free of homophobia. The author critiques this practice, pointing out that it still privileges the white heterosexual subject while also obscuring connections between sexuality, gender, and race.

The author critiques the much-publicized and potentially influential 2006 report of the Spellings Commission Report. He emphasizes the report’s inconsistencies, seeing these as reflecting a business model of education that neglects not only the decline in government financial support of colleges, but also the presence in them of new student populations

Reviewed is The Economics of {Attention}: Style and Substance in the Age of Information by Richard A. Lanham.