College English - Volume 70, Issue 1, 2007

Although many composition teachers feel anger when they discover that a student of theirs has plagiarized, they are more apt to reveal this emotion in personal conversations and in blogs than in published composition scholarship. The field’s scholarship should, however, disclose and analyze this common affective response.

Various writing programs have struggled to preserve their academic freedom amidst pressures from college administrators and members of the public. To discourage interference from outside parties, such a program needs to identify itself as focused on a substantial academic subject: the scholarly understanding of language and meaning.

Although, by the time of her death, Louise Rosenblatt was highly respected in the fields of composition and reading theory, she did not enjoy the same status among literary theorists. Yet her book The Reader, The Text, The Poem can now be seen as a precursor of contemporary literary theory’s “ethical turn.”

Reviewed is An Open Language: Selected Writing on Literacy, Learning, and Opportunity, by Mike Rose.

Reviewed are Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism, by Sharon Crowley, and Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness, by Krista Ratcliffe.