College English - Volume 71, Issue 2, 2008

The 1966 Dartmouth conference has long been regarded as a landmark in the history of American college composition. Meriting new attention, however, is the role it played in affirming the notion of “the native speaker,” a concept important to the postwar Anglo-American language alliance behind the meeting.

Originally published in a 1984 issue of College English, Stephen North’s article “The Idea of a Writing Center” has over the years been much cited in writing center scholarship. Even so, this scholarship as a whole did not proceed to gain much presence in CE and other broadly-oriented composition journals. Reconsidering North’s piece, the authors argue for greater attention now to writing centers as sites for potentially valuable scholarly inquiry.

Reviewed are “Permissions, A Survival Guide: Blunt Talk about Art as Intellectual Property” by Susan M. Bielstein and “Rhetorics of Display”, edited by Lawrence J. Prelli.