College English - Volume 72, Issue 3, 2010

Studying Chaucer’s poem Troilus and Criseyde helps us evaluate current theories of trauma, especially the very different accounts of it provided by Ruth Leys and Cathy Caruth. The poem renders trauma a feature of both linguistic acts and personal pain. Besides citing it in suffering individuals, Chaucer’s text points to a complicated and ambivalent circulation of such wounds both in culture and for it.

Historians of composition and rhetoric need to question the grand narratives that so far have predominated in their field, including those that turn particular figures like Fred Newton Scott into lone heroes.

Both critics and defenders of Judith Butler’s theoretical writing have failed to acknowledge that she employs classic argumentative moves.

The author discusses graduate courses he has taught that help students turn their academic prose into publically accessible opinion writing.

Reviewed are Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University by William Clark; Buying into English: Language and Investment in the New Capitalist World by Catherine Prendergast; How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation by Marc Bousquet; and Inside the Teaching Machine: Rhetoric and the Globalization of the U.S. Public Research University by Catherine Chaput.