College English - Volume 74, Issue 3, 2012

The literary work of Anzia Yezierska is relevant to the fields of composition, rhetoric, and literacy. Partly in dialogue with the philosophy of John Dewey, it reveals the tensions and conflicts inherent in progressive education, emphasizing how these were viewed through the lens of the immigrant student. Yezierska shows that pedagogical progressivism has had tremendous potential to tap into students’ lived experiences and transform them into more fully realized, engaged citizens, even as she also shows that such power has been constrained by institutional structures.

Recent theoretical and technological developments, including concepts of networking elaborated by Bruno Latour, enable composition studies to take an empiricist turn toward issues of identity. More specifically, these developments help the field more strongly connect the figure of the writing-subject to the experiences of actual writers.

The contemporary university’s reliance on coursepacks, whether they take print or digital form, is illuminated by Bruno Latour’s theories and by consideration of a nineteenth-century copyright case involving noted textbook author William McGuffey. In particular, these contexts remind us that coursepacks are situated within shifting constellations of material things.

Reviewed are Out of Style: Reanimating Stylistic Study in Composition and Rhetoric by Paul Butler, and Performing Prose: The Study and Practice of Style in Composition by Chris Holcomb and M. Jimmie Killingsworth.