Textual Carnivals by Southern Illinois University Press

Textual Carnivals by Southern Illinois University Press

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Textual Carnivals by Southern Illinois University Press

This is the first book-length study of the status of composition in English studies and the uneasy relationship between composition and literature. Composition studies and institutional histories of English studies have long needed this kind of clarification of the historical and political contexts of composition teaching, research, and administration.


Susan Miller argues that composition constitutes a major national industry, citing the four million freshman-level students enrolled in such courses each year, the $40 million annual expenditure for textbooks, and the more than $50 million in teacher salaries. But this concrete magnitude is not expressed in political power within departments. Miller calls on her associates in composition to engage in a persistent critique of the social practices and political agenda of the discipline that have been responsible for its institutional marginalization. Drawing on her own long experience as a composition administrator, teacher, and scholar, as well as on a national survey of composition professionals, Miller argues that composition teachers inadvertently continue to foster the negative myth about composition's place in the English studies hierarchy by assuming an assigned, self-sacrificial cultural identity. Composition has been regarded as subcollegiate, practical, a how-to, and has been denied intellectual rigor in order to preserve literature's presentations of quasi-religious textual ideals.

Winner of three major book awards:


The Modern Language Association's Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize


The Conference on College Composition and Communication's Outstanding Book Award


The Teachers of Advanced Composition's W. Ross Winterowd Award

Susan Miller, a professor of English and a faculty member in the University Writing Program at the University of Utah, teaches the history and theory of rhetoric and composition. She is the author of Writing: Process and Product, Rescuing the Subject: A Critical Introduction to Rhetoric and the Writer, Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition, and Assuming the Positions: Cultural Pedagogy and the Politics of Ordinary Writing.
SKU Unavailable
ISBN 13 9780809319220
ISBN 10 0809319225
Title Textual Carnivals
Author Southern Illinois University Press
Condition Unavailable
Binding Type Paperback
Publisher Southern Illinois University Press
Year published 1993-09-30
Number of pages 288
Cover note Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note Unavailable