We set out to investigate Miller's curious assertion--curious for a deconstructionist committed to a critique of the old metaphysics of presence--that literary works preexist their being written down. We find a basis for this sense of the preexistence of the literary work in Miller's insights about the performative dynamics of reading and writing.…

This essay questions the digital humanities' dependence on interpretation and critique as strategies for reading and responding to texts. Instead, the essay proposes suggestion as a digital rhetorical practice, one that does not replace hermeneutics, but instead offers alternative ways to respond to texts. The essay uses the Occupy movement as an…

This article excavates how style in writing was represented and taught in the under-investigated mid-twentieth century. I trace four editions of the textbook "Modern Rhetoric" (1949-1979), authored by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren; I detail how the book was surprisingly innovative for the time, despite its eventual re-entrenchment to a…

This article presents an interview with the noted Nepali American fiction writer Samrat Upadhyay. Samrat Upadhyay's fiction is mostly about his native country of Nepal, but he writes mainly for an Anglo-American audience. In the interview, Upadhyay not only discusses his own work, but he also examines samples of prose by other Asian or Asian…

Through an account of how his own students analyzed Ira Sher's short story "The Man in the Well," the author calls for teachers of literature to value and attend to their classes' misreadings rather than replace them with corrective interpretations. He argues that probing these misreadings enables one to see the limits imposed by any single…

As a field, creative writing must reject its traditional image of "uselessness" and realize its anticapitalist, antiprivatizing potential as a creator of public space. In part, this move would involve teaching students to question traditional notions of influence, as well as the modernist concept of the author as a lone, autonomous individual.

Trauma theory has been and continues to be important to critical work in every period of literary study. This essay argues that the subtle literary strategies of one fourteenth-century poem can help to address a blockage about representation current in that theory. Geoffrey Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde" meditates upon trauma by rendering…

In 1992, more than 20 artists showcased their work in a traveling exhibit, "Chicano Codex: Encountering Art of the Americas." Each piece creatively resembled Mesoamerican amoxtli, the pictographic "codex books" that were destroyed by European combatants as a strategy for subjugating indigenous minds. Spain's campaign of…

In her influential 1988 essay, "Fighting Words," Jane Tompkins argued that the arguments typically made by literary critics are characterized by an aggressive competitiveness that amounts to violence. But, as Tompkins's own rhetorical strategies demonstrate, at least as deplorable are the practices whereby critics render certain people anonymous.…

In this article, the author argues that Emerson repudiated the formalism of nineteenth century belletristic, mechanistic, reason-centered, American rhetoric influenced by Hugh Blair. Instead Emerson promoted a rhetoric with imagination at its center, which calls for civic duty. (Contains 33 notes.)

This essay provides an account of The Ohio State University's (OSU) rhetoric department during the tenure of Joseph Villiers Denney, arguing that he appropriated and repurposed national trends in education and rhetoric in ways that complicate the narrative of rhetoric and composition's decline in the late nineteenth century. In this essay, the…

Traditionally, we English faculty have warned our students against simply identifying with a literary work's characters. For us, such attachments constitute "reading badly." But we engage in identifications, too, including ones with the work's author. A consideration of critical responses to "Benito Cereno" and "Uncle Tom's Cabin" enables us to…

Author Sue Monk Kidd, who is white, employs stereotypes of African Americans and problematically appropriates features of black writing in her novel "The Secret Life of Bees." Nevertheless, this book is worth teaching, not only because it has acquired much cultural capital but also because it offers students a way to examine relationships between…

Undergraduate literature courses tend to neglect American fiction of the 1930s, especially the proletarian novel. Disregard of this particular genre is often based on the assumption that it emphasized a crude Marxist realism opposed to aesthetic modernism. Various examples of the genre are, in fact, worth teaching, especially because they do not…

In this article, the author talks about a critically acclaimed movie "Crash" and what it reveals pedagogically about the paradoxical legacies of the grand experiment in radical democracy. Written and directed by Paul Haggis, "Crash" inundates the viewer with a barrage of the most condescending racial and ethnic insults, which…