In this review, I look back to the first issue of College English, and then across the years to trace the ways in which "Intellectual Property" (and this distinction from intellectual property is important) has been addressed by authors in the pages of the journal. I distinguish two periods of time marked by different approaches to IP issues, and…

Autism is a profoundly rhetorical phenomenon. And all--parents, educators, caregivers, policymakers, the public, and autistic people themselves--would be significantly empowered to understand and respond to it as such. In the continuing absence of stable scientific or medical knowledge about autism, one needs to shine a bright and insistent light…

In the current economic climate, many corporate and political leaders seek to reform public education through entrepreneurial efforts that reflect a managerial approach. Similarly, several academic scholars are busily marketing their research. To counter these trends and improve one's own standing, the author suggests that those who are in the…

Recently, several composition scholars have engaged in apocalyptic rhetoric, although they distance themselves from versions of it that advocate critical pedagogy. Bruno Latour's theories help expose such pedagogy's limitations while also offering a perspective on teacher-student relationships that can more realistically and sensitively work…

In an article on "Smart People" (2008), a film in which Dennis Quaid plays an English professor who becomes romantically involved with a former student, Jeffery J. Williams notes that a "common complaint among academics is that films don't depict them correctly, and in some ways Quaid was accoutered by central casting, beginning the movie in a…

In this essay, the author argues that the current superficial reading practices in creative writing programs are serving not only to marginalize the discipline from the larger body of English studies, but also to stifle the creative, intellectual, and professional progress of its students. Reading for creative writers must be viewed as a critical…

One of the most important contributions of writer-teacher Wendy Bishop was to argue for the interconnectedness of creative writing and composition studies. By doing so, Bishop insisted on the importance of studying what writers do when they write. Because her pedagogy was driven by reports of individuals from a culture that had seldom been heard…

Ayn Rand's novel "The Fountainhead" can be a useful text in an undergraduate English class, helping students think through issues of individualism. Rand's own concept of the self, however, ignores its social dimensions. (Contains 7 notes.)

The forum contributors draw on their personal experiences and insights to put forth ideas about contingent faculty's relations with the profession of English studies in general. (Contains 3 notes.)

In this essay, the author explores the curious irony that a discipline and a profession organized around the study and teaching of language and literacy have had so little influence on the discursive constructions (policies) that govern the teaching of language and literacy. Part of the problem, as the author sees it, is simply that so little…

2009 is the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth. Naturally, historians are thrilled. But what about their discipline? Why and how might Lincoln matter to English studies? In this article, the authors reflect on Lincoln and his influence on English studies. They argue that Lincoln has played or can play an important role in the college English…

The author discusses his experience in a university project that led to the creation of a first-year writing text based on interviews with members of a local neighborhood. In particular, he analyzes the negative reaction that many of the community's residents expressed toward the text's portrayals of them. From the tensions that developed, the…

Traditional priorities of English as a discipline are now significantly at odds with the material circumstances of college English departments. To address these realities, college English needs to become literacy studies rather than literary studies.

Although "close reading" remains a worthwhile goal for undergraduate English courses, the term has actually been defined in numerous ways, which need to be compared and assessed. Unfortunately, the version of it spread by the New Critics has intimidated students, making them feel unable to decipher a literary text's real meaning. They…

For the last several years, composition scholarship has unfortunately neglected the paragraph. Theories about it, however, have a rich history. Eventually, it involved conflicts between prescriptivists and descriptivists, as well as between members of the latter group and the branch of descriptivism called functionalism. In this article, the…