Much of the current North American academic crisis of publishing, tenure, and promotion is both the cause and the effect of this fetishization dominant in the humanities: that of the grand narrative of knowledge-production, respectably bound with a spine. Short works will get one only so far, no matter how many of them one produces, or how well.…

Keeping in mind the Chinese character-combination "yuyan," with its multiple meanings of language, parts of language, the processes of language, and the products of those processes, the author depicts English as kept alive by many people and by many different ways of using it in a wide range of personal, social, and historical contexts.…

This author asserts that college English should provide students with certain communicative skills that enable them to analyze rhetorical effect and produce rhetorically effective texts, including those to be read, those to be viewed as images, those to be heard, and those not to be heard. Recently, new books on visual rhetoric, the rhetoric of…

Describes the emergence of Native American writers and the problems they face with their achievement. Apendixes list publishers of native American poetry and contemporary poets. (CRH)

Cites over 75 examples of errors in usage which were made by newswriters for the "Washington Post," suggesting that they indicate the social dimensions of language decay. (DD)

Describes a course in comparative North/South American literature as a model of one approach to broadening students' ethnic and cultural viewpoints. (DD)

Until very recently, gay slang reflected the sexism, classicism, and racism of straight English. (JH)

To understand decisions made concerning language usage in "Webster's Third New International Dictionary," it is necessary to realize what standard usage is and how it changes. The definition of standard usage, given in 1932, as that language used by well-educated persons remains valid and depends more and more on professional writers for guidance.…

The three books under review show what flux the English language has undergone and continues to undergo, and how stable grammatical theory has been until recent times. (Author)