This article presents a written version of the address the author gave at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) meeting in San Francisco on March 12, 2009. In this address, the author talks about the wonder of writing and discusses how writing has been considered sacred. Reading and writing are associated with inwardness…

The purpose of this workshop paper is to understand the ways that women and men who work in the field of composition-rhetoric studies can more fully understand and articulate ways to enable women writing students to use more fully the new kinds of technology that proliferate in the digital realm. The material is based on the author's twenty-six…

While Aristotle's philosophical views are more foundational than those of many of the Older Sophists, Aristotle's rhetorical theories inherit and incorporate many of the central tenets ascribed to Sophistic rhetoric, albeit in a more systematic fashion, as represented in the "Rhetoric." However, Aristotle was more than just a rhetorical…

Although a Ph.D. candidate feels pressured to take sides in the discursive war in academe between social-epistemics and expressionists, he finds it difficult to do so. W. Ross Winterowd, a "spokesperson" for social-epistemic rhetoric, makes distinctions between the two camps, maintaining a discursive dichotomy between what he calls the…

The notion of links or connections among nodes or pieces of information sorted in a computer has changed throughout the brief history of hypertext. Originally, links were either thought to be semantic or functional in nature; that is, they were between meaningful information or they performed certain activities. Recently, links are beginning to be…

Robert L. Scott's article "On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic" exemplifies agonistic-transcendent rhetoric in that it sought to revalue "rhetoric." However, as Scott has already noted, his project was ultimately compromised by his not revaluing "epistemic" in conjunction. Scott's article is criticized with respect to…

So much has been written about feminism and composition that it may seem that there is little left to be said. But one question to ask is what scholars gain by keeping up the debate--that is, instead of asking how feminism relates to composition, what should be asked is why feminism insists on a relation to composition. A look at Elizabeth Flynn's…

Interest in the sophists has recently intensified among rhetorical theorists, culminating in the notion that rhetoric is epistemic. Epistemic rhetoric has its first and deepest roots in sophistic epistemological and rhetorical traditions, so that the view of rhetoric as epistemic is now being dubbed "neo-sophistic." In epistemic…

This article presents the text of the author's address at the fifty-ninth annual convention of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) in March 2008. In her address, the author picks up strands of previous Chairs' addresses and weaves them through the fabric of her remarks. What she hopes will give sheen to the fabric is her…

If the idea is true that a theory is an abstract model that explains an objective phenomenon, where objective means anything that exists independent of individual human volition, then the best known example of such a rhetorical theory would be Lloyd Bitzer's famous rhetorical situation. Bitzer has argued that a rhetorical act comes into being when…

This paper explores the philosophical foundations and implications of fantasy theme analysis, introduced by Ernest B. Bormann in 1972. The paper rejects the appropriation of fantasy theme analysis as compatible with, or as support for the philosophical position of relativism and relativist rhetorical theories. Rather, it suggests that fantasy…

One educator who teaches many writing courses in the writing emphasis at the University of San Francisco has used the film "Pulp Fiction" in four different writing classes, the honors section of a Freshman Seminar, and assorted film courses. This paper suggests how and why teaching this film in classes devoted to writing might make a…

In the process of delegitimating the master narratives that have sustained Western civilization in the past, Postmodernism provoked a "crisis in narrative" which Francois Lyotard describes as narrativity that presents a sense of loss but not of what is lost. Recent histories of rhetoric have promulgated the view that rhetorical maps…

The "Takings Clause" of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution seems clear enough: when the government takes an individual's property, it must pay him or her for it. The "Sagebrush Rebellion" refers to the numerous incarnations of a movement to privatize public lands and contain environmental regulation. This…

Borrowing from Heidegger and following Pamela Caughie and Victor Vitanza, the work of Virginia Woolf can be linked to composition pedagogies to ask: "What are composition instructors still not thinking in relation to the postmodern?" An answer may be found through postmodern rereadings of Woolf's "A Room of One's Own" and…