It’s an early New Orleans Sunday morning. I sit at my usual table in Marigny coffee shop as a circle of neighbors forms at a table near the front window. They laugh as they talk over each other. One says, “He lives in a different world—that’s what I told him.”

We are all living in different worlds, and we are all here together. As Jelly Roll Morton once said, “We had all nations in New Orleans.” Despite Jelly Roll’s propensity for exaggeration, New Orleans had, and still has, people from around the world. And in New Orleans, the people...

As compositionists, we have unique contributions to make. We create various schools of composition theory and elaborate profound interpretations of rhetoric. We bring a variety of cultural and ethnic perspectives to our understanding of genre and academic writing. We develop pedagogies that influence teaching in other academic disciplines. My goal is to revisit the history of rhetoric to better understand why we think what we do and do what we do in our classrooms—so that we can make the past the past as we learn new ways.

National Healing is a book about understanding the teaching of writing in...

It is a cool, early autumn afternoon in 1975 in upstate New York. I am an undergraduate English secondary education major, and I am sitting in an American literature classroom in a small state college. I am reading Pound’s “Mang Tsze: The Ethics of Mencius.” In it, Pound (1973, 94) discusses the nature of the ideogram, the difficulty of the translation, the power of the image: “No one with any visual sense can fail to be affected by the way the strokes move in these characters.”

I am looking at a single ideogram in the text. Perhaps I did not...

For me, teaching writing means offering each student an opportunity to learn to use language to explore their experiences in relation to the experiences of others. It means offering students the opportunity to change by expanding their composing. It means helping students to learn how and why others make meaning so that they may incorporate, if they wish, some of these meanings, purposes, processes, and techniques into their own writing. Teaching writing means creating a pedagogy in which students explore the critical need for fluency, honesty, beauty, and truth in maintaining world health. At this time, no need presses so...

In 1980, I began my doctoral work at the State University of New York at Albany. I studied Western rhetoric and philosophy with C. H. Knoblauch. Those days were first and foremost about the process revolution and expressivism in composition. As my fellow graduate students and I studied Classical rhetoric, it was with an eye toward understanding the ways it did, or did not, sanction the contemporary conceptions of composing and teaching we were developing. We wanted to know the Classical tradition because we wanted to know the history—thanks to Cy Knoblauch’s student-centeredness—in which the rhetorical revolution in...

In her foreword to Duane Roen, Stuart Brown and Theresa Enos’s Living Rhetorics: Stories of the Discipline, Andrea Lunsford (1999a, xi) asks what are, for me, good questions: “Where were you when you ‘fell in love’ with the theory and/or practice of rhetoric and composition? What were you doing at the very moment when you claimed the teaching of writing/reading as your way of life?”

I’m not sure. Although I can see a commitment to teaching writing in my 1975 meeting with Pound’s ideograms, maybe I am forgetting something else. Or maybe I am not in love. (Indeed, when I...

The Western tradition of rhetoric offers a powerful conceptual framework and vocabulary for understanding the production and reception of discourse. A categorical system some two thousand years in the making, the Western tradition provides an effective heuristic for identifying and analyzing many aspects of discourse and reception, no matter the culture (though the application of the categories of Western rhetoric on other traditions can raise some serious ethical questions). The Western tradition was, and is, useful for achieving a deep, technical, psychological understanding of the shapes, purposes, and power distributions inherent in certain kinds of discourse. Its categories and structures...

The field of composition would benefit from a careful examination of the current, historical context of the teaching of writing, including the ways in which form is a function of ideology. We need greater understanding of how form becomes script for our utterances and our writing. We need greater knowledge about how form becomes an assigned piece of mind, a discursive end in itself. One way to reach that knowledge is by deepening our understanding of the relation of form to merger-terms like “national character” and its reliance on “Classical” sources.

In The Use and Abuse of History, Friedrich Nietzsche...

Rhetoric is not a prison-house. It is a study, as complex and far-reaching as the human quest for meaning. In Alternative Rhetorics, Laura Gray-Rosendale and Sybille Gruber (2001, 3) write that the study of rhetoric “cannot be confined within nicely drawn borders. The field is ever-changing, ever-expanding, unconstrained, unconfined, and largely uncharted.” According to them, we simply are not obligated to be “satisfied” with “one rhetorical tradition. Instead,” they argue, “we want to emphasize multiplicity and fragmentation within and between different rhetorics and different traditions” (5). We need such thinking, we need more of it, and we need it now....

Rhetoric is a system of thought for conceptualizing the composing, delivery and reception of discourse. Rhetoric is about work that connects one to another. It is about the composing of the connection. It is also about the claiming of the other’s presence (not in possession; rather, in respect of the other). As Daniel Collins (2001) and Michael Spooner (2002) have both shown us, rhetoric is also about the responsibilities of an audience member or reader and how we make meaning of the other’s work, the dialogue writer and reader engage in as meaning emerges. The study of rhetoric offers, then,...

Caring compositionists sometimes ask how students would succeed in college if we did not use our composition classes to teach argumentation and academic discourse. This is a complicated question. The easy answer is that nothing more unfortunate than anything that is happening now would occur. The fact is, of course, that students know how to argue. They do it for most of their lives—if not always well. What is more, while they certainly benefit from learning the protocols of academic arguing, such as open-mindedness, thoroughness, precision, and fair (though invested) research and reporting, we cannot say with certainty and,...

If compositionists know, now, at this point in the history of our discipline’s development, that there is more than one rhetorical tradition in the world, why does the teaching of writing change so little, especially when our students do? It is beyond the scope of this book to pay just attention to the many examples of the work that can be cited as challenges to composition’s entrenched order of discourse, but it would certainly be remiss of me not to at least note a few.

For instance, in 1986, Judith and Geoffrey Summerfield published Texts and Contexts, a book that...

There are more informed and productive ways to think about teaching writing than the ones with which we have worked in the past or the ones with which we work in the present. In this regard, I urge us compositionists to consider an international perspective on composition, one informed by international connection, dialogues, and exchanges and that has the possibility to take us beyond the national and cultural boundaries that currently limit our vision and practices.

When I suggest that we turn to an international perspective on the teaching of writing, I mean that we learn how writing is taught...

When we develop an international perspective on composition, we seek to understand the composing of others, to understand what others bring to their composing processes (ideology, religion, material concerns, patterns of social relationships, attitudes and perceptions about writing, etc.). We seek knowledge of how students of other cultures and nations compose so that we might better teach them when they are in our classes. In addition, we seek insights about how others compose so that we may develop our own composing repertoires—to open ourselves to opportunities for learning about linguistic and rhetorical options from our students. Our goal is...

John Trimbur (2004) makes an articulate case for knowing—and remembering—the realities of history and internationalism in “Keeping the World Safe for Class Struggle: Revolutionary Memory in a Post-Marxist Time.” For many reasons, not the least of which is the heartfelt way that it demonstrates how the global is also personal, Trimbur’s article stands as a model for compositionists. In it, Trimbur explains how, precisely because it is based in a critical, philosophical tradition, “Marxist revolutionary memory” continues to be a guiding force and persuasive, theoretical construct. Its vision is international and draws on the gains and strength of...

An international view of composition promotes rhetorical diversity. In an internationalist composition classroom, students are asked to learn about each other’s writing processes. For instance, when students from other countries take our classes, they are encouraged to talk about their home cultures and home languages, of course, but they are also asked to share how they write: what do they think about as they write, what are their resources, what are their inspirations? And when students from other countries do not take our classes, we have the same discussions. Difference does not need a passport. An internationalist composition classroom is...

We know next to nothing about Lao Tzu, the contemporary of Confucius who wrote the great guide to Taoist living, the Tao Te Ching. In it, Lao calls on readers to follow the Tao, or Way, the entering of the process of letting go of desires and negative impulses in order to enter into harmony with nature and life. According to the Tao, to live effectively is to live ethically, aware, without harming, without the need to control.

One does not have to read very far in Taoist literature, of course, to see the difference between Western rhetoric with its...

Because it is reminiscent of Aristotelian attempts at inclusive rhetorical categorization, readers will find echoes of the Western, Classical, rhetorical tradition in the writing of Taoist poet Sikong Tu (837–908 C.E.). In his Tang dynasty treatise, The Twenty-Four Styles of Poetry, Sikong catalogs style, from the “The Masculine and Vital Style” with its “potency and masculine strength” (1996, 25), to “The Flowing Style” which “takes in like a water mill / and turns like a pearl marble” (38).

But because Sikong’s text combines a categorical study of poetics with a philosophy of composing and living, Western readers will also...

The study of rhetoric inspires inner debates about one’s preparation and abilities. What does one need to study or know to approach the Confucian tradition? What can one know of the Arabic tradition of rhetoric? What if one does not read Arabic? Do we need to know the language of the other in order to understand its rhetoric? In one sense the answer to this last question is an easy “yes, we do.” After all, how can we hope to know another’s rhetoric without fully understanding their language, without knowing the historical and semantic nuances that inform authorial choices in...

I grew up in Johnstown, a small, depressed, mill town between the Mohawk Valley and the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York. Sixty years ago, it was filled with thriving leather mills and glove shops. Now, after years of economic erosion and cheaper labor costs overseas—NAFTA—only a few remain, and only a very few, more modern, smaller ones have begun production.

The class structure was always remarkably visible in Johnstown and its twin town, Gloversville, the setting of many of Richard Russo’s novels. The rich and the poor lived, after all, only a few blocks from each other....

I have revised EN 731: The Rhetorical Tradition and the Teaching of Writing many times during the course of my years of teaching at IUP. I call the newest version of the course “Rhetorical Traditions.” In keeping with the purpose of the graduate program in which I teach, I design the class for teacher-scholars. I structure the course around the idea that teachers of writing can meaningfully study rhetoric and its histories from various cultural perspectives in order to enlarge and deepen our sense of what a tradition of rhetoric is, how it is made, what it contains, and what...

In his introduction to Buddhism for social action, Interbeing: Fourteen Guidelines for Engaged Buddhism, Thich Nhat Hanh presents a series of mindfulness trainings anyone might practice in order to understand the ways that we inspire anger and cause suffering with our words and learn, as a result, ways for enacting and encouraging ethical living. Specifically, Hanh explores how communication can inspire happiness when we engage in caring dialogue with one another.

In Interbeing, Hanh also describes how our attachments to beliefs can lead to fanaticism. When this happens, we use language to resist or persuade others to our viewpoint. This...

The Russian psychologist, Fyodor Vasilyuk, explains how the conflicts that each of us faces in our lives can counteract the creative nature of our experience. We can lose, the “psychological possibility” (1988, 195) to act in a world that overwhelms us with either difficulty or ease (95–172). In either case, we may fail to face that which makes a situation “critical,” that is, the factors that require our creative efforts toward a solution. When that happens, Vasilyuk argues, we fail, as peculiar as it sounds, to experience life fully. We fail to work for solutions to mundane and world...

Rhetorical study is, in the constricted sense of what it means to do rhetorical study, formulaic. You begin by learning the various means—formulas—for persuasion: the kinds of speakers, audience, and discourses, and the ways for crafting persuasive confluences among the three. Rhetoric has formalism at its roots. And so, here’s my fear. It is clear that we compositionists could turn an interest in international composition studies into a search for new formalisms to apply to our classroom pedagogies. We could make various international rhetorical handbooks for what we might call African American rhetoric and writing, Asian American rhetoric...

There aren’t many textbook rhetorics presenting themselves as multicultural; Robert Cullen’s Rhetoric for a Multicultural America (1999) is one of them. We can say that Cullen deserves praise for his attempt to bring multiculturalism to rhetorical study and the composition classroom. But the problem is that even in this text Western rhetoric is the default rhetoric, the foundational rhetoric posited as the one that serves all. The result is that the text both homogenizes a people for cultural unity at the same time that it stresses the value of diversity.

And throughout, the impetus toward conformity is everywhere evident. For...

In the eighties, while we in composition were developing new pedagogical practices under the general categories of process and student-centeredness, our colleagues in literature were developing the theoretical implications of the ideas they were importing from Europe. They began the process of deconstructing the canon of received literature and critiquing its white, liberal, middle class, patriarchal nature. They theorized inherited models and, thinking about the author, interpretive practices and ideological texturing of the literary. They developed breakthrough methodologies for studying cultural objects that lay outside the traditional purview of literary studies. In other words, as we in composition turned our...

My late colleague, Patrick Hartwell, liked to acquire old composition textbooks. As he visited country rummage and yard sales and flea markets, he found great, old texts. From John Franklin Genung’s (1891) and Fred Newton Scott and Joseph Villiers Denney’s textbooks (1897, 1909), to rhetorics, such as Alexander Bain’s (1890), Pat collected history.

In Writing and Reality, James Berlin (1987) wrote that one can tell a lot about a society, including its history, by studying its rhetorics. Pat Hartwell knew this, too.

Now imagine a scenario in which a rhetorician of the future goes about the task of searching out...

In The Making of Meaning: Metaphors, Models, and Maxims for Writing Teachers, Ann Berthoff (1981) employs the work of critic I.A. Richards as a source for her epistemic, hermeneutic approach to rhetoric, and Charles

Sanders Pierce for her understanding of signification and the pragmatics of interpretation. And in Reason To Believe: Romanticism, Pragmatism, and the Teaching of Writing, Hepzibah Roskelly and Kate Ronald demonstrate

the value of claiming the uniquely American Philosophies—transcendentalism, and pragmatics—as sources for contemporary composition pedagogies. Doing so, they explain, rejuvenates our understanding of the relation of language to thought and action. Doing so can...

Change begins at home. If we educators are to teach for a world free of racism, a world where all nations cooperate to solve problems such as the climate crisis we face, we will need to learn how our teaching serves—or fails to serve—our nation, the state, and its citizens. Along the way, we will need to question some of our deepest held beliefs about the teaching of writing, and we may discover that what once stood as the sources and rationales for our teaching have become traps from which we now need to escape.

A healthier nation....

Anthony Smith draws a sharp distinction between nationalism, the ideology held by those trying to attain or maintain statehood, and feelings of “national sentiment,” or patriotism, that are shared by those who live in a country that has already achieved independent statehood (1971, 174–175). I value Smith’s distinction between a population that lives in an established state and a population that struggles to achieve and preserve statehood. Among other things, this delineation helps us to remember the difference between patriotism, in the sense of putting a flag on the lawn in front of one’s house, and revolutionary fervor, in...

In his landmark study, Nations and Nationalism, historian Ernest Gellner outlines the features he feels are necessary for the rise and maintenance of a modern nation. These essentials include power, which some in a nation’s population will have and some will not, and a shared culture, which is transmitted in several ways, not the least of which is through a system of education. Gellner describes education’s role in the circulation of culture this way:

The next element in the model is access to education or to a viable modern high culture (the two being treated as equivalent). The notion of...

As I reported in Part 1, “Cage: The Provincial Composition,” in The Decent Society, political theorist Avashai Margalit (1996) argues that when a nation’s agencies humiliate its citizens, these agencies denote an indecent society. I want to extend this definition here. When it has the power to do so, an indecent society will initiate economic policies that exploit and humiliate the citizens of developing nations as well. An indecent society will exercise what it claims to be its military options in the name of spreading a favorite “-ism,” whether it be democracy or religion or any ideology. When it does...

“Banal nationalism”—again, in Michael Billig’s terms—encourages us to prop up a single-minded version of elite culture in our composition classes. Banal nationalism calls on us to continue to inculcate a simplified version of a national culture in our students. Banal nationalism tells us that we are correct when we assume that Eurocentric culture is the source or foundation of pedagogy for college composition. Banal nationalism blinds us to the search for possibilities for answering today’s needs for broader and deeper cultural understandings. How many of us ever ask ourselves what Eurocentrism means beyond its status, depending on our...

The prejudices of the nation have become big business. Sedimented in our cultural values, American nationalism mingles as both motive and product—both economy and ideology. It circulates in what we make, acquire, sell, export, put on, ingest, and absorb, in our ideas about how “we” do business, in who “we” are, not to mention who every other right-thinking person in the world should want to be. And all through this process of cultural creation and sedimentation, nationalism infects even the higher motives of our lives. Through the conduit of culture, American nationalism is incorporated into our universities as lifestyle-product,...

Powerful national cultures have the impulse to disseminate themselves. So, what do we compositionists produce, under the logic of commercial production and consumption, for dissemination—for global export? I say, “Nothing.” “Nothing?” you ask. “Even in our global economy? Really? Nothing?” “Yes,” I reply, “really and literally, nothing.”

In The Globalization of Nothing, George Ritzer argues that the West has raised the dissemination of global consumerism to new levels of efficiency by developing the art of exporting nothing. By nothing, Ritzer means that we export “generally centrally conceived and controlled social forms that are comparatively devoid of distinctive content [author’s...

In order to construct pedagogies that resist racism, we need to understand our responses to others. The quest for this knowledge will take us to the origins of who we are. It is a journey through dark places where we confront truths about ourselves we might otherwise like to avoid. Julia Kristeva (1993a) maps the path in her collection, Nations Without Nationalism. Specifically, she explains how the origins of our racism can be found in the psychosexual processes of individuation where the unconscious processes that lead us to become ourselves also lead us to construct and maintain social commitments. Unfortunately,...

Greg Urban describes the effects of reading this way: “If you read a book you yourself have not written, culture carries over to you” (2001, 73). As we have seen, the concept of culture is hardly an inert, fixed entity or category, and neither is the ideology it serves—nationalism. The manifest of its contents and the itinerary of its course will depend on the theorist keeping track. For my analysis, the cultural content—the meaning, manner, style, thinking, emotions, and ideology—that is exchanged in the reading process affects the manner in which we compose.

This exchange is a...

In his ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound attempted a theory and method for the study of literature, though the book also contains a handful of “composition exercises” (1934, 64–65). The first half of the ABC of Reading is a compilation of criticism and writing assignments, a kind of guide for educators, whatever the types of literature or writing that they might teach. The composition exercises are mostly pedestrian, including such activities as having students exchange papers to identify and cut extraneous words in their writing. There are a few more interesting ideas, though, including having students exchange papers to...

My composition class begins with writers learning to look inward in order to articulate and interpret the many experiences of their lives and world, including one’s gender, loves, fears, and prejudices. The goal is to have students write a lot so as to become better artists of and activists in their own lives. And in this process they learn to address their worlds.

On the surface of it, my pedagogy looks simple. In fact, my first-year composition class consists of the following few assignments (all of which I explain below in subsequent sections):

1. A book manuscript (which later becomes)...

I assign no outside readings in my composition classes beyond the students’ writing and any forewords or other sources that the students choose to read for inspiration as they write their books or forewords. There are also no grammar lessons outside of the editing of the manuscripts that I do with students during individual conferences.

The class workshop takes the form of discussions about the students’ writing. On assigned days, a student distributes to each member of class a copy of one page from either the book or foreword they writing. This is done during the class immediately preceding the...

The majority of the students who enroll in my writing classes at Indiana University of Pennsylvania are European American, but many of my students are also African, Asian, Latin, or Native Americans, who come from cities like Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, or elsewhere, or even the neighboring countryside. Other students in my undergraduate classes come from other states and cities, from around the world, from Asia or Africa or the Middle East. They are, in other words, of different races and nationalities.

Over the years that I have been asking them to write books on what they are burning to tell the...

Several educators have explored the value of having students write and publish books as part of informed grade school, high school, and college curricula. Nancie Atwell (1987) has described ways for publishing school writing, including the important role that publishing plays in classroom student writing groups. Anne Wescott Dodd, Ellen Jo Ljung, Brenda Szedeli, and Sheryl L. Guth (1993) have discussed the crucial ways that publishing inspires students to see the social significance of their work. Janet Irby (1993) has explained how encouraging student publication can help to inspire the development of active, rather than passive, forms of subjectivity. Maria...

At midterm each semester, when the students hand in manuscripts their books, I distribute a copy of each student’s manuscript to someone else in the class. I then ask each student to write a foreword for the manuscript that they received. I have several reasons for doing this, but I especially want my student writers to see one of their colleagues read and take their writing seriously, to treat it as worthy of study, as writing that presents issues over which students can connect, discuss, research, and establish some sort of affiliation—though these are not always easy to do....

As any writer knows, and as many others such as Marian Mohr (1984) and Morris Young (2004) have argued in various ways and from different perspectives, one of the challenges a compositionist must face is how to encourage students to revisit, re-see, and revise their work.

As I stated above, at points in the semester I ask students to consider their work in light of a principle from a rhetorical tradition other than the Eurocentric. One semester, in one of the first sessions of my composition class, when the students were just starting to write their books, I took a...

One semester, I asked my first-year composition students to reconsider their books in light of the principles of communication that Thich Nhat Hanh (1998) discusses in Interbeing. Specifically, I asked my students to consider the ways in which their books inspired anger and suffering, or peace and healing; whether they facilitated or closed down communication between themselves and others.

Many of my students must have seen that facilitating or opening communication meant forgiving someone they were writing about, especially when the person caused them pain. It was not always easy for them. As one student wrote, “My baby cousin was...

When we compose we look to others: for words, but also for orientations to still other words that we get from conversations, from media, and from the books on our shelves and on the shelves of libraries. We look for rhetorical inspiration and strategies. We can help students learn this important lesson.

At a couple of points during the semester, I ask my students to write about a time when they learned something about writing by watching another student or hearing them talk about their writing, or by reading something that another student wrote in response to one of their...

Graduate students, like their professors, sometimes bring and give voice to the malignant side effects of nationalism in class. As I described in Part 1, “Cage: The Provincial Composition,” I teach a class called Rhetorical Traditions. Mostly the class sessions are filled with exciting and insightful discussions with teachers from around the world, but there have been moments in my classes’ study of various rhetorical perspectives where a student will say something that I wish I had not heard. I am thinking this moment of one class session where we were discussing Harriet Malinowitz’s Textual Orientations (1995) and an Arab...

In 2005, I taught an advanced doctoral seminar in literacy studies. The topic I chose for the class was “Rhetoric and Poetics.” The fifteen students who took the class were educators from the United States and countries located across Asia and the Middle East.

We began each night’s weekly session sitting in a circle, gathered around the teacher’s desk, on which students arranged whatever food they brought to class to share during that night’s session. Often the food reflected the students’ home cultures so that the sharing had particular significance for all of us—as did the discussions. Anyone who...

In fall 2009, I taught another doctoral seminar in literacy. The topic the class was “Writing and the Sustainability Crisis.” I asked my students to study global climate change and to imagine together possibilities teaching literacy in the face of it. My thinking was that as biospheric degradation continues and populations come under greater and greater stress, the impacts on human being and human relations will escalate. In this challenging future, I argue, the processes of meaning making available to we humans will become more and more critical to our as we search for meaning amidst crisis. In this regard,...

Ezra Pound’s Cantos constitutes a large collection of poems—some seemingly in bits and pieces—that do not quite come together. Pound knew it. He believed that he had failed, that The Cantos did not deliver a center, a frame, a realized form. One sees intimations of such dark realizations in the earlier Pisan Cantos: Pound’s recognition of his shortcomings, his inabilities, his illness, as if he were writing of his own failure when he wrote of “a man on whom the sun has gone the down” (1970, 430).

Allen Ginsberg met Pound late in the elder poet’s life. As...

I admire all teachers of writing, but especially those who commit themselves to studying the traditions of rhetoric and poetics from cultures and countries other than their own. I admire teachers who learn about philosophies and religions and create visions of life without ethnic and racial prejudice. I admire teachers who open themselves to others with intelligence and humility and generosity and a willingness of spirit to learn and change as they explore the international nature of composing. We have barely begun to ask the most challenging research questions. If we continue to work for it, we can articulate new...

The many journals and books I have cited throughout the course of National Healing prove that there are ample opportunities for doing and sharing internationalist work in composition. Indeed, we need to continue to disseminate information on how we do our work, what our philosophical, theoretical, and political sources are, and what our pedagogies are—in short, how we write and teach writing, wherever that may be.

Here, I would just like to point to a couple of important, related sources. Certainly The Journal of Second Language Writing is widely known to compositionists, but there are other relevant journals, as...

As poet Gerrit Lansing writes in “La p(l) age poetique”:

Poetics will be planetary or not at all (hommage á Andre Breton):

its data and resource are unrestricted by any “tradition.”

The word of sin was always Restriction, and, in the bondage-scene of verse, was always, at its best, high play (game of Decorum, the keeping, the conventions apt to some local time-crystal).

The dead hand, or confusion of times, was ever to take the living rules of one historical moment and try to fasten them down on another time. Pseudomorphosis. The restricted notion of “form” never furthers.

(Lansing 2003,...

Maybe we compositionists will be wise and lucky enough to save our writing classes from administrative mishandlings and the budgetary axes that will continue to swing as the boney fingers of the international economic crisis, those who caused it, and those who benefit from it, continue to tighten their grip on our colleges. But, of course, the future is anything but certain. With the erosion of the traditional justifications for the humanities, we compositionists have watched as literature has lost support for the offering of its various period and genre courses. The traditional rationale for composition, our service role, may...

It’s another New Orleans morning. A man and a woman sit at a nearby table. A woman comes into the coffee shop and approaches them. The man stands up, gives her a hug and introduces her to the woman with whom he is sitting, “This is my daughter.”

“Oh,” the sitting woman says with a laugh as she shakes hands with the daughter, “No wonder there are tears in your eyes!”

All three laugh and the daughter responds, “No, I’ve earned these tears all by myself. They are my own.”

They do not laugh this time.

The daughter sits down...