The literacy narrative can make a unique contribution to composition studies, illustrating both how our culture inhibits literacy and how people overcome difficult obstacles in learning to read and write. Literacy narratives highlight for writing teachers the life les- sons that have advanced people toward their literacy goals. These stories are often about the struggle for and triumph of confidence. Correspondingly, as a pedagogical tool, reading and writing literacy narratives may serve to build confidence in some of our least comfortable students. However, literacy narratives can present obstacles to school literacy as well. Some students are likely to have difficulty identifying with the narrators. Furthermore, when its characteristic values and conventions conflict with a student's cultural orality, the genre can have an alienating effect. This article discusses the advantages and disadvantages of using literacy narratives in the writing classroom. My intention is to provide an overview of how well literacy narratives can help students overcome cultural obstacles to writing in college. Scholars devoted to multicultural education have made it their project to promote pedagogies that account for and appreciate the differences among those in the classroom. Students arrive on campus with many perceptions of how they differ from the school community. In particular, students may feel that their familiar use of language will not be valued by college professors. Pedagogies influenced by multicultural studies would ideally relieve this alienation by making students see how their differences fit into the course work. This attention to the student's perceived position in relation to the academic realm suggests that the beginning point for teaching is next to the student. Bonnie Lisle and Sandra Mano, in their vision of a multicultural rhetoric, argue that students should be given opportunities to write about their cultural heritages and identities to make them feel more comfortable writing in a college setting (21). Unavoidably, students must develop their "academic voices" out of the identities they bring with them to college;

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Literacy Narratives and Confidence Building in the Writing Classroom

This groundbreaking study examines the vexed and unstable relations between the eighteenth-century novel and the material world. Rather than exploring dress's transformative potential, it charts the novel's vibrant engagement with ordinary clothes in its bid to establish new ways of articulating identity and market itself as a durable genre. In a world in which print culture and textile manufacturing traded technologies, and paper was made of rags, the novel, by contrast, resisted the rhetorical and aesthetic links between dress and expression, style and sentiment. Chloe Wigston Smith shows how fiction exploited women's work with clothing - through stealing, sex work, service, stitching, and the stage - in order to revise and reshape material culture within its pages. Her book explores a diverse group of authors, including Jane Barker, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, John Cleland, Frances Burney and Mary Robinson.

Women, Work, and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel

The Victorian Pulpit: Spoken and Written Sermons in Nineteenth-Century Britain

The assassination of President John F Kennedy in 1963 and the terrorist attacks of 9/11 are two events that scarred America and its people In the aftermath of the assassination and the terrorist attacks, the American public was forced to sift through competing messages existing in the public sphere in order to make meaning out of the events Although the American government, within a few days of both events, released who was ultimately responsible (Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy and Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda were responsible for 9/11), the people were still left with coming to terms for why such violence occurred In order to provide a frame from which the American people could view and understand the assassination and the terrorist attacks, two blue ribbon commissions were formed: the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination of President Kennedy, and the 9/11 Commission, which investigated the terrorist attacks Despite the reports‘ purposes, significant segments of the population questioned both Commissions‘ conclusions In both instances, conspiratorial understandings of the events grew after the publication of the reports so that, in the case of the Warren Commission, most of the American public believe Oswald did not act alone and, in the case of the 9/11 Commission, there is growing belief that the government‘s failure to predict and prevent the terrorist attacks was the result of a governmental conspiracy This dissertation seeks to understand why, in our current times, official discourses are unable to prevail over conspiracy theories This study proposes to illustrate the power of conspiracy discourse by examining it through the lens of official discourses that were designed, in part, to head-off conspiracy beliefs before they gained momentum within the American public Such an inquiry will provide three main benefits: it will contribute to a more exacting understanding of the rhetorical power of conspiracy arguments in our times; it will provide insight into the relationship between official and conspiracy discourses (especially as they now exist); and, such a study has implications for determining the current direction of political life INDEX WORDS: Rhetoric, Conspiracy theory, Official discourse, Paranoid style, Authority, Indeterminacy THE PARANOID STYLE IN AN AGE OF SUSPICION: CONSPIRACY THINKING AND OFFICIAL RHETORIC IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICA

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The paranoid style in an age of suspicion: Conspiracy thinking and official rhetoric in contemporary America

A healthy public sphere is necessary for a healthy democracy. While most
diagnoses currently point to an ailing public sphere, we currently have
very little empirical information about the functioning of this discursive
realm. To enhance our empirical understanding, the present essay analyzes
discussions from nationwide focus groups and argues that the major ailment
confronting the public sphere is the predominance of egocentric arguments.

Egocentric Argument and the Public Sphere: Citizen Deliberations on Public Policy and Policymakers

Hugh Blair, George Campbell, and Richard Whately, whose works were first published in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, constituted the great triumvirate of British Rhetoricians. For 20 years, earlier printings of this book, which contains substantial excerpts comprising the most significant portions of their writings, have been widely used as textbooks in history-of-rhetoric courses. An increasing interest in rhetoric at the college level has created a renewed demand for reprints of such classic primary texts.The Preface places the three rhetoricians within the context of the rhetorical tradition, which began in 5th-century BCE Greece. The bibliographies have been updated to include 20th-century scholarly work on Blair, Campbell, and Whately, and on the 18th- and 19th-century rhetorical movement. Biographical sketches of Blair, Campbell, and Whately are also provided.

James L. Golden

Papers

The Rhetoric of Blair, Campbell, and Whately