In Defense of Reading Badly: The Politics of Identification in “Benito Cereno,” Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Our Classroom

Faye Halpern

Traditionally, we English faculty have warned our students against simply identifying with a literary work’s characters. For us, such attachments constitute “reading badly.” But we engage in identifications, too, including ones with the work’s author. A consideration of critical responses to “Benito Cereno” and Uncle Tom’s Cabin enables us to see how our own identifications often operate. In our teaching of reading, we should openly acknowledge our own commitments and help our students negotiate them.

Thinking Globally, Teaching Locally: The “Nervous Conditions” of Cross-Cultural Literacy
Lisa Eck

Teaching postcolonial literature to American college students involves taking them through a dialectical process of thinking about identification.  In the first stage, students are encouraged to note similarities between their own lives and those of the work’s characters.  With the second step, students examine how the work’s cultural and historical context makes the characters different in key ways from them.  Finally, students use the differences they have found to reflect on aspects of their own situations from a new angle.  The author demonstrates this process through a discussion of her experiences teaching Tsitsi Dangarembga’s 1988 novel Nervous Conditions.

Texts of Our Institutional Lives: Studying the “Reading Transition” from High School to College: What Are Our Students Reading and Why?

Allison Harl and David A. Jolliffe

The authors discuss a survey of reading practices that they administered to students at their home institution, the University of Arkansas, as well as logs that students at the school kept of their daily reading acts. An important finding was that, contrary to possible belief, students at this university are reading quite a bit, though they are not spending much time on materials assigned in their courses. The authors propose some methods for boosting students’ interest in academic texts, and they call for other institutions to conduct similar studies.

Opinion: Measuring “Success” at Open Admissions Institutions: Thinking Carefully About This Complex Question

Patrick Sullivan

The author examines surveys indicating that in general, community college students are significantly less inclined and able than students at four-year colleges are to earn a bachelor’s degree.  He argues that it is important for teachers of English to understand the numerous conditions that limit the first group’s chances for such “success.”

Review: A Massive Failure of Imagination

Kurt Spellmeyer

Reviewed is Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life by Anthony T. Kronman.

Transnational Feminist Rhetorics in a Digital World

Mary Queen

Despite the important work emerging from both the global and digital turn in rhetoric and composition studies, one key area has yet to be examined: the central role that the circulation of digital texts plays in the transformation and appropriation of feminist discourse. This article proposes a new methodology for analyzing the processes through which the global circulation of digital representations become rhetorical and, ultimately, political actions. Feminist rhetorical studies must extend its analyses to examine how the modes of digital circulation matter in the mediation of relations among groups, communities, and nations because this digital circulation often constructs and reinforces binary oppositions and rhetorics of superiority.

Linking Transnational Logics: A Feminist Rhetorical Analysis of Public Policy Networks
Rebecca Dingo

Links among the World Bank’s gender-mainstreaming policies and recent U.S. welfare policies demonstrate how transnationalism enables international gendered logics to become national (and international) norms. The metaphor of the network helps feminist rhetoricians to expose how transnational linkages shape domestic and international policies by articulating the complex relationships among gendered logics, power, and occasion.

Pleasurable Pedagogies: Reading Lolita in Tehran and the Rhetoric of Empathy
Theresa A. Kulbaga

This essay examines Azar Nafisi’s bestselling memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), in the context of U.S. book club culture. It argues that the memoir appeals to U.S. audiences by mobilizing a neoliberal rhetoric and pedagogy of empathy that positions the U.S. as the geopolitical center of feminist empowerment and human rights.

Response: A World of Difference
Deepika Bahri

The author responds to the editors’ introduction as well as to the articles by Queen, Dingo, and Kulbaga, emphasizing that feminists need to relate theories of rhetoric to theories of transnationalism if both areas of thought are to be useful.

Review: Knowledge Making Within Transnational Connectivities
Min-Zhan Lu

Reviewed is Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms by Inderpal Grewal.