An “ever-increasing number of excellent books now competing for an ever­decreasing number of pages allocated to reviews in our journals “is a problem we all ought to think about more that we do,” contends former JAC Book Review Editor Fred Reynolds in his “Parting Comments and Concerns” (597-98). Why devote scarce review space, then, to Composition Theory for the Postmodern Classroom (CTPC), a self described “collection of the most outstanding articles published in the Journal of Advanced Composition over the last decade?” After all, subscribers to JAC (since 1987, at least) can more or less easily locate all twenty-two of these articles in their bookshelves. Moreover, many of the articles have made their way into coursepaks we JAC readers put together for our graduate courses, and several have provided springboards for our own articles, as a cursory glance at the works cited in recent editions of JAC reveals. Why devote scarce review space, then, to persuade JAC readers to reacquaint themselves with the familiar?

Jacqueline Jones Royster provides one good reason in her Foreword to the collection. She points out that CTPC appears at a critical moment, a lull in the storm in the field of rhetoric and composition, and encourages us to seize this occasion to revisit these historically situated “conversations” not just to see where we have been but to “refocus what we see, how we see it, why we see it as we do, and perhaps most of all, what we can do with ourselves as teachers, scholars, and students once we do acquire vision.”

In the Afterword, Linda Brodkey offers another reason for JAC readers to reacquaint themselves with essays in the collection, especially when one considers her remarks about “the turn to theory in composition” vis-à-vis Donald Lazere’s in his review of Into the Field and The Power of Literacy in JAC 15.1.While Brodkey contends that compositionists value theory for “what it can tell them about writing and writing pedagogy,” Lazere asserts that theoretical discourse is incomprehensible to masses of teachers and students. Moreover, Lazere continues, “the worst consequence of the profession’s surrender to poststructuralist theory and lingo is that it has allowed us all to be turned into a punching bag by political right wingers, who have thus been able to falsely claim the high ground as champions of clear writing and intellectual common sense” (177’). Has “doing theory” become a “substitute for teaching writing,” as Lazere suggests (177)? Is the turn toward theory a “desire above all for a little common sense,” as Bdodkey argues? (Re)reading the essays in CTPC might provide readers of JAC, the journal most associated with theory in the field of rhetoric and composition, with the beginnings of a response.

Not only do I strongly recommend CTPC for the opportunity it gives JAC readers to assess where the field of composition and rhetoric has been and here we might want to take it in the future, I strongly recommend it for use in graduate courses in composition theory. As editors Gary A. Olson and Sidney I. Dobrin note in their Introduction, the twenty-two articles represent the breadth and strength of composition scholarship that has engaged fruitfully with critical theory in its many manifestation over the last decade. The voices in this collection are varied, ranging from such prominent figures in the field of rhetoric and composition as James Kinneavy and W. Ross Winterowd, to J. Hillis Miller and Henry Giroux, to graduate students. And while the decade represented in the collection is a telescoped one (the earliest original date of publication is 1987), one article (Michael Murphy’s) provides a brief history of the field over the last twenty-five years. The index reveals that the discourses of philosophy, feminism, and literary and cultural theory have provided particularly fruitful engagements for composition scholars, and philosophers Aristotle, Plato, and Jacques Derrida join Kenneth Bruffee and Paulo Freire as the most frequently cited authorities.

CTPC organizes its wide range of voices and topics into five sections: The Process of Writing; Theory and the Teaching of Writing; The Essay and Composition Theory; Gender, Culture, and Radical Pedagogy,; and Rhetoric, Philosophy, and Discourse. All four essays in the first section engage discourses from other fields to complicate the notion of process pedagogy, and appropriately, the first voice heard is James Kinneavey’s. His “The Process of Writing: A Philosophical Base in Hermeneutics” (the earliest piece in the collection), opens with a sketch of the field of rhetoric and composition in 1987, depicting it in the midst of what were “probably the two most important innovations in the past ten years, writing across the curriculum and the process method of teaching composition.” Kinneavy draws on Martin Heidegger’s concept of interpretation, especially his concept of “forestructure” to argue for “a more flexible, more recursive, more exploratory, and especially more pluralistic view of the writing process” than the one afloat in the journals in the mid-1980s. Two essays that won the Kinneavy Award for the most outstanding article published in JAC follow: Jasper Neel’s “Dichotomy, Consubstantiality, Technical Writing, Literary Theory: The Double Orthodox Curse” (1992) and Patricia A. Sullivan’s “Writing in the Graduate Curriculum: Literary Criticism as Composition” (1991). Neel borrows notions of writing from ancient Greece to show that the act of technical writing and its pedagogy differ profoundly from those of literary criticism. In addition, he points out the need for some sort of Rogerian argument among professors of both fields. Neel concludes, however, with this query: “If technological writing teachers attempt some sort of rapprochement (Rogerian or otherwise), will there be anyone to talk with?” In a piece that complements Kinneavey’s, Sullivan demonstrates that while the undergraduate writing curriculum has been transformed by developments in process theory, the graduate curriculum, with its text-oriented pedagogies of reading and writing, perpetuates “the very models of inquiry and teaching that contemporary theories of reading and writing seek to displace at all levels of the English curriculum.” Mary Kupiec Cayton’s essay on women and writing-blocks closes this section, cautioning scholars that exclusively cognitive or expressive approaches to process often mask the difficulties women experience when negotiating the conventions of academic discourse.

The four essays collected in Part Two suggest ways in which the theory and practice of writing intersect. In “Some Difficulties with Collaborative Learning,” David Smit urges teachers of writing to critically examine the assumptions and evidence of the “truly eclectic body of theory” (“much of it not directly related to composition at all”) upon which theories of collabo­rative learning and collaborative writing are based before adopting these practices in their classrooms. Reed Way Dasenbrock’s “Becoming Aware of the Myth of Presence” and Sandy Moore and Michael Kleine’s “Toward an Ethics of Teaching Writing in a Hazardous Context—The University” that follow forever changed the way I teach writing. Dasenbrock’s award-winning essay employs Derrida’s critique of presence to demonstrate that writing teacher over-emphasis on the similarities between speaking and writing helps to explain why students run into so many different kinds of problems creating coherent written texts; it concludes with practical suggestions that I have borrowed successfully to help students move from notions of presence to absence. Moore and Kleine’s essay presents a chilling reminder that the writing classroom is not always a safe place to practice rhetorical skills; it has convinced me to warn my students of the possible consequences of practicing free speech in the writing classroom. Finally, Thomas Fox attempts to reposition the profession by encouraging writing teachers of all backgrounds to look to Afro-American literary theory for strategies of reading andwriting that can transform their pedagogies to meet the needs of African American students.

The three essays that comprise Part Three are among my favorites, and this section would be one of the first I would assign in my practicum for graduate assistants. Here, Douglas Hesse’s “The Recent Rise of Literary Nonfiction: A Cautionary Assay” curiously placed between W. Ross Winterowd’s “Rediscovering the Essay” and Lynn Bloom’s “Why Don’t We Write What We Teach? And Publish It?” responds to Winterowd’s and Bloom’s arguments for making literary nonfiction central to composition pedagogy. While Winterowd argues that students have “the right to explore themselves and their worlds” in Didion-like informal essays, Hesse cautions that the quality of these students’ exploratory essays will be determined by comparisons to previously written exploratory essays. And while I find Bloom’s lighter, sometimes humorous, tone a respite from the journalese found in some other pieces, I likewise agree with Hesse’s contention that Bloom’s call for students to find their own voices risks reinforcing in students a questionably romantic [and narrow] view of writing.

The fourth and largest section of CTPC engages the most widely dis­cussed issues and theorists in the field of rhetoric and composition over the last decade. The first two articles, David Bleich’s “Sexism in Academic Styles of Learning” and Robert Wood’s “The Dialectical Suppression of Feminist Thought in Radical Pedagogy” examine the sciences, social sciences, human­ities and radical pedagogy to show, in Bleich’s case, that “discourse styles and classroom styles in the academy are affected, in far too great a degree, by values of classical sexism” and in Wood’s, that the “epistemologies [Lacan’s and Beauvoir’s for example] that govern the linguistic and dialogic systems in which transcendence is supposed to take place are totalizing in their male dominance,” thus suppressing feminist thought. Giroux and Murphy follow with analyses of the appropriation of Freire’s theories by radical educators. Giroux contends that Freire’s work has been appropriated in ways that denude it of some of its most important political insight thereby “reimposing the discourse and practice of cultural hegemony.” Murphy, in his Kinneavy award-winning piece, argues that James Berlin’s “deployment of a ‘social­epistemic rhetoric”’ leads him to “an espousal of a kind of happy Freireanism (the circle-up-the-desks-progressivist idyll),” thereby making students “impotent in the larger economy of cultural politics.” Readers whose composition classrooms combine cultural studies with writing instruction will find Joseph Harris’s “The Other Reader” one of the most useful and practical essays in CTPC. He briefly describes assignments that he has used (and I have borrowed with good effect) “to offer students some chances to work with and through a number of ways of reading our culture, and, in doing so, to begin to define their own places in it.” John Trimbur’s reading of Mike Rose’s Lives on the Boundary that follows links up with Harris’s discussion of reading. Trimbur sees Lives as a “conventionalized and formulaic coming of age narrative” that takes a different turn, leaving its subject on the boundaries of society rather than securely ensconced within it. Carrie Leverenz’s closing piece, like Fox’s essay discussed earlier, looks at writing in a multicultural classroom. Leverenz examines peer responses in a course entitled African­American Voices in Literature: Intermediate Essay Writing. She concludes that teachers and students alike will need a great deal of luck in meeting the challenges of the multicultural classroom.

Rhetoric, Philosophy, and Discourse, the final section of the collection, records the engagement of compositionists with the critical discourses of philosophers and discourse theorists. J. Hillis Miller, whose interest in composition studies has engendered critical responses in recent issues of JAC, opens this section. He uses Friedreich Nietzsche’s early writings in rhetoric to demonstrate the close ties between reading and writing. Thomas Kent employs philosopher Donald Davidson’s theory of communicative interaction to challenge compositionists to drop their current process-oriented vocabulary. In “Interrupting the Conversation: The Constructionist Dialogue in Composition,” Joseph Petraglia looks at the premises of social constructionism from the perspective of one who has found them wanting, concluding that a constructionist dialogue that ignores its critics is destined to become sterile. Finally, Richard Coe offers an explanation of Kenneth Burke’s definition of “humanity” in order to “ground our teaching of composition in some understanding of Burke’s critical insight.”

And there they are: the twenty-two articles that represent the best of JAC over the last decade. This is one of the most ambitious and important of the collections recently published in the field of composition studies. It belongs on the shelves of all composition scholars, teachers of writing, and students of composition theory alike.