Composition, Literacy, and Culture
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Series Editors: Aja Martinez, University of North Texas and Stacey Waite, University of Nebraska

The Composition, Literacy, and Culture series was established in 1989. It publishes in composition and rhetoric, literacy, and culture; in the history of writing, reading, and instructional practice; the construction of literacy and letters; and the relations between language and gender, ethnicity, race, or class. The goal of the series is to bring together scholarship that crosses traditional boundaries.

Swarms, Viral Writing, and the Local

Rhetoric and Social Dynamics across Networked Publics
Format: Hardback
Pages: 424
ISBN: 9780822947950
Pub Date: 22 Oct 2024
Description:
A new addition to the University of Pittsburgh Press Composition, Literacy, and Culture series.
Literacies of/from the Pluriversal Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 200
ISBN: 9780822947295
Pub Date: 10 Jun 2024
Description:
Decolonial projects can end up reinforcing dominant modes of thinking by shoehorning understandings of Indigenous and non-Western traditions within Eurocentric frameworks. The pluralization of literacies and the creation of so-called alternative rhetorics accepts that there is a totalizing reality of rhetoric and literacy. This volume seeks to decenter these theories and to engage Indigenous contexts on their own terms, starting with the very tools of representation.
Sensitive Rhetorics Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 152
ISBN: 9780822948117
Pub Date: 10 Jun 2024
Description:
Claims that students are too sensitive are familiar on and around college campuses. The ideas of cancel culture, safe spaces, and political correctness are used to shut down discussion and prevent students from being recognized as stakeholders in higher education and as advocates for their own interests. Further, universities can claim that student activists threaten academic freedom.
Rhet Ops Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 272
ISBN: 9780822967149
Pub Date: 30 Apr 2024
Description:
In this edited volume, authors seek to document and analyze how state and non-state actors leverage digital rhetoric as a twenty-first-century weapon of war. Rhet Ops offer readers a chance to focus on the human dimension of rhetorical practice within mobile technologies and social networks: to reflect not only on the durable question of what it means to conduct oneself ethically as a speaker or writer, but also what it means to learn the art of rhetoric as a means to engage adversaries in war and conflict.
Unorganized Women Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 232
ISBN: 9780822947554
Pub Date: 06 Feb 2024
Description:
Across a range of industrial, domestic, and agricultural sites, Greer shows how repetitive discursive performances served as rhetorical tools as women workers sought to rescript power relations in their workplaces and to resist narratives about their laboring lives. The case studies reveal noteworthy patterns in how these women’s words helped to construct the complex web of class relations in which they were enmeshed. Rather than a teleological narrative of economic empowerment over the course of a century, Unorganized Women speaks to the enduring obstacles low- and no-wage women face, their creativity and resilience in the face of adversity, and the challenges that impede the creation of meaningful coalitions.
Changing Minds Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 248
ISBN: 9780822947974
Pub Date: 31 Jan 2024
Description:
In Changing Minds: Women and the Political Essay, 1960–2000, Ann Jurečič documents the work of five paradigm-shifting essayists who transformed American thought about urgent political issues. Rachel Carson linked science and art to explain how pesticides threatened the Earth’s ecosystems. Hannah Arendt redefined “evil” for a secular age after Eichmann was tried in Jerusalem.
Making the World a Better Place Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 384
ISBN: 9780822967064
Pub Date: 31 Jan 2024
Description:
In Making the World a Better Place, Royster argues that African American women must be taken seriously as historical actors who were more consistently and more variously engaged in community—and nation-building than they have been given credit for. Their considerable rhetorical expertise becomes evident when looking carefully at their work in terms of identity, agency, authority, and expressiveness. Their writings constitute a substantial artifactual record of their levels of engagement, their excellence in sociopolitical work, and the legacies of leadership and action.
Writing and Desire Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 280
ISBN: 9780822947776
Pub Date: 31 Jan 2024
Description:
Writing and Desire is a sustained, multimovement exploration of how writers, particularly queer writers, think and feel through desire as central to their writing practice. In a time of political, social, global, and ecological unrest, how might we understand desire - the desire for things to be different, the desire for a better world - as a crucial dimension of contemporary human experience? What might such a recentering of desire offer us, personally and politically?
Kairotic Inspiration Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 194
ISBN: 9780822947509
Pub Date: 06 Dec 2022
Description:
On the precipice of the Sixth Extinction, we face a frightening fate - ongoing ecological crises that may result in not only the extinction of a million species within decades but another mass extinction event like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. In Kairotic Inspiration: Imagining the Future in the Sixth Extinction, Sarah Allen suggests that humans face this future, whatever it brings, by attending to the ways in which all beings are caught in the entangled processes of becoming. But change is often painful and requires inspiration.
What it Means to Be Literate Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 188
ISBN: 9780822947233
Pub Date: 06 Dec 2022
Description:
Disability and literacy are often understood as incompatible. Disability is taken to be a sign of illiteracy, and illiteracy to be a sign of disability. These oppositions generate damaging consequences for disabled students (and those labeled as such) who are denied full literacy education and for nonliterate adults who are perceived as lacking intelligence, knowledge, and ability.
Teaching Black Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 264
ISBN: 9780822946953
Pub Date: 28 May 2022
Description:
Teaching Black: The Craft of Teaching Black Life and Literature presents the experiences and voices of Black creative writers who are also teachers. The authors presented here write and teach across a variety of genres and at numerous intersections, including writers of poetry, fiction, experimental fiction, playwriting, and also from creative writers who are engaged in literary studies and criticism. Contributors from this book provide practical advice, engage with historical and theoretical questions about teaching in classrooms, workshops, and community settings.
Like What We Imagine Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 304
ISBN: 9780822946724
Pub Date: 28 Dec 2021
Illustrations: 20 b&w illustrations
Description:
David Bartholomae has been a prominent figure in the field of composition and rhetoric for almost five decades. Throughout his career, his focus has always been on teaching, writing, and the teaching of writing. These essays, written over the past dozen years, are arranged and unified by a thread that connects some of the books and ideas, people and places, students and courses that have shaped and sustained his work as a teacher of writing.
Composition and Big Data Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 328
ISBN: 9780822946748
Pub Date: 28 Dec 2021
Illustrations: 75 b&w illustrations
Description:
Everything is data. And as large-scale aggregation and computational analysis of data become more common and manageable, it becomes more important to rhetoric and composition. It is increasingly possible to examine thousands of documents and peer-review comments, labor-hours, and citation networks in composition courses and beyond.
Ethics and Representation in Feminist Rhetorical Inquiry Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 256
ISBN: 9780822946731
Pub Date: 28 Dec 2021
Illustrations: 10 b&w illustrations
Description:
The historiography of feminist rhetorical research raises ethical questions about whose stories are told and how. Women and other marginalized people have been excluded historically from many formal institutions, and researchers in this field often turn to alternative archives to explore how women have used writing and rhetoric to participate in civic life, share their lived experiences, and effect change. Such methods may lead to innovation in documenting practices that took place in local, grass-roots settings.
Authentic Writing Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 240
ISBN: 9780822946700
Pub Date: 05 Aug 2021
Illustrations: 27 b&w photos
Description:
In typical academic circles, texts must be critiqued, mined for the obfuscated meanings they hide, and shown to reveal larger, broader meanings than what are initially evident. To engage in this type of writing is to perform an authentic version of scholarship. But what if a scholar chooses instead to write without critique?