Communication, Media, and Arts Faculty Book and Book Chapters

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  Creative Approaches to Writing Center Work (Research and Teaching in Rhetoric and Composition)

  Kevin Dvorak and Shanti Bruce

  This is the first book length attempt to address the role creativity plays in writing centers. Beginning with the premise that creativity has the potential to make work and learning environments more productive - and possibly more dangerous - the ideals in this collection will complicate visions of what writing centers can and should be. Striking a balance between theory and practice, readers will learn about creative tutor training and staff meeting activities, how to use toys to tutor and how to tutor creative writers, and, finally, how to implement creative outreach programs. Those who are in search of ways to infuse their centers with creativity and fun will find this book to be an invaluable, inspirational resource.

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  Writing Students Should Write about Advertisements

  Claire E. Lutkewitte

  This professional development guide offers insights and strategies about using pop culture in the first year writing classroom. The edited volume includes essays by instructors who share details of their most effective class ideas and writing assignments. It is a resource for new teachers and for those interested in incorporating popular culture into their writing courses.

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  Cooking the Books: Jewish Cuisine and the Commodification of Difference

  Eric Mason

  Edible Ideologies argues that representations of food—in literature and popular fiction, cookbooks and travel guides, war propaganda, women’s magazines, television and print advertisements—are not just about nourishment or pleasure. Contributors explore how these various modes of representation, reflecting prevailing attitudes and assumptions about food and food practices, function instead to circulate and transgress dominant cultural ideologies. Addressing questions concerning whose interests are served by a particular food practice or habit and what political ends are fulfilled by the historical changes that lead from one practice to another in Western culture, the essays offer a rich historical narrative that moves from the construction of the nineteenth-century English gentleman to the creation of two of today’s iconic figures in food culture, Julia Child and Martha Stewart. Along the way, readers will encounter World War I propaganda, holocaust and Sephardic cookbooks, the Rosenbergs, German tour guides, fast food advertising, food packaging, and chocolate, and will find food for thought on the meanings of everything from camembert to Velveeta, from salads to burgers, and from tikka masala to Campbell’s soup.

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  “Her very phrases”: Exploiting the Metaphysics of Presence in Twelfth Night

  Eric Mason

  This chapter argues that, in addition to the favoring of speech over writing, "many other hidden sediments cling" to the "metaphysico-theological roots" of the metaphysics of presence, including the ideological commitments related to gender that are active in William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Malvolio's misreading of the letter as being written in "her hand" and containing "her very phrases" demonstrates how easily men can "secure the fictions of masculinity and authorial voice by excluding female bodies and voices". The metaphysics of presence is founded on the observation that "in oral communication, the speaker is present to an audience, and, according to the tradition, the presence assures full, unmediated communication; writing, in contrast, is seen as secondary to speech". The oral nature of the fantasies is intimately connected to the dominance of the metaphysics of presence, which establishes public speech as the paradigm for the authority to "do things with words."

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  Examining Writing Center Director-Assistant Director Relationships

  Kevin Dvorak and Ben Rafoth

  The Writing Center Director's Resource Book has been developed to serve as a guide to writing center professionals in carrying out their various roles, duties, and responsibilities. It is a resource for those whose jobs not only encompass a wide range of tasks but also require a broad knowledge of multiple issues.
  
  The volume provides information on the most significant areas of writing center work that writing center professionals--both new and seasoned--are likely to encounter. It is structured for use in diverse institutional settings, providing both current knowledge as well as case studies of specific settings that represent the types of challenges and possible outcomes writing center professionals may experience. This blend of theory with actual practice provides a multi-dimensional view of writing center work.
  
  
  In the end, this book serves not only as a resource but also as a guide to future directions for the writing center, which will continue to evolve in response to a myriad of new challenges that will lie ahead.