8.0373 COnference: Rhetoric and Composition (1/204)
Elaine Brennan (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Wed, 8 Mar 1995 23:35:18 EST
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 8, No. 0373. Wednesday, 8 Mar 1995.
Date: Wed, 8 Mar 95 09:49 EST
From: "Tom Benson 814-865-4201" <T3B@PSUVM.PSU.EDU>
Subject: Penn State Conference on Rhetoric and Composition
The Penn State Conference on Rhetoric and Composition
July 12-15, 1995
The Penn State Conference on Rhetoric and Composition, now
in its 14th year, offers a generous mixture of plenary and
specialinterest sessions in a relaxed atmosphere. A fourday
gathering of teachers and scholars, the conference provides
occasion to reflect on composition and rhetoric and
opportunity to discuss professional concerns with nationally
known speakers and interested colleagues.
The program committee invites proposals for papers and
entire sessions on any current topic in rhetoric and
composition. Especially welcome are extensions,
applications, and critiques of the work of our featured
speakers. Please submit a onepage proposal and identify each
proposal as one of the following:
a 20minute conference paper.
a 10minute position paper. Position papers declare and
pointedly defend an assertion on a current professional,
institutional, pedagogical, or research issue in rhetoric
and composition.
a 60 or 90minute panel. In addition to the descriptions of
each talk, please include a cover page briefly describing
the relationships among the papers.
a 90 or 120minute workshop. We especially welcome workshops
on innovative pedagogical techniques and on stateoftheart
applications of educational computing. Strong preference
will be given to workshop proposals that clearly incorporate
handson, interactive involvement of the participants.
Contribution to a SpecialTopics Session. SpecialTopics
Sessions give participants the opportunity to present their
ideas and get responses from our featured speakers.
This year's specialtopics sessions include: Gender and
Writing, Miriam Brody and Sharon Crowley, respondents. We
invite 20minute papers on gender in research and teaching in
rhetoric and composition.
Rhetorics of Disciplinary and Professional Authority, John
Angus Campbell, Susan Peck MacDonald, and James Boyd White,
respondents. We encourage 20minute papers on the rhetorical
creation and criticism of authoritative voices in academic
and professional discourse.
Current Situations of Composition, Jacqueline Jones Royster
and Kurt Spellmeyer, respondents. We encourage 10minute
position papers declaring a position on a current issue on
the professional, institutional, pedagogical, or research
agenda of composition.
On each proposal, please include (for each speaker):
presentation title
speaker's name
speaker's professional affiliation
speaker's home address (current and after June 1)
speaker's home phone number (current and after June 1)
speaker's electronic mail (email) address (if available)
speaker's fax number (if available)
Send your proposals by April 17 to Don Bialostosky, 117
Burrowes Building, Penn State University, University Park,
PA 16802-6200; phone (814) 8633069; email to
alg5@psuvm.psu.edu; fax to (814) 8637285.
We will announce this year's program in early May and notify
all who have submitted proposals. We receive many more
proposals than we can accept; so please let us know if you
would be willing, if your proposal is not accepted, to chair
a session.
Plenary Session Speakers
Sharon Crowley, professor of rhetoric at University of Iowa,
has written extensively on the history of rhetoric,
deconstruction, and composition theory and pedagogy. She is
particularly interested in freshman English textbooks and
classrooms as sites for the construction of political values
and gender roles. She has published widely in such journals
as College English, College Composition and Communication,
Rhetoric Review, and PRE/TEXT and is the author of Ancient
Rhetorics for Contemporary Students (Macmillan, 1993), The
Methodical Memory: Invention in CurrentTraditional Rhetoric
(Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), and A Teacher's
Introduction to Deconstruction (NCTE, 1989).
Jacqueline Jones Royster is associate professor of English
at Ohio State University and Chair of the Conference on
College Composition and Communication. Her scholarship
focuses on literacy and women's studies. She has
collaborated with the editorial team of SAGE on Double
Stitch: Black Women Write About Mothers and Daughters
(Beacon Press, 1991) and coauthored, with Jerrie Cobb Scott,
Classroom Environments: Multidirectional Relationships
Between Theory and Practice (Boyton/Cook, forthcoming). Her
current work includes a study of writer and activist Ida B.
WellsBarnett. At Ohio State she teaches courses in
literacy, writing across the curriculum, and African
American women writers.
James Boyd White is Hart Wright professor of law, professor
of English language and literature, and adjunct professor of
classical studies at University of Michigan where he has
been on the faculty since 1983. His books on the history
and theory of rhetoric include Acts of Hope: Creating
Authority in Literature, Law, and Politics (University of
Chicago Press, 1994), Justice as Translation: An Essay in
Cultural and Legal Criticism (University of Chicago Press,
1990), Heracles' Bow: Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of
Law (University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), and When Words
Lose Their Meaning: Constitutions and Reconstitutions of
Language, Character, and Community (University of Chicago
Press, 1984).
Featured Speakers
Miriam Brody is associate professor in the Writing Program
at Ithaca College. Her book, Manly Writing: Gender,
Rhetoric, and the Rise of Composition (Southern Illinois
University Press, 1993), explores the use of gender
metaphors in texts that offer advice to writers. These
metaphors, she argues, have functioned as ideology serving
the development of capitalist British and American society,
and they still inform the assumptions at work in
contemporary composition textbooks.
John Angus Campbell, associate professor of communication at
the University of Washington, investigates how scientific
revolutions depend upon continuity with an existing cultural
grammar and the rhetorical means by which this continuity is
created as exemplified in Darwin's On the Origin of Species.
His work on Darwin's use of conventional language and
religious categories, prudential reason, and other
rhetorical strategies has been published in Speech
Monographs, Western Journal of Speech Communication, and
Quarterly Journal of Speech.
Susan Peck MacDonald is the assistant coordinator of the
Dimensions of Culture Program at the University of
California, San Diego. In her new book, Professional
Academic Writing in the Humanities and Social Sciences
(Southern Illinois University Press, 1994), she examines how
professional academic discourse both reveals and constructs
disciplinary knowledge. Her essays on academic and basic
writing have appeared in Writing, Teaching, and Learning in
the Disciplines (MLA, 1992) as well as College English,
College Composition and Communication, Written
Communication, and Writing Instructor.
Kurt Spellmeyer is associate professor of English and
Director of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Writing Program
at Rutgers University. His recent book, Common Ground:
Dialogue, Understanding, and the Teaching of Composition
(PrenticeHall, 1993), argues that the essay genre, by
engaging students in a continuous process of selfformation
through dialogue with others, can establish the cultural
practice of negotiation necessary for democratic public
discourse. His writings on composition theory and pedagogy,
particularly their relations to philosophy, postmodernism,
and politics, have also appeared in College English and the
Journal of Advanced Composition.
Social Occasions
In addition to good papers and good talk, the Penn State
Conference includes several convivial occasions. On
Wednesday evening, July 12, you are invited to nightcaps on
campus. An outdoor barbecue dinner with live music is
planned for Thursday, July 13, in the mountains near State
College. A reception will be held after the concluding
plenary session on Friday, July 14. Meal contracts in the
conference dormitories will give participants additional
opportunities to meet and talk.
The Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts, one of the
largest annual events of its kind in the country, runs
through Sunday, July 16, in downtown State College. More
than four hundred juryselected exhibitions line the streets
of State College, and numerous performing groups will be on
hand.
Leisure Activities
The Penn State campus and surrounding Nittany Valley offer
facilities for camping, swimming, fishing, hiking, tennis,
and golf. Within an hour's drive of State College are
boating at Stone Valley, swimming at Whipple Dam State Park,
fishing at Black Moshannon State Park, and hiking at Alan
Seeger State Forest. History buffs will enjoy nearby
Bellefonte, a town of fine nineteenthcentury stores and
houses, and Curtin Village, a reconstruction of an iron
foundry.