Resistant Writer

Charles Paine is Assistant Professor of English at the University of New Mexico.

"I see this book as a highly original contribution, full of new information, based on careful scholarship and bristling with original juxtapositions. Paine has reconceptualized the recent history of rhetoric, producing a book everyone in the field will need to read and absorb." — John C. Brereton, author of The Origins of Composition Studies in the American College, 1875–1925: A Documentary History"I appreciate Paine's argument that the situated history of composition has cooperated with a protection, not an activation, of the student-as-individual who is not a participant in receiving and forming public persuasion. This argument about the isolated, self-protected 'individual' student is quite important now, as is Paine's critique of Berlin and others' histories on the basis of their avoiding 'local,' more thorough investigations." — Susan Miller, University of Utah

• PrefaceAcknowledgmentsPart One: Introduction1. On the Idea of Discourse Immunity, or the Public Health of Rhetorical InstructionPart Two: History2. The Uses of Composition History3. To "Fortify the Immunities of a Free People": Edward T. Channing's Response to Emerging Forms of Popular Public Discourse4. A. S. Hill (i): Nineteenth-Century Journalism and the Making of a Patrician Intellectual5. A. S. Hill (ii): Reforming the Public and Its Discourse at the Modern University and in the Writing CoursePart Three: Contemporary Pedagogy6. Classroom Argument, Responsibility, and Change7. Conflict, Change, and "Flexibility" in the Composition and Cultural Studies ClassroomNotesWorks CitedIndex