Amy E. Robillard - Böcker

We Find Ourselves in Other People’s Stories: On Narrative Collapse and a Lifetime Search for Story is a collection of five essays that dissolves the boundary between personal writing and academic writing, a longstanding binary construct in the discipline of composition and writing studies, in order to examine the rhetorical effects of narrative collapse on the stories we tell about ourselves and others. Taken together, the essays theorize the relationships between language and violence, between narrative and dementia, between genre and certainty, and between writing and life.

This volume explores a dimension of authorship not given its due in the critical discourse to this point—authorship contested. Much of the existing critical literature begins with a text and the proposition that the text has an author. The debates move from here to questions about who the author is, whether or not the author’s identity is even relevant, and what relationship she or he does and does not have to the text. The authors contributing to this collection, however, ask about circumstances surrounding efforts to prevent authors from even being allowed to have these questions asked of them, from even being identified as authors. They ask about the political, cultural, economic and social circumstances that motivate a prospective audience to resist an author’s efforts to have a text published, read, and discussed. Particularly noteworthy is the range of everyday rhetorical situations in which contesting authorship occurs—from the production of a corporate document to the publication of fan fiction. Each chapter also focuses on particular instances in which authorship has been contested, demonstrating how theories about various forms of contested authorship play out in a range of events, from the complex issues surrounding peer review to authorship in the age of intelligent machines.

We Find Ourselves in Other People’s Stories: On Narrative Collapse and a Lifetime Search for Story is a collection of five essays that dissolves the boundary between personal writing and academic writing, a longstanding binary construct in the discipline of composition and writing studies, in order to examine the rhetorical effects of narrative collapse on the stories we tell about ourselves and others. Taken together, the essays theorize the relationships between language and violence, between narrative and dementia, between genre and certainty, and between writing and life.

This volume explores a dimension of authorship not given its due in the critical discourse to this point—authorship contested. Much of the existing critical literature begins with a text and the proposition that the text has an author. The debates move from here to questions about who the author is, whether or not the author’s identity is even relevant, and what relationship she or he does and does not have to the text. The authors contributing to this collection, however, ask about circumstances surrounding efforts to prevent authors from even being allowed to have these questions asked of them, from even being identified as authors. They ask about the political, cultural, economic and social circumstances that motivate a prospective audience to resist an author’s efforts to have a text published, read, and discussed. Particularly noteworthy is the range of everyday rhetorical situations in which contesting authorship occurs—from the production of a corporate document to the publication of fan fiction. Each chapter also focuses on particular instances in which authorship has been contested, demonstrating how theories about various forms of contested authorship play out in a range of events, from the complex issues surrounding peer review to authorship in the age of intelligent machines.

In How Stories Teach Us: Composition, Life Writing, and Blended Scholarship, Amy E. Robillard and D. Shane Combs leave behind the debate between the personal and the academic in composition studies in order to witness what happens when composition scholars allow both the personal and the academic to act upon them in the stories they tell. The editors and contributors, in blending their scholarship, celebrate the influence of life writing on their work and allow the contexts of their lives and the urgency of their stories to blend together for a range of approaches to scholarship and essay writing. This blended scholarship features scholars and teachers dealing with loss, grief, illness, trauma, depression, abuse, gender identity, and the ravages of time. How Stories Teach Us is both a challenge and an invitation to composition scholars to pursue a fuller and more robust approach to their scholarship and life stories. It is also an invitation to teachers of composition to open up the potentials of blended scholarship to the students they teach.

In How Stories Teach Us: Composition, Life Writing, and Blended Scholarship, Amy E. Robillard and D. Shane Combs leave behind the debate between the personal and the academic in composition studies in order to witness what happens when composition scholars allow both the personal and the academic to act upon them in the stories they tell. The editors and contributors, in blending their scholarship, celebrate the influence of life writing on their work and allow the contexts of their lives and the urgency of their stories to blend together for a range of approaches to scholarship and essay writing. This blended scholarship features scholars and teachers dealing with loss, grief, illness, trauma, depression, abuse, gender identity, and the ravages of time. How Stories Teach Us is both a challenge and an invitation to composition scholars to pursue a fuller and more robust approach to their scholarship and life stories. It is also an invitation to teachers of composition to open up the potentials of blended scholarship to the students they teach.

When Andrew Cuomo was forced to resign as governor of New York in August 2021, a commentator on CNN remarked that he had "not gotten his own memo" on sexual harassment that he had signed into law two years earlier. Misogyny in English Departments theorizes the results of a qualitative empirical study of the ways women in U.S. college and university English departments experience misogyny, and the effects that misogyny has on their personal and professional lives. It seems that we in English departments, too, have not gotten our own memos. English departments market themselves as spaces of equity and diversity, as dedicated to inclusivity and social justice, as committed to rooting out injustices like misogyny via such means as socially just, feminist, and critical pedagogies. We are some of the very people who teach students to recognize and fight back against social injustices like misogyny, and yet, as the women the author interviews demonstrate in this book, we are no less likely to engage in gender-based discriminatory and abusive practices.