Wendy Ryden - Böcker

In this volume, Ryden and Marshall bring together the field of composition and rhetoric with critical whiteness studies to show that in our "post race" era whiteness and racism not only survive but actually thrive in higher education. As they examine the effects of racism on contemporary literacy practices and the rhetoric by which white privilege maintains and reproduces itself, Ryden and Marshall consider topics ranging from the emotional investment in whiteness to the role of personal narrative in reconstituting racist identities to critiques of the foundational premises of writing programs steeped in repudiation of despised discourses. Marshall and Ryden alternate chapters to sustain a multi-layered dialogue that traces the rhetorical complexities and contradictions of teaching English and writing in a university setting. Their lived experiences as faculty and administrators serve to underscore the complex code of whiteness even as they push to decode it and demonstrate how their own pedagogical practices are raced and racialized in multiple ways. Collectively, the essays ask instructors and administrators to consider more carefully the pernicious nature of whiteness in their professional activities and how it informs our practices.

An innovative collection of essays examining the sometimes paradoxical alignment of Realism and Naturalism with the Gothic in American literature to highlight their shared qualitiesFollowing the golden age of British Gothic in the late eighteenth century, the American Gothic’s pinnacle is often recognized as having taken place during the decades of American Romanticism. However, Haunting Realities explores the period of American Realism—the end of the nineteenth century—to discover evidence of fertile ground for another age of Gothic proliferation.  At first glance, “Naturalist Gothic” seems to be a contradiction in terms. While the Gothic is known for its sensational effects, with its emphasis on horror and the supernatural, the doctrines of late nineteenth-century Naturalism attempted to move away from the aesthetics of sentimentality and stressed sobering, mechanistic views of reality steeped in scientific thought and the determinism of market values and biology. Nonetheless, what binds Gothicism and Naturalism together is a vision of shared pessimism and the perception of a fearful, lingering presence that ominously haunts an impending modernity. Indeed, it seems that in many Naturalist works reality is so horrific that it can only be depicted through Gothic tropes that prefigure the alienation and despair of modernism.  In recent years, research on the Gothic has flourished, yet there has been no extensive study of the links between the Gothic and Naturalism, particularly those which stem from the early American Realist tradition. Haunting Realities is a timely volume that addresses this gap and is an important addition to scholarly work on both the Gothic and Naturalism in the American literary tradition.

In this volume, Ryden and Marshall bring together the field of composition and rhetoric with critical whiteness studies to show that in our "post race" era whiteness and racism not only survive but actually thrive in higher education. As they examine the effects of racism on contemporary literacy practices and the rhetoric by which white privilege maintains and reproduces itself, Ryden and Marshall consider topics ranging from the emotional investment in whiteness to the role of personal narrative in reconstituting racist identities to critiques of the foundational premises of writing programs steeped in repudiation of despised discourses. Marshall and Ryden alternate chapters to sustain a multi-layered dialogue that traces the rhetorical complexities and contradictions of teaching English and writing in a university setting. Their lived experiences as faculty and administrators serve to underscore the complex code of whiteness even as they push to decode it and demonstrate how their own pedagogical practices are raced and racialized in multiple ways. Collectively, the essays ask instructors and administrators to consider more carefully the pernicious nature of whiteness in their professional activities and how it informs our practices.