To study rhetoric is to pay attention to how communication works (or doesn’t). For ancient rhetoricians, that meant studying how individuals spoke, what they said, to whom, and in what broader contexts. While much current rhetorical theory still engages these concepts, over time, the study of rhetoric has expanded significantly, Read more…
Pundits of digital media and the Internet, traditionalist bibilophiles, stand-up comedians, arm-chair philosophers — all have expressed some of our collective cultural anxieties about the Internet and what it stands for. Some worry about the often-spastic, fast-paced movement of image and word that assault us when we go to MySpace; Read more…
Most of us can easily remember a few of our favorite books from childhood. For me, there are the obvious ones: Where the Wild Things Are, Winnie the Pooh, Danny & the Dinosaur, and all those awful Little Golden books, like Pokie Little Puppy. But there’s also this little-known book by Margaret Wise Brown called Read more…
English 6625 (Teaching Composition: Theory and Practice) offers graduate students a background in the major theories and pedagogies that continue to shape best practices in the teaching of writing at the college level. Can you remember exactly when you learned to write? or how? Or can you remember the major Read more…
Welcome to the website for English 7665: Ethos & Critical Agency. As a “Special Topics Seminar” in the graduate curriculum of the English department at East Carolina University, this course functions to augment core work in Rhetoric and Composition. Students should expect an advanced course, one which moves quickly beyond Read more…
English 7601 (Research Design in Rhetoric and Composition) and 8601 (Advanced Research Design) combine master’s and doctoral level students in order to facilitate a richer, more engaged discussion of best practices in methods and methodologies for the researcher in Composition and Rhetoric. Scholars in Rhet-Comp continually point to the multi-disciplinarity/transdisciplinarity Read more…
If any discourse has dominated public consciousness in the last thirty years, it would have to be discourse(s) of multiculturalism. Elementary schools moved from metaphors of the “melting pot” to metaphors of the “salad bar”; our cultural backgrounds stopped disappearing in some cultural stew and began to be individually valued Read more…