Articles
I suppose the first article I ever wrote was one that was published in Harper’s Weekly when I was fourteen. Harper’s had decided to try to revive the weekly version of their magazine, but it didn’t last long. It was a short piece, more or less adolescent angsty, and the only interesting thing about it is that the writing process broke most of the rules for how that kind of thing is supposed to go. I try to keep that in mind when I find myself getting too rigid about things like pre-writing.
“A Tutor Evaluates Her Teaching Ability.” New Directions Series of Quarterly Sourcebooks. New Directions in College Learning Assistance; Winter, 1981: Improving Student Writing Skills. Editors: Thom Hawkins and Phylllis Brooks. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
The next piece was similarly serendipitous. I was tutoring at the undergraduate writing center and had written, as was required, an end of semester essay about what it was like to tutor. It so happened that one of the supervising faculty was co-editing a collection on peer tutoring and asked to include the piece.
“Reading the Writing on Nature’s Wall,” Reader 18 (1987): 31-44.
Similarly, in graduate school, someone was guest editing Reader and had heard that I was working on John Muir’s environmental hermeneutics (a fancy phrase for the way that he continually talked about reading nature). For reasons I can no longer remember, this topic was related to the theme of that issue, so I was asked to contribute something.
“Habermas’ Varieties of Communicative Action: Controversy Without Combat.” Journal of Advanced Composition 11.2 (1991): 409-424.
I know that the classic advice for graduate students is that you give a conference paper that you turn into an article. This is the only time I did that (altough I often tried).
“Frank Harris.” Dictionary of Literary Biography Volume 156: “British Short-Fiction Writers, 1880-1914” Ed. William F. Naufftus.
At this time, I was still trying to bridge four fields (history of rhetoric, composition pedagogy, early American studies, and environmental rhetoric). I was interested in the way that people know what nature is, long before they experience it. And one way, of course, is the Western. Frank Harris is interesting in that regard, as he wrote one of the classic “westerns” without getting any closer to cowboy life than working in his brother’s butcher shop in Kansas City. When I heard that Naufftus was looking for someone to write about Harris, I jumped on the chance. This turned out to be one of those—well, not exactly dead ends, but digressions, perhaps, that happen when you just follow your heart.
Co-authored with Virginia Pompei Jones, “Imagining Reasons: The Role of the Imagination in Argumentation.” Journal of Advanced Composition 15.3 (Fall 1995): 527-541.
Ginny, one of my grad students at UNC-Greensboro, and I discovered a shared interest in trying to persuade people that the imagination v. reason dichotomy is false. So, we set out to write a paper together on that topic. It was great fun.
“Habermas’ Rational-Critical Sphere and The Problem of Criteria” in The Role of Rhetoric in an Anti-Foundational World edited by Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Glejzer. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.
“Habermas and the American Puritans: Rationality and Exclusion in the Dialectical Public Sphere” Rhetoric Society Quarterly (Winter, 1996)
This was when I figured out the composition process that works best for my writing style—I write a book and then turn it into articles. (Which is, I know, the opposite from how every says you’re supposed to do it.) While the Puritan ms. was molding away at the publisher’s, I cannibalized it for articles. I was told that it’s best not to publish the entire book in article form, especially for one’s first book, but I now think I could have sent out a few more pieces without any harm.
“Post-Contemporary Composition: Social Constructivism and Its Alternatives” Composition Studies (Spring 2002):
After I finished the Deliberate Conflict manuscript, I took chunks and mailed them out, especially chunks that had had to be cut. Because I’m very bad at predicting what will and will not be accepted (I really don’t think there’s any correlation between the quality of things I’ve written and whether they’ve gotten published) I sent out three pieces from the book, as well as one piece that was cut. This piece was one of the ones accepted. It’s essentially half of a chapter, and I remain most nervous about this essay, as I’m certain it will be (has been?) misunderstood. The argument is that there is a three-part dichotomy (trichotomy?) in comp studies, so that people assume you must be expressivist, foundationalist, or social constructivist (with that last category meaning something very specific). In this article, I argue that the trichotomy is wrong. I am certain that I have probably earned myself a reputation as an expressivist or foundationalist, which would be a thorough misunderstanding, but that’s how that kind of thing goes.
“John Quincy Adams Amistad Argument: The Problem of Outrage; Or, the Constraints of Decorum.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly. (Spring 2002).
This came largely out a conversation with Laura Wilder in a grad seminar. She and I disagreed as to whether Adams’s notions of rhetoric were strikingly different from Blair and Witherspoon. That conversation got me looking more closely at Adams, and then I got very interested in the extent to which his rhetorical practice followed his pedagogical dictates. I decided he sometimes followed his own advice (in the Amistad case, but sometimes didn’t (in his attack on Henry Wise). Initially, I was going to write an article that talked about both of those incidents, but it turned into two separate articles.
Forthcoming. “Communities, Communitarianism, and Communities of Discourse” CCC (Spring 2003)
“Fighting without hatred: Hannah Arendt’s agonistic rhetoric” JAC 22.3 (2002): 585-601.
Two more pieces from the Deliberate Conflict book. The first was also my job talk for U of Texas (a draftier version of it, anyway).
It might look from the above as though there’s a steady progress, but that isn’t really the case. If you add up the various dates, you’ll see it took me a while to get a publication record going—I had some bad mentoring, took on too much administration, and made some bad decisions about my projects. Just as the rich get richer, so the published tend to get published-er. That’s my experience anyway.