Book Review: Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition

        One could certainly be forgiven for asking the customary question in response to the title of this book review: what does a French sociologist and anthropologist, with no training in composition and seemingly no knowledge of rhetoric studies’ existence as a discipline, have to contribute to the field of academic and … Continue reading Book Review: Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition

Can We Hold Class Outside, Professor? Nature, Cognition and Composition

Composition and education have long questioned a central premise of the academy and university life in higher education: What is a classroom?  Recent research published in Psychological Science steers us toward a premise that is of paramount interest to our discipline.  What would it mean for the natural world to serve the acting, thinking brains of our … Continue reading Can We Hold Class Outside, Professor? Nature, Cognition and Composition

Ambedo (A Chapter from A Novel Written Long Ago…)

Ambedo JD Richter To be successful in Millennial America without sacrificing soul and artistry—that was the goal, the tightrope to be walked in a concrete land of parking garages and traffic lights, where everything is bought and sold, where a person’s selfhood is bartered for attention and defined to the outside world as a collection … Continue reading Ambedo (A Chapter from A Novel Written Long Ago…)

Peter Handke’s “A Sorrow Beyond Dreams”

Peter Handke's memoir "A Sorrow Beyond Dreams" details the life and eventual suicide of his mother, which he attempts to portray in the narrative as having been an "exemplary case" of voluntary death.  This is my response to the dense, sparse narrative in which Handke refuses sentimentality and resists analysis; the text ventures into places rarely … Continue reading Peter Handke’s “A Sorrow Beyond Dreams”