Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Privatized World - Softcover

Welch, Nancy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0867095849 ISBN 13: 9780867095845

Publisher: Boynton/Cook Publishers Inc US, 2008

Synopsis

How can our students find - or make - spaces where their ideas and arguments can be heard? Living Room takes up this question in an age defined not only by YouTube and My Space but also the conversion of public streets to festival marketplaces, the creation of cordoned-off and tucked-away "free speech" zones, and the state sanctioning of ethnic profiling. In Living Room Nancy Welch traces the erosion of publicity rights to post-9/11 legislation and, more troublingly, to nearly thirty years of neoliberal privatization of space, institutions, and resources - even the very idea of who has the authority to speak and argue, especially in the political and public arenas. Joining the field's reinvigorated interest in public writing and rhetorical history, Welch argues that if we're to explore with our students when, where, and how they can deliver arguments that matter, we need to look to the lessons of earlier generations. Especially in the 20th century's struggles for labor and civil rights - the struggles that won "living room" rights for ordinary people in the first place - we find consequential (and sometimes unruly) arguments: workers shutting down production lines and cash registers, students disrupting segregated lunch counters, AIDS-HIV activists dying-in across a Wall Street intersection. By examining these and other vibrant models of rhetorical action in our classrooms, we can help our students better understand how to deliver effective arguments in the most restrictive of circumstances and how to most effectively shape their arguments using genre, collaboration, audience, tone, and style. Living Room vigorously critiques our privatized era "of shopping malls and Clear Channel; of state-sanctioned ethnic profiling and militarized responses to public protest; of private economic interests colluding to shape public policy on everything from energy and interest rates to health care and access to the airwaves." Read Living Room and heed Nancy Welch's call for a reinvigorated rhetoric that connects your composition classroom with a contentious, lively history of writing as social action.

About this title

About the Author

Nancy Welch is the author/coeditor of the Boynton/Cook titles Living Room (2008), The Dissertation and the Discipline: Reinventing Composition Studies (2002), and Getting Restless: Rethinking Revision in Writing Instruction (1997). She is Professor of English at the University of Vermont, where she teaches composition, rhetoric, literacy studies, and women's studies. She has also published a collection of short stories, The Road from Prosperity.

About this edition

• Publisher: Boynton/Cook Publishers Inc US
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0867095849
• ISBN 13: 9780867095845
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 183