Starting Bid: $100.00 (Full Run of Series Titles)

This item up for auction consists of all current and forthcoming books in the Reference Guides to Rhetoric and Composition series, edited by Charles Bazerman. The first release, Invention in Rhetoric and Composition by Janice M. Lauer, was published in January 2004.  There are presently 10 more books contracted for the series, with more to follow those, appearing roughly at the pace of three per year.  Titles include the following, each by major scholars in the field: Argument in Composition, Basic Writing, Collaborative Learning in Composition Studies, Community Literacy, Expressive Writing, Genre, Revision, Rhetorical Tradition in Composition, Writing across the Curriculum, and Writing Program Administration.

The winning bidder will receive the paperback editions of all books published in the series for its lifetime, with a retail value of at minimum $330.00 for just the first books due in the series.

Paper

Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures: Refiguring College English Studies
Expanded Edition
By James A. Berlin

Lauer Series in Rhetoric and Composition
Edited by Patricia Sullivan and Catherine Hobbs

© 2003 by Parlor Press; 268 pages
ISBN 0-9724772-8-4 ($27.00 Paper)
Starting Bid: $10.00

Description
Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures is James Berlin’s most comprehensive effort to refigure the field of English Studies. Here, in his last book, Berlin both historically situates and recovers for today the tools and insights of rhetoric—displaced and marginalized, he argues, by the allegedly disinterested study of aesthetic texts in the college English department. Berlin sees rhetoric as offering a unique perspective on the current disciplinary crisis, complementing the challenging perspectives offered by postmodern literary theory and cultural studies. Taking into account the political and intellectual issues at stake and the relation of these issues to economic and social transformations, Berlin argues for a pedagogy that makes the English studies classroom the center of disciplinary activities, the point at which theory, practice, and democratic politics intersect. This new educational approach, organized around text interpretation and production—not one or the other exclusively, as before—prepares students for work, democratic politics, and consumer culture today by providing a revised conception of both reading and writing as acts of textual interpretation; it also gives students tools to critique the socially constructed, politically charged reality of classroom, college, and culture.

This new edition of Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures includes JAC response essays by Linda Brodkey, Patricia Harkin, Susan Miller, John Trimbur, and Victor J. Vitanza, as well as an afterword by Janice M. Lauer. These essays situate Berlin’s work in personal, pedagogical, and political contexts that highlight the continuing importance of his work for understanding contemporary disciplinary practice.

© 2004 by Parlor Press; 720 pages
ISBN 1-932559-01-9 ($40.00 Paper)
Starting Bid: $15.00

Description
Like Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered, Boiardo’s chivalric stories of lords and ladies first entertained the culturally innovative court of Ferrara in the Italian Renaissance. Inventive, humorous, inexhaustible, the story recounts Orlando’s love-stricken pursuit of “the fairest of her Sex, Angelica” (in Milton’s terms) through a fairyland that combines the military valors of Charlemagne’s knights and their famous horses with the enchantments of King Arthur’s court.

Today it seems more than ever appropriate to offer a new, unabridged edition of Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato, the first Renaissance epic about the common customs of, and the conflicts between, Christian Europe and Islam. Having extensively revised his earlier translation for general readers, Charles Ross has added headings and helpful summaries to Boiardo’s cantos. Tenses have been regularized, and terms of gender and religion have been updated, but not so much as to block the reader’s encounter with how Boiardo once viewed the world.

Paper

Burke is back. This publication in print and digital formats of previously unpublished writings of Kenneth Burke is an event not just for Burke studies but for the wider community of readers interested in understanding the "progress" of literature, literary theory, culture, rhetoric, and philosophy in the late twentieth-century.

Burke has profoundly influenced in one way or another a long list of major literary theorists, poets, novelists, linguists, and rhetoricians. They include Harold Bloom, Wayne Booth, Paul De Man, Hugh Duncan, Ralph Ellison, Dell Hymes, Richard Kostelanetz, Frank Lentricchia, Andrea Lunsford, Howard Nemerov, Edward Said, Victor Vitanza, Hayden White, and William Carlos Williams.

These letters show the development of Burke’s thought in the last thirty or so years of his life, when he remained remarkably productive not only as a correspondent but as a critic and traveling scholar. Rueckert became for Burke both student and “co-conspirator,” with Burke himself playing the roles of teacher, mentor, father, and peer. While Burke corresponded for many years with Malcolm Cowley, William Carlos Williams, Hugh Duncan, and others, with Rueckert, we see him writing to someone who may have understood and appreciated his work more than anyone. These letters often probe deeper, with less explanation and defensiveness, more inquiry and reflection. As one might expect among like-minded peers, we also see sharp critiques of contemporaries, including theorists who have had enormous influence of their own, including Marshall McLuhan and Fredric Jameson.

Paper

Reference Guides to Rhetoric and Composition
Edited by Charles Bazerman

Description
Invention in Rhetoric and Composition examines issues that have surrounded historical and contemporary theories and pedagogies of rhetorical invention, citing a wide array of positions on these issues in both primary rhetorical texts and secondary interpretations. It presents theoretical disagreements over the nature, purpose, and epistemology of invention and pedagogical debates over such issues as the relative importance of art, talent, imitation, and practice in teaching discourse. After a discussion of treatments of invention from the Sophists to the nineteenth century, Invention in Rhetoric and Composition introduces a range of early twentieth-century multidisciplinary theories and calls for invention’s awakening in the field of English studies. It then showcases inventional theories and pedagogies that have emerged in the field of Rhetoric and Composition over the last four decades, including the ensuing research, critiques, and implementations of this inventional work. As a reference guide, the text offers a glossary of terms, an annotated bibliography of selected texts, and an extensive bibliography.

Paper

© 2004 by Parlor Press. 384 pages, including notes, bibliographical references, and index
Starting Bid: $10.00

Description
Faulkner from Within: Destructive and Generative Being in the Novels of William Faulkner is the culmination of William H. Rueckert’s lifetime of study of this great American novelist. Rueckert tracks Faulkner’s development as a novelist through eighteen novels—ranging from Flags in the Dust to The Reivers—to show the turn in Faulkner from destructive to generative being, from tragedy to comedy, from pollution to purification and redemption. At the heart of Faulkner from Within is Rueckert’s sustained treatment of Go Down, Moses, a turning point in Faulkner’s career away from the destructive selves of the earlier novels and—as first manifest in Ike McCaslin—toward the generative selves of his later work. Faulkner from Within is a wide-ranging, beautifully written appreciation and analysis of the imaginative life of a great American author and his complex work.

© 2004 by Parlor Press. 84 pages
ISBN 1-932559-14-0 ($14.00, paper)
Starting Bid: $7.00

Description
Jeffrey Thomson’s second collection of poems, The Country of Lost Sons, investigates the narrative environment of childhood, especially the way violence is inscribed on children through myth, culture, and legend. The poems trace the growth of the author’s young son (his vulnerability and equal potential for violence) across a landscape of rewritten myth and narrative. From the Trojan War (bracketed as it is by the deaths of two children, Iphegenia and Astyanax) through the Biblical accounts of Job, Jeremiah, and Jephthah to the modern tragedies of the war in Kosovo, AIDS, and the contemporary culture of violence, the poems build to a culmination of fear that is only tempered by love, grace, and the redemptive power of storytelling itself.

In the midst of so many fast-talking contemporary poetry books comes Jeffrey Thomson’s lovely The Country of Lost Sons. Here is a book that chooses tender, meditative music over electric chatter. Here are the poems that tell us poetry can still explore and heal earnestly. More than praise, I want to offer gratitude for such an intimate book. After reading it, you will want to offer gratitude too. — Terrance A. Hayes

Paper

© 2003 by Parlor Press; 204 pages
ISBN 0-9724772-7-6 ($20.00 Paper)
Starting Bid: $10.00

Effective Writing offers specific advice on how to write effectively the many kinds of writing lawyers do in actual practice. It considers what makes writing effective in letters of various kinds, forms, bills, the many kinds of writing done through the trial, writing for an appeal, contracts, and writing for wills and trusts. The last chapter addresses how to rewrite to promote more effective thinking and how to rewrite for the reader, going beyond the usual considerations of correct or “plain” style to address what constitutes effective word choice, sentence structure, organization, citation and quotation in real contexts. The book is seasoned with “sidebars”—brief stories about legal writing from many judges, lawyers, and other writers-- that help to bring the world of legal writing alive. This book is the product of a collaboration between a distinguished lawyer and a professor of English (Rhetoric and Writing).

368 pages, 6 x 9, 16 illus.
Signed by the editor.
Review forthcoming in JAC
Starting Bid: $20.00 (This is the cloth edition.)

“The Terministic Screen: Rhetorical Perspectives on Film offers readers who have interests or specialities in rhetorical analysis a point of entry into contemporary cinema as it frames issues of style, representation, history, and culture. Although the literature on cinema is vast, relatively few books have adopted an explicitly rhetorical emphasis. Thus, this volume fills a long-neglected gap in the scholarly literature on film.”

—Stephen Prince, author of Movies and Meaning: An Introduction to Film

The Terministic Screen: Rhetorical Perspectives on Film examines the importance of rhetoric in the study of film and film theory. Rhetorical approaches to film studies have been widely practiced, but rarely discussed until now. Taking on such issues as Hollywood blacklisting, fascistic aesthetics, and postmodern dialogics, editor David Blakesley presents fifteen critical essays that examine rhetoric’s role in such popular films as The Fifth Element, The Last Temptation of Christ, The Usual Suspects, Deliverance, The English Patient, Pulp Fiction, The Music Man, Copycat, Hoop Dreams and A Time to Kill.