New Books by Dartmouth Authors: Institute for Writing and Rhetoric

At the 1966 Dartmouth Seminar, scholars gathered to debate the direction of English Studies in the academy. This debate had far-reaching effects and arguably forever changed writing instruction in the United States. To commemorate the 45th anniversary of this gathering, Dartmouth College hosted an event both celebrating the past and looking toward the future. Then as now, there is this simple truth: writing well matters, and it matters in institutions of higher education across disciplines. Yet what it means to be a good writer in the academy and in the public sphere remains a site of controversy and discussion. The Power of Writing: Dartmouth '66 in the Twenty-First Century argues that any discussion of why writing well matters should extend beyond composition and rhetoric scholars to capture the knowledge that outstanding teachers and writers themselves put to work every day. The editors have brought together scholars and public intellectuals (including New York Times best-selling authors David McCullough and Steve Strogatz) from the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and interdisciplinary fields to engage in a dialogue about some of the controversial questions related to writing today. Readers will engage with questions about what it means to write well and how different answers affect the teaching and learning of writing in higher education. Each anchor article--representing disciplines as varied as musicology, African studies, mathematics, and history--receives responses from Dartmouth faculty and nationally renowned faculty members in writing studies programs. This timely and wide-ranging collection will have appeal far beyond writing instructors and is specifically designed for readers across disciplines.

Writing about World Literature, a new guide created to accompany the Norton Anthology, covers the processes and particulars of writing in the world literature survey course. Starting with the essential question, "What is Academic Writing," the guide takes students step-by-step through the writing process - from generating ideas to researching to revising. It includes an entire chapter on the different types of writing about world literature - including textual and contextual analyses.

Institute for Writing and Rhetoric

Prejudice is a significant social issue that the human race continues to face in the world today, and it is destructive and costly for social encounters. The increase of these social obstacles suggests that an intervention or collection of strategies are needed and necessary to break down prejudice barriers that divide communities of people. This first edition of Communicating Prejudice: An Appreciative Inquiry Approach breaks new ground with rich discussions of controversial interactions in various contexts that integrate prejudice and appreciative inquiry approaches from intra- and inter level perspectives. Authors provide alternative solutions that hold true for anyone who wishes to counter and regulate the impact of prejudice, racial profiling, bigotry, and stereotyping.

Precipice Fruit tells the story of Jenna, a young girl with an autistic spectrum diagnosis whose spirit transcends the stigmatizing forces around her. Often pigeon holed, manhandled, and misunderstood by her doctors and teachers,Jenna blossoms into a young girl with a perspective entirely her own. Different points of view clash against each other in this series of poems-the cold objectivity of the clinician, the private terror and faith of the mother, the punitive decree of the teacher, the spirited self-narration of the child. These voices struggle against each other, leaving us to consider how institutions author children with a disabilities, and the harm they do in the process. In the poem "At the Library," the speaker declares "When we go in, we go through." This is the journey we are taken on in Sara Biggs Chaney's Precipice Fruit. Co-opting the language of the clinician, of the I.E.P. summary, of the fearful parent, and finally the child, she weaves these disparate voices into a single narrative. We begin at what is unknown and therefore fearful, and we end on what is unknowable and therefore filled with hope. It is a deft examination of love, grief, and the reclamation of joy. ~ Liz Kay, editor burntdistrict

This book offers a fresh approach to Hawthorne and O'Connor as writers of the American romance. Drawing from a contemporary philosophical context, it applies Gadamer's cultural critique of modernity to the moral and artistic visions conveyed through the authors' use of the literary form of romance. Hawthorne defines the romance form in terms of its freedom from the realism demanded by the novel. The writer of romance creates a neutral territory between the actual and imaginary, inner and outer reality. The world of the romance is therefore one of the author's own making, freed from the constraints of objective reality. As Hawthorne's formulation emphasizes mystery as the traditional realm of romance, it closes the gap between subject and object upon which modern scientific objectivity is based. Hawthorne's scientists, idealist philosophers, artists, and Puritans demonstrate not only his characteristic head and heart dichotomy, but also the prevailing subjectivism of Enlightenment modernity. O'Connor adopts Hawthorne's romance in her own use of the grotesque and for a similar ethical purpose. As a Catholic Christian, she distorts the real in order to reveal the mystery that surrounds existence. O'Connor's secular reformers, liberal intellectuals, and nihilists attempt to manipulate the world of matter in order to improve or remake the world to their own liking. Like Hawthorne's characters, they are confronted by the mystery of the romance to be recalled to the reality of their own finitude. In the field of hermeneutics, Gadamer makes claims that are pertinent to the narratives of Hawthorne and O'Connor. Against the dualism of modern method, he conceives of knowledge as a "fusion of horizons." This dialogic nature of knowledge calls into question the prevailing scientism of post-Enlightenment modernity. Like the fiction writers, he asserts the mystery of aesthetic experience against the will-to-power that, he argues, is characteristic of modern method. This interdisciplinary study seeks to demonstrate that Gadamer's notions of understanding and the philosophical nature of art shed new light on the moral dimension of the romances of Hawthorne and O'Connor.

A poem is an act of faith because the poet believes in it, contends John Wall Barger in The Elephant of Silence, a collection of essays exploring forms of knowing (and not knowing) that awaken a poetic mind. By considering poetry, film, and the intersections among aesthetic moments and our lives, Barger illuminates the foundations of poetic craft but also probes how to be alive, creative, and open in the world. Each piece investigates unanswerable questions and indefinable words: Lorca's duende, Nabokov's poshlost, Bash's underglimmer, Huizinga's ludic, Tarkovsky's Zona. Influenced by poets such as Glück and Ruefle, and filmmakers such as Kubrick and Lynch, Barger writes--first always sharing his own personal life stories--on the nature of perception, experience, and the human mind. With lyric eloquence and disarming candor, The Elephant of Silence tackles how to live an imaginative life, how to gravitate toward the silence from which art comes, and how the mystical is also the everyday.