In The Valve, Mark Bauerlein writes:
'Here are some papers that were delivered at the annual CCCC (Conference on College Composition and Communication). With so many college students graduating without the ability to compose a coherent paragraph, one might assume the focus of the convention would fall upon writing skills and rhetorical structures. But for a fair portion of the entries, we get something else.
One paper is entitled “‘Register Your Penis’: Using Critical Discourse Analysis to Uncover Gender Conflict,” and the description runs, “As part of a larger thesis, this paper focuses on the “Penis Registry,” an activity introduced by CSU, Chico’s Women’s Center in support of Take Back the Night (TBTN), a nationwide university event . . .”
Here’s another one, showing us that there is no topic to which the race isue may not be applied: “Race, Rhetoric and the Digital Divide: From Digital Writing to Blogging.” And this: “Classroom and Race Issues for Building Community,” and this: “alternative Rhetorics: Postcolonial, Race, Womanist.”
And what would a general humanities conference be without something on the Middle East, as in: “Rhetoric and the Question of Palestine,” with a description containing the requisite sneer quotes--"The continuing saga of violence and bitterness known as the ‘Israel-Palestine conflict’ is less a matter of contested land than it is a matter of contested reality, framed in rhetorics that lead to radically different moral conclusions.”
And, to display hipness, we need some pop culture stuff, if only to show our appreciation of its subversive potential. Here is “Disturbing the Peace: Hip Hop as Theory, Politics, and Pedagogy,” and also “Rhetorics of Reception: Three Cases from Popular Culture” (two of them being the films Barbershop and Million Dollar Baby).
And, finally, for the political slant, there is a panel on “Towards A Progressive Politic in High School English Classrooms in Chicago.” Can one imagine a session at CCCC that begins “Towards a Conservative Politic”? '
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This is ed school stuff, kicked upstairs to freshman comp. It was kind of Bauerlein not to subject us to the real guts of the scandal -- the paragraphs that come after these titles.
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