#15. Book Drop #2

I have had quite the peripatetic summer, and I am finally back in Davis and ready to return to this blog. I feel guilty for not posting as regularly as I should, but now I'm back and have quite the lineup for features going forward. See the picture below for some books I picked up at the library, which I will be writing about over the next few weeks:

Books. 

a. Whatever (1994) by Michel Houellebecq: There is more to life than rhetoric and composition. There is more to life than the PhD. For this upcoming school year, my goal is to do more reading that is not related to my academic work. My inclusion of this book in this list reflects this effort. The book so far is a pretty short and light read, but articulates a rather bleak worldview, in the sense that the protagonist doesn't really care about anything. This is my first time reading Houellebecq, and I think this is a regular theme in his works, or the phenomenon of how people in late-stage capitalist societies confront a lack of meaning and purpose in their lives. The protagonist also articulates some misogynistic views, which potentially makes the book unpalatable for contemporary audiences, but overall I think these writerly choices serve to make the reader wonder, "how do people end up like this?" As a big fan of 90s/aughts design aesthetics, I also loved the cover of the book, which features a cow protruding from an old-school cathode ray monitor. 

"L'Étranger for the info generation" is a good one-sentence summary of the book.

b. Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition (1991) by Susan Miller: This book has been on my list for a long time (it was actually on my second blog post when I did my first drop of books) and I feel that I have the necessary context to finally understand and follow Miller's overall argument. Essentially she is engaging with the idea that composition started as remediation and thus literature has always seen composition as lesser. This will probably be the next book that I cover on the blog. 

c. Composition & Resistance (1991) edited by C. Mark Hurlbert and Michael Blitz: The 1990s were definitely a time where critical theory had a lot more prevalence in composition studies, and this book reflects how many compositionists at the time were newly thinking about their classrooms as activist spaces. There is an interesting piece from Stephen North in this collection, who talks about the discomfort he has with using activist rhetoric. This is a topic I have thought a lot about over my short career as a community college adjunct and compositionist, and I aim to share more of my thoughts when I review this book. 

d. How To Do Discourse Analysis (2011) by James Paul Gee: The summer has always struck me as a time to study. Considering that this upcoming year I will need to collect data for my qualifying exam, I am trying to sharpen my methodological skills. My qualifying exam involves one-on-one instructor-student writing conferences, which entail instructors engaging in dialogue with students in order to give them feedback on their writing, and I want to be able to conduct discourse analysis in the event that I record this dialogue. As I read this book, Gee makes discourse analysis sound less complicated than it sounds. It seems that the practice just entails reading one's discourse of interest with certain questions in mind. 

e. Constructing Grounded Theory (2014) by Kathy Charmaz: In a similar vein as the previous book, I am again trying to sharpen my methodological skills, and since I am primarily going to be a qualitative researcher, I want to make sure that my knowledge about qualitative coding is as strong as possible. Again, the term grounded theory sounds more complicated than it actually is, and a brief summary of Charmaz's order of operations involves initial coding (going through text and assigning initial codes), focused coding (looking over your initial coding and focusing on codes that are of great interest), and memo writing (developing themes and categories through writing). 

f. Writing On-Line (1985) edited by James L. Collins and Elizabeth A. Sommers: My research interests would situate me as somewhat of a technologist, as I am interested in how AI writing tools might be used to help students learn how to write. This book struck my eye as new technology has always been a disruptor to writing instruction, and while the book is titled Writing On-Line and one would think that the book has to do with the Internet, from a quick look at the table of contents it appears that the book is mainly about how to utilize word processing technologies. This is definitely a technology we largely take for granted in the year 2026. I am interested to see if there is anything we can learn from this previous moment to see how it applies to the perilous times we face today. 

g. Discourse Studies in Composition (2002) edited by Ellen Barton and Gail Stugall: This book was intended to be paired with the grounded theory and discourse analysis books I mentioned above. Considering that I am not a linguist, I figured I would explore how discourse analysis methods have been employed in writing studies research. 

h & i. Beyond Postprocess and Postmodernism: Essays on the Spaciousness of Rhetoric (2003) edited by Theresa Enos and Keith D. Miller & Post-Process Theory: Beyond the Writing-Process Paradigm (1999) edited by Thomas Kent: Since last year, I have been strongly interested in post-process theory, and have thought a lot about what a real world post-process model of teaching composition might look like in the writing classroom. These books will hopefully help me to explore this interest.

That is all for this post. I will be very busy reading and writing over the next few weeks. Until next time!