Abstract: I had to gather my courage before trying to score on someone as quick as Stanley Fish, who’s faster than Kobe Bryant in the paint. I’ve admired his work and, indeed, been shaped by it for a very long time. He once said something nice about my work—I treasure that. But, unfortunately, in his new book he also says that composition studies presents “the clearest example” of what’s desperately wrong in the academy, because in writing classrooms “more often than not anthologies of provocative readings take center stage and the actual teaching of writing is shunted to the sidelines” (49, 40). Therefore I venture to defend my field and try to block a few of his shots. Fish objects to shunting writing to the sidelines because teaching writing is the proper job of composition specialists and academics have one job and one job only: to teach the material of their disciplines. The goal of this teaching is to help students learn how to arrive at carefully qualified, antifoundationalist, but nevertheless objective and trustworthy truths about the objects of study. For composition scholars, the goal should be to help students learn to write better. But this is exactly what composition specialists have always been trying to do. The field’s development has been profoundly shaped by the changing demographics of the college classroom, bringing more and more

Abstract: In this paper, I consider the question of teaching in the light of the crisis in the humanities. This crisis comprehends not only the threatened situ ation of the humanities in terms of resources and cultural value but also the related problem of the seeming abstruseness of humanities scholarship relative to the aesthetic values and experiences of the broader public. In this context, discussions of pedagogy tend to be inherently justificatory for the discipline?that is, discussions of how we teach, far more than discus sions of how we do our scholarship, heighten and focus the question of how we explain what we do and why it matters. Conversely, justifications of the discipline tend to require, at some point, a discussion of teaching. That is, explaining the importance of what we do is typically seen to re

Abstract: Some instances of editorship seem to call for activism as well as archival scholarship. When as coeditors (Maura Spiegel from the English department and Rita Charon from the Department of Medicine at Columbia) we took up stewardship of the boundary-crossing journal Literature and Medicine, the divisions between its two parent fields were more evident than their alignments. Our readers, despite their express willingness to cross the lines between humanities and science, were not always at home with the complex theoretical musings of each other, a state of affairs that had limited the intellectual octane of earlier stages of this new dual field. Nonetheless, we took a chance on our readers’ intellectual curiosity and published sophisticated theoretical treatments of clinically salient topics (e.g., disability, mourning, memory) and clinical treatments of textually salient topics (e.g., psychoanalytic theories of reading and neurological sources of identity). Sensing that in some literary quarters an interface with medicine carried the musty aura of “cultural enrichment” for busy doctors or was merely the work of medical hobbyists intent on diagnosing the unspecified ailments of characters in novels, we sought and published established literary scholars—including Wayne Booth, Andrew Delbanco,

Abstract: The truth is that promoting science isn't just about providing resources?it's about protecting free and open inquiry. . . . It's about en suring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology. It's about listening to what our scientists have to say, even when it's inconvenient?especially when it's inconvenient. Because the highest purpose of science is the search for knowledge, truth and a greater un derstanding of the world around us.

Abstract: Scholars usually think of journal editors with some ambivalence. Editors are, first of all, gatekeepers. When one’s article is accepted, the image is of the kindly doorkeeper, opening the way to publication. When an article is rejected, the editor is the evil troll lurking under the bridge, barring the way. The editor’s second generally recognized role is that of emender: to some, a kindly mentor; to others, an interfering Miss Thistlebottom. Beyond that, many give little thought to what editors do. Yet often editors also direct a journal’s intellectual development, manage its finances, create its graphic image, design and manage its Web presence, and set the tone for its relationship with readers and contributors. And given the extent of their influence on academic disciplines and on the careers of their colleagues, it seems equally reasonable to consider what can be done to ensure that they are well prepared for their editorial responsibilities. Is the editing of scholarly journals a profession? At first blush, certainly not! Except for editors at university presses and other scholarly publishing institutions, few people edit full time or for their entire careers. Most journal editors serve part-time, for a few years.1 Moreover, few journal editors have any training for their positions. They are chosen by their colleagues or by a publisher because of their reputations as scholars, and preparation for the job usually involves little more than a meeting with the previous editor and the ritual handing down of files. (The sciences are an exception:

Abstract: It might not be obvious to many, but academic journals, through their continuous serial publication, knit a fine yet extensive web of language that flows like a nervous system through society, connecting readers to multiple states of intellectual awareness and vibrant potentiality. The work of journal editing in language and literature studies interlaces a collective dialogue that takes place across all the issues of a journal; between that journal and other journals; and, just as important, within and among different nations. A multilingual journal constructs a palpable cultural viaduct, allowing intellectual and literary production to flow into new spaces in other cultures, creating alertness on both ends, for the practice of translation can transcend barriers of language. In an increasingly global way of life, multilingual journals are the catalysts of cultural fusion and assimilation, the place where translation becomes the lattice supporting the growth of the concept of otherness. However, I often wonder to what extent this observation is applicable to journals published in the United States, for editing across language and culture divides is such a scarce activity in this country. I wish to trace some of the forces that impede editing across the divide between English and other languages—particularly Spanish.

Abstract: At a recent gathering of colleagues in a restaurant perched among the precarious hills of San Francisco, the conversation tipped momentarily toward editing. Some of those seated at the table had been contributors to Leviathan, the peer-reviewed journal of Melville studies I edit. And as I carefully spun the lazy Susan of Chinese dishes to my left, I disclosed what I had heard from another contributor?not present and never mind the name, of course?whose work was soon to appear in the journal. As with all contributions, the essay had been a blind submission, accepted by readers on our editorial board and revised according to their advice. In a final round of revision, I had given the essay a vigorous copyediting, responding often line by line to issues regarding fact, mechanics, and style but also argumentation. After his article had gone through several rounds of such back-and-forthing and been sent off to the compositor, the con tributor wrote to me, with tremendous appreciation, to say that he had never gotten as much feedback from his dissertation director as he had from me. Across the table, another contributor, whose experience moving his essay through the Leviathan matrix had been similar, added his own anecdote. He had made exactly the same comparison between dissertation director and "Editor Bryant" but in this case to a fellow graduate student. And as he spun the sizzling beef back in my direction, he reported his friend's riposte: "Well, yeah, it's his journal."

Abstract: As much as anyone in literary studies, Stanley Fish has taken seriously the injunction to be a public intellectual. Back in the early 1990s he debated Dinesh D’Souza in a large number of venues, on questions of education, political correctness, affirmative action, changes in the literary canon, and other subjects of controversy, in a road show where the attraction was opposing contrarians. Since then he has continued to write essays for nonacademic publication, and Save the World on Your Own Time is a distillation of such op-ed pieces and public pronouncements. Now often when we think of public intellectuals, we imagine someone who mediates between the academy and the general public, explaining academic discoveries to a lay public in terms that they can comprehend: Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, or Brian Greene. Another version is the intellectual who operates outside the academy and pronounces judiciously on a range of public issues: Emile Zola and Jean-Paul Sartre are illustrious predecessors, but we can also think of Susan Sontag, Salman Rushdie, Cornell West, and perhaps Umberto Eco. But Fish has pioneered a different role—the role of public intellectual as provocateur—where the goal is not to explain work in a recondite academic specialty or to propound judiciously on questions of public moment but to provoke, to offer arguments that will irritate and prompt discussion. In this new role, it is not a matter of taking sides in an ongoing controversy—strategically, to promote the side you favor, trying to win

Abstract: In their introduction to the collection Multimodal Composition, Pamela Takayoshi and Cynthia Selfe assert that “[i]f composition instruction is to remain relevant, the definition of ‘composition’ and ‘texts’ needs to grow and change to reflect people’s literacy practices in new digital communication environments” (3). Although Takayoshi and Selfe are emphasizing undergraduate instruction, a parallel argument applies to journal editors in English studies and beyond: as scholars heed the call, they require contexts that enable rather than constrain scholarship about teaching and researching in digital environments. Certainly, the desire to create such an intellectual community was behind the development of Computers and Composition in 1983, originally edited by Cynthia Selfe and Kate Kiefer and since 1988 by Gail Hawisher and Selfe. Twenty-some years later, Computers and Composition is an international journal with both print and online components, supported by a strong cohort of digital literacy and composition scholars

Abstract: Once, late in the hot afternoon of a summer day, I looked up from a set of manuscripts to find a stranger leaning against the doorframe. His name was Richard Price, and he’d come to write a magazine article on an aspect of the university’s athletic program. In his off time, he wanted to see the offices of the literary quarterly Prairie Schooner. I was pleased to meet Price, whose novels I’d read and liked. He and my family spent an evening together, drinking beer and eating pizza, talking about wrestling, a passion our grandmothers shared. We of the next generations seemed to like to wrestle text. In fact, my passion for editing was one response to the difficult times we discussed. History, I suggested, offers little control to its human witnesses, maybe only the power of retrospective analysis. But art seemed to invite immediate human response. I’d come to believe that we editors, if we worked hard enough, might see some of our writers grow to be famous, as Price was about to become. The family stories we told were an act of friendly exchange. But the occasion for our meeting was very much a by-product of the intensive work of literary publishing, an active collaboration between creative writers and editors that brings art to its audience. Price knew about Prairie Schooner just as we knew about Price.

Abstract: The assumption that the quality of the texts we assign determines the educational value of studying those texts seems so self-evident as to be beyond question. It seems obvious that the higher the quality of a text, the more educationally rewarding reading it will be. The most influen tial modern statement of this view is Matthew Arnold's 1888 essay "The Study of Poetry," in which Arnold argued that with the waning of popular religious faith, poetry had to step in and assume the burden of provid ing spiritual comfort and meaning to an emerging mass democratic so ciety. But Arnold stresses that for poetry to fulfill this new responsibil ity, only poetry of the highest literary quality would suffice. As Arnold puts it, we must "set our standard for poetry high, since poetry, to be ca pable of fulfilling such high destinies, must be poetry of a high order of