Scott (English, U. of North Carolina-Charlotte) examines the gap between students' inner lives as they express their intellect through writing academically and their existence in low-wage jobs in service industries. Written for students and scholars, this book argues that teachers and students in post-secondary learning institutions are compromised by a "social turn" in rhetoric and composition, dated concepts in higher learning and generic identity categories in fast-capitalist economies, leading to the lack of connection between these two facets of students' lives. The author also uses interviews 21 members of writing faculty to examine the relationship between professional standing, textbook industries and writing pedagogy. Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Building on recent work in rhetoric and composition that takes an historical materialist approach, Dangerous Writing outlines a political economic theory of composition. The book connects pedagogical practices in writing classes to their broader political economic contexts, and argues that the analytical power of students’ writing is prevented from reaching its potential by pressures within the academy and without, that tend to wed higher education with the aims and logics of “fast-capitalism.”
Since the 1980s and the “social turn” in composition studies and other disciplines, scholars in this field have conceived writing in college as explicitly embedded in socio-rhetorical situations beyond the classroom. From this conviction develops a commitment to teach writing with an emphasis on analyzing the social and political dimensions of rhetoric.
Ironically, though a leftist himself, Tony Scott’s analysis finds the academic left complicit with the forces in American culture that tend, in his view, to compromise education. By focusing on the structures of labor and of institutions that enforce those structures, Scott finds teachers and administrators are too easily swept along with the inertia of a hyper-commodified society in which students---especially working class students---are often positioned as commodities, themselves. Dangerous Writing, then, is a critique of the field as much as it is a critique of capitalism. Ultimately, Scott’s eye is on the institution and its structures, and it is these that he finds most in need of transformation.
