Writing against the Curriculum: Anti-Disciplinarity in the Writing and Cultural Studies Classroom(Cultural Studies/Pedagogy/Activism)

Writing against the Curriculum responds to the growing popularity of Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) and Writing in the Disciplines (WID) programs in universities and colleges across the United States. Many of these schools employ both an "Introduction to Writing" course and a subsequent selection of writing-intensive courses housed within academic departments, thus simultaneously offering opportunities to subvert disciplinary knowledge production in the earlier course, even as they reaffirm those divisions in their later requirements. Written by administrators, faculty, and librarians at public and private institutions, who teach traditional and online introductory and advanced writing classes, the essays in Writing against the Curriculum argue that these introductory composition classrooms make excellent spaces to question disciplinarity through the study of rhetoric, with an emphasis on critical thinking and curricular flexibility, before students experience disciplinary enforcement most intensely in the advanced courses. Thus, this collection intervenes in current discourses of theory and practice in the related fields of composition and cultural studies because simultaneous attention to both fields enables both the activist enactment of cultural studies' theoretical ambitions and the interrogation of the theoretical and political implications of composition practices.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1. Introduction: Writing against the Curriculum Part 2 Part I. What is the Writing for? Chapter 3 Chapter 2. Cultural Studies, Rhetorical Studies, and Composition: Toward an Anti-Disciplinary Nexus Chapter 4 Chapter 3. Subjugated Knowledges and De-disciplinarity in a Cultural Studies Pedagogy Chapter 5 Chapter 4. Interventions at the Intersections: An Analysis of Public Writing and Student Writing Part 6 Part II. Shifting Schemas Chapter 7 Chapter 5. Writing is against Discipline: Three Courses Chapter 8 Chapter 6. The Brake of Reflection: Slowing Social Process in the Critical WID Classroom Chapter 9 Chapter 7. Location, Location, Location: The Radical Potential of Web-Intensive Writing Programs to Challenge Disciplinary Boundaries Chapter 10 Chapter 8. Discipline and Indulgence Part 11 Part III. Writing across the (Anti)Disciplines Chapter 12 Chapter 9. "Only Connect": Doing Dickens, Cultural Studies, and Anti-Disciplinarity in the University Literature Classroom Chapter 13 Chapter 10. From Things Fall Apart to Freedom Dreams: Black Literature in the Multicultural Composition Classroom Chapter 14 Chapter 11. Performing/Teaching/Writing: Performance Studies in the Critical Composition Classroom

About the Author :
Randi Gray Kristensen is assistant professor of university writing at The George Washington University. Ryan Claycomb is assistant professor of English at West Virginia University.

Review :
Writing against the Curriculum makes a significant and timely contribution to critical conversations about the place and status of the fields/areas of composition, rhetoric, and cultural studies. This collection is especially timely given substantial institutional pressures to rationalize writing, inquiry, and pedagogy into commodifiable and assessable forms; and, by demands to professionalize and package these fields as 'disciplines.' While Kristensen and Claycomb accurately refer to their collection as "border writing" (in Giroux's sense of the term), the text also has the critical, creative, and resistant energy of an affinity group-struggling within the nexus of classrooms, academic institutions, and neoliberalism. Writing against the Curriculum is a must read for students and faculty devoted to, in the words of Kristensen and Claycomb, "making space for the unruly, the resistant, and the radical" in composition, rhetoric, and cultural studies. This volume is the guide book to anti-disciplinary living and teaching we've been waiting for. Composition and cultural studies come together here to expose the fractures in the corporate university, with its efforts to streamline production, contain difference, and turn out recognizable, disciplined commodities. Writing against such a limited curriculum, the scholar-activists included in this volume collectively seek to unleash all that is excessive and unruly about learning, teaching, and writing. In doing so, they position the writing classroom not as a mere gateway to disciplinarity and professionalization. Instead, the writing classroom here becomes a resistant location where new forms of knowledge, new ways of thinking and writing, and unexpected but vital forms of critical conviviality are generated. Writing against the Curriculum provides a timely and needed response for how Composition Studies and Cultural Studies can resist these trends, implement theory across pedagogical and programmatic contexts, and build anti-disciplinary praxis into an increasingly disciplined academy.