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Scholarship in literacy and education has depicted reading as an active, multidimensional, and complex process. However, an often more reductive version of reading, close reading, has been advocated frequently for use in secondary and postsecondary literacy classrooms. The author examines materials created to help teachers implement close reading strategies to demonstrate the New Critical assumptions that undergird some close reading pedagogies. The author ends by recommending genre analysis as a way for educators to broaden students’ conceptions of reading.

Data from a study of graduate instructors in a composition teaching practicum show that the neglect of declarative knowledge about language is something that they were conscious of and wished to remedy. This finding supports arguments calling for reinstating a focus on linguistic knowledge in composition and writing studies programs.

In his often-cited “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class,” James Berlin (1988) contends that there is no such thing as a politics-(or ideology-) free classroom. As framed in the introduction to this collection, scholars working in rhetoric and composition have long argued, albeit from various standpoints, that because language and literacy are political and ideological, such ideology inevitably enters the writing classroom. Critical pedagogy maintains that because schooling is “an instrument of domination,” even educators who profess to leave politics out of the classroom are political in that they are reproducing dominant ideology and maintaining acceptance of inequality, a

This article uses a combination of speech act theory and research on microaggressions to analyze statements made by scholars in the fields of literature and creative writing towards their colleagues in composition. We argue that framing these interactions as “hierarchical microaggressions,” a term coined by Kathryn Young et al., helps explain compositionists’ potentially defensive reactions to seemingly innocuous remarks, and also points towards ways of engaging in constructive communication among English department colleagues about the field of composition.