Amazon.com description: Product Description: The Resistant Writer integrates two lively sub-fields in rhetoric and composition: nineteenth-century composition history and contemporary issues about teaching cultural studies in composition. Examining the broad cultural anxieties that nineteenth-century intellectuals faced reveals that training in composition was envisioned as more than the means for producing competent writers. The training also reacted to and tried to ameliorate the nineteenth-century crisis in public discourse, this one brought about not by television, commodity capitalism, or the World Wide Web, but by the then-dominant medium of public discussion, the newspaper.
Paine carefully reveals that today s writing teachers are not the first to desire that the composition classroom have social import beyond the academy. These thoughtful new insights from composition s origins form an intriguing critique of contemporary cultural studies and composition theories of student transformation."