Assembling Composition - (Studies in Writing and Rhetoric) by Kathleen Blake Yancey & Stephen J McElroy (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Drawing on historical studies as well as on current innovations of composing, Assembling Composition provides a new framework for understanding composing.

As Kathleen Blake Yancey, Stephen J. McElroy, and their contributors detail, assemblage theory explains disparate composing practices--from postcard production in the early twentieth century to database-informed composing in the twenty-first, from museum-inspired collecting to creative repetitions of authentic Native American practices. And as a key concept, assemblage has been field tested in several settings, including first-year composition, upper-level writing courses, and graduate courses. Assembling Composition speaks particularly to four dimensions of assemblage:

• Ways that assemblage helps us theorize current digital and material composing practices
• Ways that employing assemblage as a key term and practice in the teaching of writing can assist both teachers and students
• Ways that assemblage has historically contributed to everyday composing
• And ways that we can interrogate assemblage as an ethical practice

Collectively, these chapters complicate and enrich our understandings of composing, our sense of what constitutes a text, and our expectation of the potential effects of texts.

Review Quotes

"Assembling Composition builds on the concept of assemblage, showing what the practice of assemblage can do. Much more than a simple putting together of things that already exist, assemblage becomes agencement, a processual capacity for invention that arises from collective movements. The production of new things becomes entangled with the invention of new concepts, all of which impact composition as a whole. This book should become essential reading for graduate courses in composition studies that aim toward embodying new materialisms in processes of composing." --Byron Hawk, University of South Carolina

"The authors of the collection brilliantly expand and constrict assemblage and its possibilities as noun and verb, inviting us--through the work of Johnson-Eilola and Selber, Delueze and Guattari, and others, and with examples that range from tombstones to music to postcards to memes--to think deeply, critically, contextually, and culturally about what it means to assemble." --Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, Michigan State University