Issue One
“ Big Books”

The editors of inReview discussed at length the pros and cons of taking the rhetoric-reader-handbooks, what we are calling “Big Books,” as the focus for our inaugural issue. In our discussions, the ubiquity of these texts in the field kept coming up as the best reason for and against adopting such a focus. On the one hand, why not begin a discussion about the texts in the widest circulation? Wouldn’t this serve the most teachers and students? On the other hand, hasn’t enough been said already about these familiar titles? Shouldn’t a new journal begin down a road less traveled?

In the end, we decided that the lore and sedimented practices surrounding books like the St. Martins Guide to Writing far outstripped focused critical dialogue. These texts, so often adopted by writing programs, constitute the instructional landscape for many teachers entering composition studies, especially those who do so as adjuncts and from disciplines outside of the field of composition studies. The influence of widely used rhetoric-reader-handbooks on teaching practices is considerable. We are concerned that untheorized, they often drive pedagogy. Short of careful critical discussion, textbooks are perhaps the most powerful site of what composition theorists refer to in the abstract as ideological reproduction. For this reason, we like the resonance of Big Books as a description for the textbooks reviewed in this issue. Their bigness, which in most cases could appropriately be measured in pounds, should be considered in terms of influence.

Of course, no textbook, no matter how hard some authors try, can teach itself. When a teacher adapts a book for her class, she selects and omits, ignores, criticizes, enacting a pedagogical position with the text as an aid and/or a constraint. As this process translates into assignments, syllabi and classroom exercises, the will of the text is challenged again by the students in our diverse classrooms. Big Books are inevitably whittled down at a number of points in the circuits of their use.

The variability of approaches to textbook use represented in these reviews suggest this process of negotiating pedagogy with pedagogical apparatus. We hope that this first and all subsequent issues will inspire discussion among teachers using these texts, and more generally, that it encourages serious theoretical consideration and reflection on our experiences teaching. We ask that you respond to reviews and that you submit your own take on the Big Book you and your students lug around.
Continue to Issue One.