In this collection of original essays, editors Theresa Enos and Keith D. Miller join their contributors--a veritable "who's who" in composition scholarship--in seeking to illuminate and complicate many of the tensions present in the field of rhetoric and composition. The contributions included here emphasize key issues in past and present work, setting the stage for future thought and study. The book also honors the late Jim Corder, a major figure in the development of the rhetoric and composition discipline. In the spirit of Corder's unfinished work, the contributors to this volume absorb, probe, stretch, redefine, and interrogate classical, modern, and postmodern rhetorics--and challenge their limitations. Beyond Postprocess and Postmodernism: Essays on the Spaciousness of Rhetoric will be of interest to scholars, teachers, and students in rhetoric and composition, English, and communication studies. Offering a provocative discussion of postprocess composition theories and pedagogies and postmodern rhetorics, as well as the first thorough consideration of Jim Corder's contributions, this work is certain to influence the course of future study and research.

Beyond Postmodernism: Onto the Postcontemporary is a collection designed to provide the reader with an alternative to viewing the world through the lens of Postmodernism. Contributors to this collection utilize and define such critical tools as transhumanism, post-post theory, posthumanism, and postcontemporary theory. Other essays focus on interpreting texts or genres, yielding impressive conclusions that were “beyond” the scope of postmodern discourse. Eclectic in nature, while examining works as diverse as Julia Ward Howe’s The Hermaphrodite and Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, yet unified in a commonsensical statement that postmodernism has perhaps ruled too long in critical discussions, this collection is also designed to attract those seeking or awaiting something new in critical methodology to consider joining in the postcontemporary dialogue.

Beyond Postprocess offers a vigorous, provocative discussion of postprocess theory in its contemporary profile. Fueled by something like a fundamental refusal to see writing as self-evident, reducible, and easily explicable, the contributors rethink postprocess, suggesting that there is no easily defined moment or method that could be called postprocess. Instead, each contribution to this collection provides a unique and important example of what work beyond postprocess could be. Since postprocess theory in writing studies first challenged traditional conceptions of writing and the subject who writes, developments there have continued to push theorists of writing in a number of promising theoretical directions. Spaces for writing have arisen that radically alter ideological notions of space, rational thinking, intellectual property and politics, and epistemologies; and new media, digital, and visual rhetorics have increasingly complicated the scene, as well. Contributors to Beyond Postprocess reconsider writing and writing studies through posthumanism, ecology, new media, materiality, multimodal and digital writing, institutional critique, and postpedagogy. Through the lively and provocative character of these essays, Beyond Postprocess aims to provide a critical site for nothing less than the broad reevaluation of what it means to study writing today. Its polyvocal considerations and conclusions invest the volume with a unique potential to describe not what that field of study should be, but what it has the capacity to create. The central purpose of Beyond Postprocess is to unleash this creative potential.

Post-Postmodernism begins with a simple premise: we no longer live in the world of "postmodernism," famously dubbed "the cultural logic of late capitalism" by Fredric Jameson in 1984. Far from charting any simple move "beyond" postmodernism since the 1980s, though, this book argues that we've experienced an intensification of postmodern capitalism over the past decades, an increasing saturation of the economic sphere into formerly independent segments of everyday cultural life. If "fragmentation" was the preferred watchword of postmodern America, "intensification" is the dominant cultural logic of our contemporary era. Post-Postmodernism surveys a wide variety of cultural texts in pursuing its analyses—everything from the classic rock of Black Sabbath to the post-Marxism of Antonio Negri, from considerations of the corporate university to the fare at the cineplex, from reading experimental literature to gambling in Las Vegas, from Badiou to the undergraduate classroom. Insofar as cultural realms of all kinds have increasingly been overcoded by the languages and practices of economics, Nealon aims to construct a genealogy of the American present, and to build a vocabulary for understanding the relations between economic production and cultural production today—when American-style capitalism, despite its recent battering, seems nowhere near the point of obsolescence. Post-postmodern capitalism is seldom late but always just in time. As such, it requires an updated conceptual vocabulary for diagnosing and responding to our changed situation.

Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard and Geoffrey Hartman all claim to have found a way to transcend value judgment. This book confronts these assertions and argues that tinkers such as these have, by their rejection of conventional methods of constructing value judgments, succeeded in problematizing the entire area of aesthetics. Stuart Sim treats posttructuralism and postmodernism as forms of anti-aesthetics and contextualises the movements within a longer-running tradition of anti-foundationalism and radical skepticism in Western philosophy. Arguing from a broadly socialist, historical materialist position he demands that discourses be made to declare their ideological commitments. While the radical skepticism of Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard, and their followers is shown to be ultimately philosophically unsustainable and ideologically suspect form a left-wing point of view, Sim concludes that these critics nevertheless point to a need for reassessment of methods and objectives among critical theorists on the left.

After the veritable hype concerning postmodernism in the 1980s and early 1990s, when questions about when it began, what it means and which texts it comprises were apt to trigger heated discussions, the excitement has notably cooled down at the turn of the century. Voices are now beginning to be heard which seem to suggest a new episteme in the making which points beyond postmodernism, while it remains at the same time very uncertain whether what appears as newness is not rather a return to traditional concepts, theoretical premises, and authorial practices. Contributors to this volume propose to explore new openings and recent developments in anglophone literatures and cultural theories which engage with issues seen to be central in the construction of a postmodern paradigm, but deal with them in ways that promise new openings or a new Zeitgeist.