Agency: A bibliography for composition and rhetoric


Rebecca Moore Howard
The Writing Program
Syracuse University



Please note: I'm increasingly using CiteULike and del.icio.us for my bibliographic work. (On both sites you'll need to click on tags of interest.) Browse what's on this page and then check out CiteULike, del.icio.us, CompPile, and the MLA International Bibliography (requires SU ID) for more. A list of all the static bibliographies that I've put online is here.


Please email suggestions, corrections, or additions.


Last updated 13 July 2007

Alphen, Ernst van.  Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self.  Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993. 

Altieri, Charles.  Subjective Agency:  A Theory of First Person Expressivity and its Social Implications.  Cambridge, MA:  Blackwell, 1994. 

Bevir, Mark.  "Foucault and Critique: Deploying Agency Against Autonomy." Political Theory 27.1 (February 1999):  65-84.  [file Plagiarism:Autonomy]

Bohman, James.  "Practical Reason and Cultural Constraint:  Agency in Bourdieu's Theory of Practice."  Bourdieu:  A Critical Reader.  Ed. Richard Shusterman.  Malden, MA:  Blackwell, 1999. 

Burke, Sean.  Authorship:  From Plato to the Postmodern.  Edinburgh:  Edinburgh UP, 1995. 

Buss, Sarah, and Lee Overton, eds.  Contours of Agency. Cambridge, MA:  MIT P, 2002. 

Butler, Judith.  Excitable Speech:  A Politics of the Performative.  New York:  Routledge, 1997. 

Collins, Daniel F.  "Audience in Afrocentric Rhetoric:  Promoting Human Agency and Social Change."  Alternative Rhetorics:  Challenges to the Rhetorical Tradition.  Ed. Laura Gray-Rosendale and Sibylle Gruber.  Carbondale:  Southern Illinois UP, 2001.  185-202. 

Couture, Barbara.  "Modeling and Emulating:  Rethinking Agency in the Writing Process."  Post-Process Theory:  Beyond the Writing-Process Paradigm.  Ed. Thomas Kent.  Carbondale:  Southern Illinois UP, 1999.  30-48. 

Crowley, Sharon.  "writing and Writing."  Writing and Reading Differently:  Deconstruction and the Teaching of Composition and Literature.  C. Douglas Atkins and Michael L. Johnson, eds.  Lawrence:  UP of Kansas, 1985.  93-100. 

Davis, D. Diane.  Breaking Up [at] Totality:  A Rhetoric of Laughter.  Carbondale:  Southern Illinois UP, 2000. 

Devoss, Danielle, Dawn Hayden, Cynthia L. Selfe, and Richard J. Selfe, Jr.  "Distance Education:  Political and Professional Agency for Adjunct and Part-Time Faculty, and GTAs."  Moving a Mountain: Transforming the Role of Contingent Faculty in Composition Studies and Higher Education. Ed. Patricia Lambert Stock and Eileen E. Schell. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2000.  261-286. 

Eagleton, Terry.  "Self-Authoring Subjects." What Is an Author? Ed. Maurice Birotti and Nicola Miller.  New York:  Manchester UP, 1993.  42-52. 

Ewald, Helen Rothschild, and David L. Wallace.  "Exploring Agency in Classroom Discourse or, Should David Have Told His Story?"  College Composition and Communication 45.3 (October 1994):  342-68.

Faigley, Lester.  Fragments of Rationality:  Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition.  U Pittsburgh P, 1992. 

Flannery, Kathryn T.  "Composing and the Question of Agency."  College English 53.6 (October 1991):  701-13.

Foss, Sonja. "Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Rhetorical Criticism: Rhetorical Criticism as Synecdoche for Agency." Rhetoric Review 25.4 (2006): 375-379.

France, Alan W.  "Dialectics of Self:  Structure and Agency as the Subject of English."  College English 63.2 (November 2000):  145-165. 

Gardiner, Judith Kegan.  Provoking Agents:  Gender and Agency in Theory.  Champaign:  U Illinois P, 1995. 

Geisler, Cheryl. "How Ought We to Understand the Concept of Rhetorical Agency?: Report from the ARS." Rhetoric Society Quarterly 34.3 (Summer 2004): 9-18.

Geisler, Cheryl. "Teaching the Post-Modern Rhetor: Continuing the Conversation on Rhetorical Agency." Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35.4 (Fall 2005): 107-114.

Glass, James M.  Shattered Selves: Multiple Personality in a Postmodern World.  Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993. 

Gunner, Jeanne. "Ideology, Theory, and the Genre of Writing Programs." The Writing Program Administrator as Theorist. Ed. Shirley K. Rose and Irwin Weiser. Westport, CT: Heinemann Boynton/Cook, 2002.

Hawisher, Gail E., and Cynthia L. Selfe, with Yi-Huey Guo and Lu Liu. "Globalization and Agency: Designing and Redesigning the Literacies of Cyberspace." College English 68.6 (July 2006): 619-.

Hite, Molly.  "Inventing Gender:  Creative Writing and Critical Agency."  Disciplining Composition:  Alternative Histories, Critical Perspectives.  Ed. David R. Shumway and Craig Dionne.  SUNY P, 2002.  149-158.

Holland, Dorothy, Debra Skinner, and Carol Cain.  Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds.  Cambridge, MA:  Harvard UP, 2001. 

Howard, Rebecca Moore.  "Reflexivity and Agency in Rhetoric and Pedagogy."  College English 56.3 (March 1994):  92-9. 

Jones, Donald C. "Beyond the Postmodern Impasse of Agency:  The Resounding Relevance of John Dewey's Tacit Tradition."  JAC:  A Journal of Composition Theory 16.1 (1996):  81-102. 

Lash, Scott, and Jonathan Friedman, eds.  Modernity and Identity.  Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992.

Lundberg, Christian, and Joshua Gunn. "'Ouija Board, Are There Any Communications?' Agency, Ontotheology, and the Death of the Humanist Subject, or, Continuing the ARS Conversation." Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35.4 (Fall 2005): 83-106.

McComisky, Bruce.  "Composing Postmodern Subjectivities in the Aporia between Identity and Difference."  Rhetoric Review 15 (1997):  350-64. 

McLeod, Susan H. "The Foreigner: WAC Directors as Agents of Change." Resituating Writing: Constructing and Administering Writing.  Programs. Ed. Joseph Janangelo and Kristine Hansen. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995. 108-116.

Mann, Patricia S.  Micro-Politics:  Agency in a Postfeminist Era.  Minneapolis:  U Minnesota P, 1994. 

McNay, Lois.  Gender and Agency:  Reconfiguring the Subject in Feminist and Social Theory.  Malden, MA:  Blackwell, 2000. 

Messer-Davidow, Ellen.  Disciplining Feminism:  From Social Activism to Academic Discourse.  Durham, NC:  Duke UP, 2002. 

Miller, Susan.  Rescuing the Subject:  A Critical Introduction to Rhetoric and the Writer.  Carbondale:  Southern Illinois UP, 1989. 

O'Hara, Daniel T.  Radical Parody: American Culture and Critical Agency after Foucault.  New York: Columbia UP, 1992. 

Overbye, Dennis. "Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don't." New York Times 2 Jan. 2007.

Poulakos, Takis.  "Human Agency in the History of Rhetoric:  Gorgias's Encomium of Helen."  Writing Histories of Rhetoric.  Ed. Victor Vitanza.  Carbondale, IL:  Southern Illinois UP, 1994.  59-80. 

Russell, David R.  "Vygotsky, Dewey, and Externalism:  Beyond the Student/Discipline Dichotomy."  Journal of Advanced Composition 13.1 (Winter 1993):  173-98. 

Reynolds, Nedra.  "Interrupting Our Way to Agency:  Feminist Cultural Studies and Composition."  Feminism and Composition Studies:  In Other Words.  Ed. Susan C. Jarratt and Lynn Worsham.  New York:  Modern Language Assocation, 1998.  58-73. 

Ritter, Kelly. "Extra-Institutional Agency and the Public Value of the WPA." WPA: Writing Program Administration 29.3 (Spring 2006).

Sosnoski, James J.  "Notes on Postmodern Double Agency and the Arts of Lurking."  College Composition and Communication 47.2 (May 1996):  288-92. 

Strauss, Susan, and Xuehua Xiang. "The Writing Conference as a Locus of Emergent Agency." Written Communication 23 (2006): 355-396.

Trimbur, John.  "Agency and the Death of the Author:  A Partial Defense of Modernism."  JAC:  A Journal of Composition Theory 20.2 (2000):  283-298. 

Wall, Susan.  "Where Your Treasure Is':  Accounting for Differences in Our Talk about Teaching."  Taking Stock:  The Writing Process Movement in the '90s.  Ed. Lad Tobin and Thomas Newkirk.  Portsmouth, NH:  Boynton/Cook-Heinemann, 1994.  239-260.  

Wallace, David.  "Reconsidering Behaviorist Composition Pedagogies:  Positivism, Empiricism, and the Paradox of Postmodernism."  JAC 16.1 (1996):  103-17. 

Wegner, Daniel M.  The Illusion of Conscious Will.  Cambridge, MA:  MIT P, 2002. 

Werder, Carmen.  "Rhetorical Agency:  Seeing the Ethics of It All."  WPA:  Writing Program Administration 24.1-2 (Fall-Winter 2000):  9-28. 

Wise, J. Macgregor.  "Intelligent Agency."  Cultural Studies 12.3 (October 1998).

Yarbrough, Stephen R.  "Force, Power, and Motive."  Philosophy and Rhetoric 29.4 (1996):  344-58. 

Ziarek, Ewa Plonowska.  An Ethics of Dissensus:  Postmodernity, Feminism, and the Politics of Radical Democracy.  Palo Alto, CA:  Stanford UP, 2001.