Aristotle's voice

Believing that all composition teachers are situated politically and socially, both as part of the institutions in which they teach and as beings with lived histories, Neel examines his own life and the life of composition studies as a discipline in the context of Aristotle: first, he situates the Rhetoric as a political document; he then situates the Rhetoric in the Aristotelian system and describes how professional discourse came to know itself through Aristotle's way of studying the world; finally, he examines the operation of the Rhetoric inside itself before arguing the need to turn to Aristotle's notion of sophistry as a way of negating his system. Jasper Neel's sure-to-be-controversial resituating of Aristotle centers around three questions that have been constants in his twenty-two years of teaching experience: What does it mean to teach writing? What should one know before teaching writing? and If there is such a thing as "research in the teaching of writing," what is it?