Document Type
Review Essay
Abstract
[First paragraph]
City Comp: Identities, Spaces, Practices is a collection of essays that address the intersections of composition studies and place studies. But don't look for any sublime vistas or sweeping landscapes in this volume. Rather, City Comp is an engagement with urban spaces and the citizens, teachers and students who write, work and live in these spaces. The (auto)ethnographic, narrative style of the collection is common to composition studies, but this volume resists the kind of self-therapeutic tendencies that are often found with such an approach. Rather, City Comp makes a critical exploration of the historical, political, cultural and spatial conditions that mix to create what Linda Flower calls, in her introduction to the volume, a "rhetoric of real space." All the teachers and writers in this volume encounter and engage in heterogeneous discourses that collide with a rhetoric of materiality, leading these writers to negotiate discrete spaces and to the act of doing "city comp."
Repository Citation
Ortoleva, Matthew. "On McComiskey and Ryan's City Comp: Identities, Spaces, Practices." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 5, no. 3, 2025, pp. 1–3. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol5/iss3/15