Besides the editors, the essayists are Lori Chamberlain, Michael Clark, Dennis A. Foster, Jon Klancher, Randall Knoper, Elaine O. Lees, Mariolina Salvatori, and Nina Schwartz.
Donahue and Quandahl present accessible and exciting efforts to explore composition teaching in a new mode— perhaps, a pristine paradigm of cultural criticism. Approximately half of the essays investigate the pedagogical agenda implied in the theories of a particular writer— Barthes, Lacan, or Burke, for example—and place such theories in the classroom.
The remaining essays examine pedagogy as a critical practice. The book does not advocate a single method of instruction but instead reminds us that theory is itself continually modified by the classroom.