Mark(et)ing “The Handbook:” Pedagogies of Legitimization, Neutral Expertise, and Convention

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Notes

1. It is impossible here, to begin to list even very recent handbooks whose subject matter touches on central concerns of this journal. Suffice it to say that there are handbooks on cultural analysis, political economy, performance studies, media studies, Internet politics, black studies, emotion and affect, gender and sexuality studies, political geography, film studies, and so forth.

2. There exist variations on the entitling word that are at least as interesting as “handbook.” Blackwell publishes “handbooks,” but it also produces “companions,” in some respects an even more appealing terminological claim on the market, although one that occasionally harbors the capacity for odd misreading. A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare might raise the (impertinent) question of whether Shakespeare wanted or needed a feminist chum. Dympna Callaghan, ed., A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001).

3. James Arnt Aune, “Coping With Modernity: Strategies of twentieth-Century Rhetorical Theory,” in The SAGE Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, ed. Andrea A. Lunsford, with associate eds. Kirt H. Wilson and Rosa A. Eberly (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009), 102.

4. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, ed., Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Carole Blair

Carole Blair is Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on the rhetorical dimensions of twentieth-century US commemorative places and artworks