Contests the assumption that vitalism and contemporary rhetoric represent opposing, disconnected poles in the writing tradition. Vitalism has been historically linked to expressivism and dismissed as innate and unteachable, whereas rhetoric is seen as a rational, teachable method for producing argumentative texts. Hawk calls for the reexamination of current pedagogies to incorporate vitalism and complexity theory and argues for their application in the environments where students write and think today.
Winner of the 2007 JAC W. Ross Winterowd Award
Honorable Mention, 2007 MLA Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize

Byron Hawk is associate professor of English at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of A Counter-History of Composition: Toward Methodologies of Complexity, winner of the W. Ross Winterowd Award, and coeditor of Small Tech: The Culture of Digital Tools.