Reconstruction 5.3 (Summer 2005)

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Bruce McComiskey and Cynthia Ryan, eds. City Comp: Identities, Spaces, Practices. New York: SUNY Press 2003. 248 pp. Softcover. $21.95. ISBN: 0791455505

<1> 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."

<2> Edited by Bruce McComisky and Cynthia Ryan, City Comp is divided into three sections. The first section deals with identities of both cities and their inhabitants, and how the two interact to construct one another. McComisky and Ryan, along with Tracey Baker and Peggy Jolly, contribute the first essay in the volume, entitled "Myth, Identity and Composition: Teaching Writing in Birmingham, Alabama." This essay is part ethnographic study, part rhetorical criticism and part teaching workshop. The essay examines the way that the city of Birmingham, Alabama has been, and continues to be, created through several different and competing discourses. The essay further examines the mythological construction of the city and explores attempts by the University of Alabama to change this mythological identity with rhetorically-distinct admissions materials. This first essay sets the tone of the entire collection, but not necessarily the model. Other essays in the first section move beyond the walls of academia and attend to city comp in other urban settings. A prime example is "'Not Your Mama's Bus Tour': A Case for 'Radically Insufficient' Writing," an essay by Paula Mathieu, which explores the educational difficulties and life challenges of homeless and low-income people that work for the Chicago street newspaper StreetWise. Mathieu's essay does an exceptional job at highlighting the social and public character of writing that exists outside academia.

<3> I found the most intriguing essays located in section two of the collection. The essays in section two examine the spaces where writing is done and the influence of those spaces upon the writing. These essays also examine the spaces where urban controversies and issues play out in a multiplicity of discourses. Van Hillard's essay, "A Place in the City: Hull-House and the Architecture of Civility," conducts a microcosmic study of the Chicago settlement house known as Hull-House. His exploration of the non-traditional writing classroom investigates how a structure, in this case Hull-House, becomes a space for the practice of civic and public behaviors. To Hillard, city comp at Hull-House "takes a form of composition instruction that grapples with the variants of urban sociability, population diversity, and material-spatial constraints in a manner characteristically different from writing instruction in non-urban spaces" (113). Hence, Hull-House became the impetus for the practice of civic literacies and new social and cognitive associations. Jeffrey Grabill's "The Written City: Urban Planning, Computer Networks and Civic Literacies," and Richard Marback's "Speaking of the City and Literacies of Place Making," both explore the "rhetorical turn" in urban planning and aptly illustrate the discursive character of the profession. Marback's essay, perhaps the best in the volume, offers a compelling articulation of place-making theory. Marback writes "Place making constructs an understanding of places out of the actions, objects and words we use when we occupy a space and fill it with meaning" (147). Taken as a whole, section two of this volume lays a powerful foundation for future studies of place-making in an urban environment.

<4> The essays contained in the third section of this volume largely expand on the preceding two sections, and specifically look at pedagogical practices and the institutional dynamics of composition within urban universities. Readers used to composition scholarship may find the style of the essays familiar, with descriptions of university programs and the author's personal experiences with them. Of particular note, Barbara Gleason's "Urban Literacies and the Ethnographic Process: Composing Communities at the Center of Worker Education," offers an exceptional argument in favor of ethnographic writing in composition courses as it examines an adult writing program at New York's City College. The variations of institutions and practices that are evident in this section illustrate an important point of City Comp - that composition pedagogy and rhetorical construction are localized, situated practices.

<5> The inhabitants of this volume offer a diversity of voices that is truly striking. A sweeping array of subject positions and urban environments provides a terrain full of promise. The residents of City Comp include traditional-aged, upper-middle-class students; people of color; working adults; homeless people; and community activists that all share one important feature, they all write to understand, negotiate and ultimately change the environments that they inhabit. Evident throughout this volume is a strong notion of writing for change, writing that is socially engaging, and the sense that city comp is a liberating and civic practice.

<6> Pedagogically, City Comp is an exceptional introductory to the intersections of place studies and composition studies. For scholars that are intrigued by this intersection, City Comp is a great place to start. For teachers that want to try a new approach to composition that is very much in keeping with critical and libratory practices, this volume offers the ingredients for such a change. City Comp would even serve well as an upper-division undergraduate composition reader. Ultimately, the essays contained in City Comp and the variety of practices represented could signal yet another turn in the field of composition studies - the spatial turn.

Matthew Ortoleva

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