New York, NY – 5 December 2011 – The Modern Language Association of America today announced it is awarding its thirty-first Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize to Jane Stanley, of the University of California, Berkeley, for her book The Rhetoric of Remediation: Negotiating Entitlement and Access to Higher Education, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. The prize is awarded for an outstanding work in the fields of language, culture, literacy, and literature with strong application to the teaching of English.
Jane Stanley's fascinating, engaging Rhetoric of Remediation reminds us that the history of remediation and its guiding rhetorics continue to operate today—as well as to shape the teaching of writing from high school through college. With impressive historical range, Stanley links archival documents with political and economic developments, vividly illustrating how the rhetoric of remediation negotiates the terrain between access and status at the University of California, Berkeley, and by implication elsewhere. Along the way, portraits of key composition figures offer an insightful genealogy of the present. This is an excellent resource for anyone interested in the history of college composition and remediation, perplexed by institutions' ambivalence toward underprepared students, or charged with articulating what our culture currently calls college readiness.
