Writing at the End of the World

Reviews / Votes

Only a book as eloquently composed and carefully reasoned as this one could provide the critical optimism missing from the Humanities today. Miller's intelligent and moving study gives me hope that writing does matter after all, even and especially in the face of our greatest national traumas. This book is humanistic writing at its very best. * Diana Fuss, Princeton University * Richard E. Miller is that rarity in today's academia, a writer of passion and originality whose ideas never conform to predictable party lines. Miller is at his incisive best in this absorbing 'institutional autobiography' on how 'writing may be said to matter' in the post-Columbine, post-9/11 world. * Gerald Graff, author of <i>Clueless in Academe</i> * As always, Miller is not afraid to postulate limit cases for probing the uses and abuses of writing and the teaching of writing at times of crisis. A tour de force bound to provoke intensely divergent but thoughtful responses. * Min-Zhan Lu, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee * Richard Miller has written another provocative, thought-provoking, and moving book about the roles of writing and education in all our lives. I expect Writing at the End of the World to be widely read by teachers and scholars of rhetoric and writing as well as literature, cultural studies, and education. Although this book may seem at first glance not to be as potentially confrontational as Miller's As If Learning Mattered, it is, in parts, more radical than the earlier work and a very fine and nuanced extension of the argument offered there. * Andrea Lunsford, Stanford University * Richard Miller gives us an extended meditation on hope in bleak times, hope as it might be nurtured in the writing classroom, a robust hope, thoughtful and critical, a tool for leading an informed and generous life. * Mike Rose, author of <i>The Promise of Public Education in America</i> * Rich, provocative, and multigenric. . . . The most consistent strength in Writing at the End of the World is Miller's ability to locate existing binaries and blend competing arguments to produce strikingly original insights. * <i>JAC</i> *