Engaging Audience: Writing in an Age of New Literacies

This collection builds upon Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford’s groundbreaking work to examine the rhetorical concept of audience as it relates to twenty-first century teaching and learning. Editors M. Elizabeth Weiser, Brian M. Fehler, and Angela M. Gonzalez bring together compositionists from the departments of English, communications, public relations, and writing to offer insights that serve as a guide for incorporating audience awareness into the contemporary classroom.

Contributors engage in a dialogue with Ede and Lunsford’s previously published essays Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy and Representing Audience: ‘Successful’ Discourse and Disciplinary Critique, as well as their new essay, Among the Audience: On Audience in an Age of New Literacies, written especially for this collection.

Through these engagements, contributors offer insights on audience from divergent perspectives - composition pedagogy, new media studies, service learning and professional writing, diversity, and rhetorical and literary theory - that establish a third category in the addressed/invoked binary, an audience updated that takes various professional and cultural forms but is most evidently audience interacting .