Fields of Reading: Motives for Writing

Fields of Reading draws on the major divisions of the curriculum — arts and humanities, social sciences, and sciences — to offer well-crafted and high-quality writing from these fields. Chosen with the rhetorical purposes of composition in mind by editors who are all distinguished teachers and writers, the selections progress from individual essays to paired texts to casebooks that contain multiple readings on engaging topics and compelling issues. Even more than its predecessors, the new edition emphasizes the cross-curricular reading, thinking, and writing expected in college as it exposes students to key cultural conversations that involve major voices in contemporary intellectual life. The print text is now integrated with e-Pages for Fields of Reading, designed to take advantage of what the Web can do. 

Robert Scholes, professor of modern culture and media at Brown University, is a distinguished teacher and a scholar in literary studies. He has published many influential books and articles, including The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline (1998), Protocols of Reading (1989), and Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English (1985), which won the Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize of the Modern Language Association in 1986 and the David H. Russell Research Award from NCTE in 1988. Scholes is a contributor of numerous articles and book reviews to learned journals, literary magazines, and weekly reviews.