“This ambitious collection of essays was a very powerful read for me as both a teacher and a scholar—brimming with depth, insight, and empathy. Robert Cowan’s engagement with his students and with provocative literary and philosophical texts is a call to action for critical educators, and a testament to the complexity of the diverse student populations served by many urban community colleges. After reading, I continue to ponder over the layered probing of humanism and posthumanism, literary analyses embodied in service learning and social action, and the challenge to ‘use the past to rein in the present in the service of the future.’”

“In , Robert Cowan and his student participants show us the negative function of criticism in community college composition courses. Appropriating Enlightenment philosophy, Adorno’s negative dialectics, and critical engagements of popular culture, Cowan’s negation of the negation, as Marx once put it, affirms symptomatic reading and writing as the practice of educational freedom. Cowan’s narrative is a convincing portrayal of teaching and learning not only as acts waged by the critical mind but the search for an ethical life.”