Introduction

Even as neuroscience gains cache in popular culture as a crude explanation of seemingly everything, from the behavior of someone teenager to their tendency to vote republican, it's understandable if the first reaction of writing studies scholars to "neurorhetoric" involves eye rolling. Student embodiment and the materiality of writing disappear as process pedagogies look towards the symbolic, discursive, and ideological work of composing. The question of disaffection has great relevance to writing pedagogy, given our discipline's concern with writerly problems like heuristics, motivation, transfer, and writers block, and our theorization of the relations between emotion, expertise, and public rhetoric following the "affective turn." The new materialist-inflected pedagogies and postcomposition theories remain deficient in their accounts of the relations between form and difference, affect and learning. The neuroscientific theory of affect will enable a more rigorously materialist approach to our field's "affective turn," and a more complete response to our field's privileging of the symbolic and reason.