Call: CCCarnival

 _{First posted July 14, 2008.}

Related entries:
more thoughts on rhet/comp disciplinary futures
Response to Karen Kopelson's "Sp(l)itting Images; or, Back to the Future of (Rhetoric and?) Composition"
New Echo, New Narcissus
Pedagogy of Rhet/Comp Job Market Imperatives
Carnival on Kopelson: The Pedagogical Imperative and Borrowing Theory
Spitting Images
Joining the CCCarnival: Kopelson's "Sp(l)itting Images"
Kopelson's Back to the Wall: Resisting Responsibility
Inversion and Dissolution
Theory and Interdisciplinarity: Kopelson Part Two
Kopelson carnival - my first take
CCC Carnival: Sp(l)itting Images
Karen-ival
Kopelson (1): Stuck on paragraph 4
The Pedagogical Imperative: Kopelson Part I

Anyone interested in a carnival? After glancing the latest CCC (59.4) at a coffee shop Saturday morning, I had the distinctive and lasting impression that "Sp(l)itting Images; or, Back to the Future of (Rhetoric and?) Composition" would be a good choice for a swarm of late July entries.  Kopelson's article covers a lot of ground, from a survey of grad students and faculty at two institutions, to three of the chasms in the field (pedagogical imperative, theory/practice split, and the brambles of identifying by varying ratios among those two terms, rhetoric and composition), to a call for concerning ourselves less with ourselves.  Ripe! because I endured a great range of responses while reading it.

Here's what I'm thinking: If you're in, do what you can to post some sort of response by one week from today--the 21st. I'll try to keep tabs on all of the links, but feel free to send a trackback. Then we can kick around spin-offs, interjections, and retractions through the end of the month.

Also, here is how I will measure the success of the carnival:

12-15 participants: Wow.  There really is living comp/rhet blogosphere.
9-12 participants: Terrific.  Something told me the article was carnival worthy.
6-8 participants: Just great.  There is a value in reading what others think (esp. while out to sea with the diss).
2-5 participants: Um, it's late July.  What are you, on vacation?
0-1 participant: Witness spikes in traffic at E.W.M.

In?

Kopelson, Karen. "Sp(l)itting Images; or, Back to the Future of (Rhetoric and?) Composition." CCC 59.4 (2008): 750-780. [Carnival]

Do You Believe In Now?

D etroit Lions training camp begins today, and the title above--word has it--is the banner material leading their 2008-2009 charge toward the NFC playoffs. 

What, no playoffs, you say? In that case, "Do you believe in now?" will be their slogan as they surge to a week eight "pundit's mention" of a slim possibility that they will make the post-season. Right: like last year.

Sean Yuille of Pride of Detroit puts it this way:

Detroit undoubtedly could have come up with something that doesn't draw instant mocking, but that's exactly what happened with the slogan as most people answer the question with "no." To be specific, 77% of over 1000 people voted no in a poll on Pride of Detroit that featured the Lions' slogan. That means well over 800 people do not believe in now, which should come as no surprise.

Believe in now? I'm clinging to the response, "yes until no," which means that I, for one, believe in now about the same as I believed in any Lions' season since I was old enough to have beliefs (I can't pinpoint the date, but the very possibility of belief in the Lions' chances must've come about during the Chuck Long era).

Now? Not a whole lot more than then. Yet, sadly, I will persist in my Lions fandom, so, 'yes' for the duration of training camp at the very least.

Added: Also, there is this, which includes this:

New Echo, New Narcissus

K opelson writes,

Yet, as composition studies is distinct in its penchant for 'borrowing,' we are also, in my opinion, unrivaled in our proclivity for self-examination. I am not arguing that this is an unimportant activity, but only that the costs are indeed high when self-scrutiny comes at the expense of taking up other critical concerns and of making other, more innovative and far-reaching forms of knowledge (775).

This appears in the final section of the essay, the part titled "Conclusion: Banishing Echo and Narcissus." Here, Kopelson takes exception with the field's self-reflexivity, the growing heap of self-interested and self-absorbed assessments of where we are or where we are heading. There is an unidentified villain here, and I wondered as I read whether Kopelson has any favorite 'misses', accounts that get it terribly wrong or that are built up on marsh-lands of mushy data.

Reading this section and the quotation above in particular, I didn't get the sense that Kopelson wasn't so much interested in "banishing" Echo and Narcissus as in giving them overhauls, in renewing them, even in teaching them how to resonate and reflect less recklessly. In other words, what is wrong with many self-reflexive disciplinary accounts (or "discipliniographies" to lift and bend a term Maureen Daly Goggin introduces in Authoring a Discipline) is that they succumb to a localist impulse. That is, they un-self-conciously extrapolate from local experience and anecdotal evidence onto the field at large, projecting some local knowledge onto the expansive abstraction that is the discipline (however we imagine it to be). The localist impulse can take many different shapes; often it is akin to reading patterns through the course of an individual career (i.e., "in my thirty years at Whatsittoyou U.") or by cherry-picking from an exceedingly thin selection of data (titles of conference presentations or tables of contents for teacher training manuals). We all do this to some extent--making sense of the field at large through our local, immediate experiences, but it is dangerous to arrive at conclusions about the field (or world) at-large solely by examining one's own neighborhood.

What I'm getting at is that I don't have any beef with the disciplinary practice of self-examination. Perhaps there are more than a handful of fields in the academy that would benefit from more of it. I hold history (the calling of others who've navigated this canyon) and reflection in high regard (perhaps not to the ill-fated extremes of Echo and Narcissus). Resonanceresonanceresonance and reflection are valuable, especially for newcomers, for the "new converts" Kopelson mentions. But they will not be successful--or very useful--until they get beyond that localist impulse, until they involve earnest field-wide data collections and collaboratively built databases. I don't know how well this matches with Kopelson's "innovative and far-reaching forms of knowledge," but it is increasingly where my own interests lie. If those far-reaching forms of knowledge included disciplinary data (even simple stuff, like how many programs offer undergraduate writing majors), they could generate insights about disciplinarity. In the meantime those full-view insights will continue to elude us as long as we leap from local knowledge to widespread pattern, without addressing sufficiently the intermediary scales.

Kopelson, Karen. "Sp(l)itting Images; or, Back to the Future of (Rhetoric and?) Composition." CCC 59.4 (2008): 750-780. [Carnival]

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