Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Rice, "The 1963 Composition Revolution"

Rice, Jeff . "The 1963 Composition Revolution Will Not be Televised, Computed, or Demonstrated by Any Other Means of Technology." Composition Studies 33.1 (2005): 55-73.

Composition's grand narrative which cites, across multiple sources, 1963 as the watershed moment for the field--a "revolutionary" resurgence in legitimacy anchored with the CCCC convention in Los Angeles, marked differentiations between composition and communications, and the reintegration of classical rhetoric as an influential force. Rice depicts the year, 1963, as a "moment of confusion," a moment when the "paperdigm" settled ever more fixedly into the work of teaching writing at the expense of nearby theoretical developments merging writing and culture. 1963: a missed opportunity for comp. Basically, Rice revisits the moment to ask, "What if McLuhan had been taken seriously by scholars in the then-emerging, then-revolutionary field of composition studies?" This essay introduces McLuhan as composition theorist--accounts for McLuhan's valuable perspectives on how education and, specifically, writing, will change, must change. With the rejection of communication studies in the early 60's, so too was McLuhan's work rejected, a triumph of word over image and media, and hence, composition studies as, more often than not, tipped toward a constrained, purpose-driven, testing-plagued, rationalistic project relatively unmoved by shifts in writing technologies since the 1960s.

McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy asks, ""What will be the new configurations of mechanisms and of literacy as these older forms of perception and judgment are interpenetrated by the new electric age?" Why doesn't this question enter into the discussions of composition?

"I want to consider how McLuhan's focus on media as writing has not been fully understood as relevant to Composition Studies, and I want to question why it hasn't. In other words, this essay will explore the unmentioned media side of the field's grand narrative by revisiting those influential moments in 1963 that Composition Studies draws upon for influence and those it doesn't as well."

"Echoing what he conceived as the nature of electronic media production, McLuhan chose a different path than these writers; he abandoned traditional scholarly rhetoric as well as Aristotelian logic in favor of a collage of quotations interspliced with commentary, puns, and allusions."

"What makes McLuhan's presence in 1963 writing theory relevant is precisely his lack of interest in technology as pure science (or for assessment purposes) and his promotion of technology as rhetoric."

"McLuhan's position is that the linear, hierarchal methods which are conducive to print and which support rational, ordered thinking must yield to an electronic world where ordered thought no longer plays the same role in communication."

"Juxtaposition assumes that difference cannot be repeated easily because the bringing together of unlike texts, ideas, or images produces different results depending on the material used. Such is the basis of Ted Nelson's notion of hypertext, an idea he, too, devised in 1963."

Related sources:

McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy. Toronto: U of Toronto, 1962.

North, Stephen. The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field. Upper Montclair: Boynton, 1987.

Trimbur, John, and Diana George. "The Communication Battle or Whatever Happened to The '4th C?'" CCC 50 (1999): 682-98.

Posted by Derek Mueller at August 30, 2006 8:13 PM to Writing Technologies