Friday, September 8, 2006

Rice, "Writing About Cool"

Rice, Jeff. "Writing About Cool: Teaching Hypertexts as Juxtaposition." Computers and Composition. 20 (2003) 221-236.

Rice refers to two courses he taught at UF called "Writing about Cool" to present a pedagogy of cool, rooted in composition, hypertext, cultural studies, and juxtaposition. The courses traces cool through McLuhan, Baraka and Robert Farris Thompson; the pedagogical model advocates juxtaposition as an electrate strategy for the production of hypertext (a making/doing project rather than interpreting or coming to awareness/appreciation). Using the locus of a single moment, 1963, Rice puts Berlin, Miller and Faigley in conversation and considers the significance of the '63 CCCC in L.A. relative to cultural studies in composition, including Kitzhaber's reservations about the writing machine's mechanistic orientation. He also refers to Landow on students' writing from scraps using juxtaposition (26).

The pedagogical approach, then, is combinatory, drawing together cultural studies, hypertext and juxtaposition. Their combination is demonstrated in the pursuit of cool writing. It is located in a particular moment and proceeds, in the courses Rice explains, by considering cultural forces and by contrasting the idyllic and iconic set against the turbulent and detached (230). Mindful of two cools (one technological, the other social), students in the courses develop online handbooks of cool (how to write cool, not how to be cool).

Terms: Ulmer's chorography (226), Nelson's hypertext (228)

"In addition, these sites [Netscape, Yahoo, etc.] proposed cool as long listings of out-of-the-ordinary web sites because of either design or content. Usually, the more bizarre or eclectic, the cooler the site" (222).

"The lesson of corporate usage of cool, then, it is a rhetorical one. The pedagogical challenge is to resituate the popular application of cool as an electronic and cultural phenomenon (TV and Web usage) into a curriculum that teaches electronic rhetorical strategies" (223).

"The attempt by composition studies to include cultural studies in its curriculum often concentrated on the questions or representation, ideology, and power" (225).

"What this brief survey of the field tells me, then, is that while cultural studies and hypertext have been thought of as interconnected, and while hypertext and juxtaposition have been considered interrelated, there still exists a need to bring all of these items together" (226).

"Engelbart's writing machine resembled McLuhan's cool mosaic, a technologically shaped writing system where disciplines juxtapose with one another" (228).

"The icon motivates a form of discourse determined by juxtaposition. Celebrity images become appropriated and reentered into cultural expression by way of unlikely arrangements" (230).

"The writer of the handbook [Ars], then, acted as a compiler. Any original writing found itself lost amid quoted texts" (231).

"Borrowing from McLuhan's 1963 musings on cool, Baudrillard deemed current discourse cool because of its emphasis on commutation rather than signification. In cool discourse, Baudrillard claimed, 'signs are exchanged against each other rather than against the real' (7). (233)"

"With cool writing, the notion that the computer-networked classroom is a place for looking outward to cyberspace and its threatening, challenging, different ways of expression for purposes of evaluation and
analysis becomes instead the idea that we are already in such a place and that we bring to those situations cultural events, transformations, and strategies. (234)

Related sources:

Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002.

Faigley, Lester. Fragments of Rationality. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1992.

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

Posted by Derek Mueller at September 8, 2006 10:47 AM to Writing Technologies