Hesse, "Saving a Place for Essayistic Literacy"

Hesse, Doug. "Saving a Place for Essayistic Literacy." Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies. Eds. Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe. Urbana, Ill.: NCTE, 1999. 34-48.

Considering then-formidable digital avenues, such as home pages and listservs, Hesse issues a preservationist argument for the essay. The provisional, self-reflective, scrap-collecting models of essayism, though historically abundant, have yielded to "essay" as an institutional staple--a commonplace for "writing practices characterized by texts of a certain length, complexity, and expected integrity" (34). Hesse proceeds along two stases, definition and value (i.e., what is an essay or what is essayism? how valuable is it in light of shifting writing practices online?).

Hesse points specifically to anti-essayistic traces in Bolter (Writing Space) and Lanham (The Electronic Word). Bolter, Hesse contends, focuses his study of hypertext too much on full-text hypertexts, like Jocye's "Afternoon" (40). "Bolter and Lanham imagined a reading and writing world of glosses, in which readers interactively modified and constructed texts by direct reference. In fact, the Web evolves by accretion, not substitution or critique" (40).

"Within the academy the term 'essay' has evolved into a generic term for all works of prose nonfiction short enough to be read in a single sitting. But the genre's history and the qualities of its defining texts make clear that essays are a specific kind of nonfiction, one defined in opposition to more formal and explicitly conventional genres--the scientific article or report, for example, or the history, or the philosophical argument" (36).

"The rhetoric of the essay depends on consoling the reader that the world can be made abundantly complex and strange and yet still be shown as yielding to ordering, if not order" (37).

"Some of the very qualities associated with literacy online--specifically, movement and exploration in a method more provisional and contextual than methodical--have been true of the essay since its inception" (40).

"There is an important value to reading and writing extended, connected texts whose authors manage the double pulls of complexity and order, producing works that convey their status as products of a certain experiential and intellectual nexus, not as objective truth" (47).

^Clearly written before the popularization of weblogs (41d).

Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola, "Blinded by the Letter"

Wysocki, Anne, and Johndan Johnson-Eilola. "Blinded by the Letter: Why Are We Using Literacy as a Metaphor for Everything Else?" Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies. Eds. Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe. Urbana, Ill.: NCTE, 1999. 349-368.

Literacy is storied in a host of distinctive ways, yet as a singular term, it plays so loosely and is so heralded that it becomes a god-term of sorts. Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola begin with two questions: 1. "What are we likely to carry with us when we ask that our relationship with all technologies should be like that we have with the technology of printed words?" and 2. "What other possibilities might we use for expressing our relationships with and within technologies?" (350). These lines of inquiry could be characterized as residuum and openings or as inertia and acceleration. Basically, the article alleges (a probability) that "literacy," given it's prevailing connotations to print text, infects non-print "literacies," constraining them conceptually and practically by way of strong alphabetic-linear associations: "When we speak of 'literacy' as though it were a basic, neutral, context-less set of skills, the words keep us hoping--in the face of lives and arguments to the contrary--that there could be an easy cure for economic and social and political pain, that only a lack of literacy keeps people poor or oppressed" (355).

"Literacy" won't do. We need more models or metaphors to account more precisely for the "wide range of skills and procedures and practices," (360) the differentiated dynamics involving discourse, rhetoric, and technology.

"But. When we speak of the relationship we hope to establish--for ourselves and our students--with newer technologies, do we want to carry forward all these particular attachments and meanings and possibilities?" (360).

"When everything is all at once, what do we do?" (365). ^ We reintroduce Barthes' punctum in its temporal sense.

"No single term--such as 'literacy'--can support the weight of the shifting, contingent activities we have been describing" (366).

"With the notion of connection, in articulation, comes the notion of potential disconnection. Literacy here shifts away from receiving a self to the necessary act of continual remaking, of understanding the 'unity' of an object (social, political, intellectual) and simultaneously seeing that that unity is contingent, supported by the efforts of the writer/reader and the cultures in which they live" (367).

"If the first bundle that comes with 'literacy' is the promise of social, political, and economic improvement, it is because the second bundle is the book, which covers who we are and what we might be and the institutions in which we act" (359).

"When we discuss 'technological literacy' or 'computer literacy' or '[fill in the blank] literacy,' we cannot pull 'literacy' away from the two bundles of meanings and implications we have described" (359-60).

Terms: "bundle of stories" (350), "technological literacy" (352), Graff's "literacy myth" (353)

Related sources:

Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994.

Hall, Stuart. "Ideology and Communication Theory." Rethinking Communication: Vol. 1. Paradigm Issues. Eds. Lawrence Grossberg, et.al. Newbury Park: Sage, 1989.

Illich, Ivan. A B C: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988.