Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Haynes, "Writing Offshore: The Disappearing Coastline of Composition Theory"

H aynes, Cynthia. "Writing Offshore: The Disappearing Coastline of Composition Theory." JAC 23.4 (2003): 667-724.

Haynes calls for composition-theory in motion, a willingness to drift all the while cognizant that "so much defies reason" (669). If composition's theoretical currents are akin to waters upon which we float, in much that same way Haynes was when she launched from the Norwegian shore into the Artic Sea in the scene that opens the essay, argumentative writing with its commitment to ground/reason is the anchor that has dragged "until it took hold among the bedrock curricula of grammar and style, aims and modes, claims, grounds, and warrants" (668). Haynes sets out "dissatisfied with teaching writing that is primarily argumentative writing qua reason" (669). Invoking Crowley, Haynes expresses skepticism toward the "discourse of needs" (i.e., "students 'need' to write and think in particular ways" (668d)). Composition, is, in effect "rotten with reason" (668)--poisoned with a mindset in relentless pursuit of "the why, the reason, the rationale" (668). Writing offshore desires the disappearing coastline while acknowledging a need for movement; "it is suggestive" (670), preferring something like Elam's "groundless solidarity." Haynes writes, "Equally charged and similarly moved, I mean to probe the ground beneath teaching argument (née critical thinking) that compels us to teach good writing as the invention of good reasons" (670).

Unlearning a Pedagogical Apparatus (671)
Haynes creates a polarity between argumentation and abstraction, preferring the latter, but not as something the belongs exclusively to the authority of the teacher and not as something that stirs in smoothly with the "discourse of needs" (viz., "students need abstraction"). That is, as we move away from the shoreline of composition theory, we would move toward an "abstract horizon" (671), shifting our relationship to ground, footing, and finitude. The "pedagogical juggernaut" (Ong) composition has inherited suffers from a Ramist attachment to logic and reason; teacher training (replication of the juggernaut) collapses ars (art) and doctrina (teaching), reducing pedagogy to argumentation: "Reason is perfected in pedagogy, for pedagogy, by pedagogues" (673). Haynes argues for "unbuild[ing] this pedagogical apparatus" (673), for unlearning as the "defamiliarization vis-à-vis unquestioned forms of knowledge" (673). With a Derridean willingness to "disturb the doxa in its slumber", Haynes acknowledges the chance that she will be charged with "irresponsibility," but she is willing to bear this charge if it allows her "to probe the depths of a more responsive relation to students, to each other, and to each Other" (674).

The Ground of Reason (674)
Haynes "prepare[s] us to need the sea" (674), as she works at the joint between argumentation and abstraction. Reason, logic, and ground are the anchors, the root system of too much composition theory; Heidegger's turn on Being (from anchor, a release toward Being as "the principle of ground itself") moves such thinking offshore: "Just there, beneath the seas of [Meister] Eckhart's theological detachment and Heidegger's secular withdrawal, we witness the thunderous breach of our whale--abstraction" (677). But abstraction requires yet more training: "We need to hear this word, and we need to tread slowly" (677) (sounds like Latour on slowciological accounts). Abstraction risks "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness" (677) (i.e., going aground where determinate meaning is built). "We cannot leap from ground to ground unless we keep moving; and we cannot build castles in the air on solid foundations" (678). Still, from the withdrawal/detachment, we drift away from "representational thinking." Persistent problem: "Resting in our not-leaping poses the ultimate hazard: we become so rooted in reason that our feet sink deep into the sand at low tide, and each attempt to step out and up is futile" (680).

Street-Smart Writing Students (682)
Haynes is skeptical of calls to "connect the text and the street" because such gestures tend to conjure up the flaneur as the prototypical city-goer, along with its problematic "attitude towards knowledge and its social context" and its "writing safely hidden by anonymity and insignificance" (683). Here, the dismissal of the flaneur feels too deliberately pursued; he never stood a chance! But this particular framing of flanery, although it doesn't account for how such an attitude might be an improvement on certain other attitudes (some of this in the flaneur's preference for social realities as preferable to the hermeneut's disposition)...this particular framing is used to "glimpse an unhappy association in whose folly we are unwittingly complicit by connecting 'the text and the street'" (683). Haynes puts it bluntly: "'the street' serves as a metonymic substitution through which the old 'bait and switch' of 'reinventing the university' is accomplished" (683). "Street smarts" flattens into argumentation, keeping with "Hellenic male ceremonial combat" traditions, in which conflict is performed in such a way that maximally manages tensions. Haynes works through a series of references--T.R. Johnson's "School Sucks," ETS research on "Extending Intelligence," and a program called Reason!able that supports argument maps--visual renderings of a text (Haynes is especially critical of this; it's not clear that she has much tolerance for visuality, especially where technology is concerned).

What Should Not be Built (686)
Check the foundation. Is it rotten? In this section, Haynes works from Virilio's notion of the "trajective" (rather than objective or subjective) to explore the mode of being that involves "movement from here to there" (686). The nomad, transcience. She couples the trajective to questions about architecture (and ground), borrowing from Rajchman: "What would an architecture of such trajectories and movements look like?" (686). Here, Haynes also recombines the flanuer (taken apart previously) and replaces him with the refugee as "the figure of the dispossessed" passing and dwelling different "zones of intensity" (687). Citing Sirc, she mentions the change he articulates, drawing on avant-garde architects, artists, and theorists, from street "as mere topos to the street as event" (687). Clearly she prefers the latter, aligning with Sirc in "groundless solidarity." Lebbeus Woods comes up, too, as Haynes draws up a "rhetoric of the unbuilt" (688). Woods' work is that of speculative, imagined architectures, the pre-concretized abstractions that peel layers from reality with uncertainty. More examples follow, of a "peace park" between North and South Korea proposed by Natsios and Young, and of Libeskind's proposed model for the World Trade Center memorial: "Such projects remind us that a rhetoric of the unbuilt must also consider (and rendered in in/visible textures) unqualified hope" (691). Haynes calls this section an "attempt to locate (and appropriate) permissible isomorphisms between theoretical architecture and composition theory" (693) in such a way that can "bridge the expanse between reason and refuge" (695). "What clearly was needed were not new objects, but a new orientation toward a phenomenal field of events and interactions--not objects, but the abstract regimes of force that organize and deploy them" (84) (694) [Read this alongside Latour's renewal of objects; could this be taken as an undesireable sort of abstraction compatible with the sociology of the social?]

Pedagogy and the Refugee (695)
"One answer, then, to the question of what an architecture of trajectories would look like is: a boat in an intensive zone" (695). Instensive why? What puts a boat in an intensive zone? (Piracy, mutiny, scurvy?) The density is sharply up in this section; Haynes works at the problem of the "tourism experience" as relates to invoking refugee-as-figure for "abject forced mobility" (696). The irrationality (unreasonableness) of refugees primes an ethical muddle: "It cannot go without saying that removing the ground has profound implications for re-moving students into the murky waters of border politics" (697). Agamben, Agamben. Can't be oblivious to matters of the un-reason-able. Heidegger, Derrida (slow down!). Quarantining terms. Reason threatens to turn us away from Being itself (701). But a poetics of the trace remains (some hope in this): Heidegger: "What is presumed to be eternal merely conceals a suspended transiency, suspended in the void of durationless now." Haynes finds in Heidegger a revived current (charge, voltage) for the poet, still, "Thus far we have scarcely issued a reading that can properly stand beside the refugee without addressing the incongruity of poetizing in the face of their immediate and devastating dangers" (703).

Unbuilding the Logic of Containment (704)
Haynes seems to be reassembling deconstruction, re-accounting for its over-simplification, which made possible its take-down by proponents of "practical reason" (704). Haynes goes back over deconstruction with an abstraction-toothed comb, citing Caputo's explanation that "Deconstruction offers no excuse not to act....Undecidability does not detract from the urgency of decision; it simply underlines the difficulty" (704). Working through "Derrida's call for 'forms of solidarity yet to be invented'" and matters of hospitality and cosmopolitanism, Haynes works toward an assertion of "renegade rhetorics" (707), incorporating nods to Ulmer, Worsham, Sirc, Vitanza, and Davis, as she shows that "[r]hetoric as refuge rearticulates the paths of the poets and illuminates their abstract trajectories. Displacing argument is rhetoric's supreme task; disinventing logos is rhetoric's sacred duty" (707). For the concentrated push against argument and reason, this bit comes very close to sound like an assertion--an argument for the heretical. "Into these uncommonplaces, I submit rhetoric as refuge, writer as refugee, and abstract pedagogy" (708). Haynes also admits her own (t)reason: an account of the program at UTA, which was undone, some believe, by the "steady poisoning of rhetoric with the principle of reason" (708). Haynes continues to challenge the behemoth of argumentation: "Our collective (t)reason will be necessary to dismantle this edifice" (710).

Writing Nomadically (711)
"Keeping still to [her] desire to remain suggestive," (711) Haynes declares several musts in a string of manifesto-like challenges (take off the garb of the flaneur, dispossess our monopoly on abstraction, etc.). She tells about the "quasi-journal Archigram", which "rendered radical creations such as capsule apartments, walking cities (on the ocean), instant cities, university nodes, most of which were never meant to 'take up a finite configuration'" (711)--the "unbuilt spoof in response to their view of traditional architecture as hoax" (712). Receivables? Much like what Saper writes of in Networked Art (on-sendings, kits, etc.). Archigram included a course with an assignment called "depth probe" (713). Haynes correlates the depth probe to Berthoff's "abstraction as a speculative instrument" and then accounts for the discipline's tenuous relationship to abstraction (713). Although it was a "failure" in terms of uptake, Berthoff's work, explains John Clifford, "takes seriously her call to weld philosophical frames of reference to classroom techniques" (714). How much drift can we tolerate? Berthoff lamented that "seemingly broad-minded theorists...refuse to see how far from shore we can drift on theoretial currents" (714). Abstract writing, abstracting practices are overdue.

"The diverse senses of converting argumentation pedagogy to teaching abstraction could also include teaching how to achieve distance, to detach from one's preconceptions, distill concepts, condense language, and translate meanings. Leaning to abstract would involve learning the alluring nature of language, how it draws you away, how it seduces you" (715).

End: "at times I need this depth/ forgive me" (715).

Returns

• Re: Braddocks and argumentation (707, 717). Consider uptake/notake with Hiatt.
• Berthoff, Langer, speculative instruments (see Berthoff on speculative instruments in "Problem with Problem Solving").
• Reason, rational, the why, etc. as relates to rigid models (rather than relays-Ulmer).
• Detachment from representational thinking (678): rose, being without cause, knows not why.
• Coercion (681) and reason - Tufte.
• Argument maps (Haynes' critique); what maps then? Or maps as abstraction? Monmonier writes only of map generalization. See abstraction/generalization distinction in Haynes and Berthoff (685).
• Virilio on trajective (686).

Phrases: (gore-tex^TM)ual tourists (668b), argumentative writing (668), discourse of needs (668d), groundless solidarity (670), writing offshore (670), abstract horizon (671), Ramist dialectic (672), Ong's "pedagogical juggernaut" (673), unlearning (673), violent realities (674), castles in the air (677), abstractus (677), without why (678), marionettes (680), flaneur (682), normative catachresis (683), fliting (684), argument maps (685), trajective (686), zones of intensity (687), rhetoric of the unbuilt (688), brutal foundations (693), refugees (694), abject forced mobility (696), quarantining terms (700), metaphysical homelessness (704), renegade rhetorics (707), abstract pedagogy (708), testing contradistinctions (715), aphorism (715).

Postied by at 7:54 PM | to Abstraction, Article, Models

Monday, June 11, 2007

Lauer-Berthoff, "Counterstatement" and "Response"

L auer, Janice. "Response to Ann E. Berthoff, 'The Problem of Problem Solving.'" CCC 23.2 (1972): 208-210.

Berthoff, Ann E. "Response to Janice Lauer, 'Counterstatement.'" CCC 23.5 (1972): 414-416.

Lauer's "Heuristics and Composition" | Berthoff's "The Problem of Problem Solving"

Lauer's counterstatement to Berthoff ends with a call for tolerance and pluralism. She contends that we must be patient with the "recent and exploratory" development of heuristics from psychology, rather than waiting for a grand, penultimate conclusion from what is a heterogeneous field (more varied, she argues, than Berthoff has given credit for, as it includes "behaviorists, gestaltists, factor-analysts, information theorists, and so on).Lauer responds sharply to Berthoff's willingness to pile on her own dichotomies, such as where she sets psychology apart from creativity, where she opposes problem solving learning to knowing, and where she values articles in Teacher above three dozen articles in psychology journals. Berthoff's dismissal of psychology and "the technicians", according to Lauer, depends on lumping them all together and characterizing their collective work, varied though it is, as reductive and short-sighted--of relatively little value to rhetoric and composition: "Instead [Berthoff's] quarrels rest on the false assumption that psychology has one contribution to make, a contribution which she identifies with an overly narrow conception of problem solving" (209).

Lauer discusses the way Berthoff reframes Lauer's primary point about heuristics, instead calling it "problem-solving." This shift is cause for some concern, although Lauer agrees with much of Berthoff's commentary, especially on matters of "creative problem solving", only objecting to Lauer's criticism and polemical approach. Lauer even goes so far as to write off Berthoff's conflation of "science" and "technology" to be a non sequitur. Lauer acknowledges the source of alarm pervasive among humanists who feel threatened by the sciences, but we should be more patient, Lauer argues, before rejecting the possibility that psychology has anything to offer composition (210).

***

Berthoff answers yet again as she contends that the argument she has with Lauer's approach (and initial recommendations for reading heuristics through psychology) is non-trivial. One concern she has is that some psychologists tend to "reduce and limit the operation of imagination" (414). That is, in the pursuit of data, the reduce mentation to only "quantifiable results." Psychology, in and of itself, Berthoff argues, does not care to get at the complexities of meaning-making, particularly where information-processing theories reign. She invokes Susanne K. Langer's work as a few among many resources, such as the "notebooks and journals of artists and thinkers" that might help us "learn anew the sources and modes of the creative imagination" (415). Berthoff would have teachers assume their own expertise on creativity and imagination, rather than turning to technicians of mind whose approaches to language and meaning are too limiting. She introduces two statements on method and creativity that capture what she fears would be compromised in the over-use of psychological models:

Herman Melville: "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method."
Alfred North Whitehead: "There is a state of imaginative, muddled suspense which precedes any successful inductive generalization" (415).

"I believe that speculation taking these two wise sayings as a point of departure could lead us to understand, for instance, why the Formal Outline is properly the last step and not the first in composing; why it is so useful to keep options open, to keep freedom of choice alive, especially at first, by writing phrases, images, sets of oppositions, by thoughtful doodling instead of depending on the concoction of topic sentences; why it is that 'pre-writing' is so painful for those who have nor learned the uses of chaos; how it is that naming and re-naming, developing analogies and metaphors can lead us to discover 'the shape of content'; it could help us to understand what Paul Klee means when he notes: 'I begin with chaos; it is the most natural start. In so doing, I feel at rest because I may, at first, be chaos myself'" (415).

Finally, Berhoff asserts the fruitful pursuit of "speculation" before arguing for a frame of reference for heuristics that "exercises the means by which we come to discover and to understand" (415)

Postied by at 2:52 PM | to Article

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Lyon, "Rhetoric and Hermeneutics"

L yon, Arabella. "Rhetoric and Hermeneutics." Perspectives on Rhetorical Invention. Eds. Janet Atwill and Janice Lauer. Knoxville, Tenn.: Univ. of Tennessee P, 2002. 36-52.

Lyon works at the intersection of rhetoric and hermeneutics in an effort to make sense of the relationship between the two concepts. To weigh the terms and explore their interrelationship, she uses invention as a fulcrum. Rhetoric and hermeneutics, Lyon explains, both can be thought inventive, but they are not equal terms with respect to invention. Lyon is concerned that "[b]y turning toward interpretation and away from production and making, rhetoricians have diminished the place of rhetoric as an action in the world" (36). With this, Lyon makes a strong argument for the inventive orientation of rhetoric the must not be lost with turns to rhetorical criticism, hermeneutic invention, or rhetorical reading. Hermeneutics and rhetoric are "not the same project" (37).

Lyon attributes one explanation of the interpretive renewal in traditional rhetoric to Dilip Gaonkar and Michael Leff who "draw attention to the relationship between interprettion and agency" (39), keeping them separate rather than working to harmonize them. Next, Lyon sets out to examine two treatments of the relationship between hermeneutics and rhetoric: one she regards favorably by Hans-Georg Gadamer and one she regards skeptically by Steven Mailloux. Gadamer reserves some distinctions between hermeneutics and rhetoric; toward a "philosophical hermeneutics" he says they are "interdependent" and they "work synergistically" (40). Lyon explains Gadamer's stance: "Hermeneutics is a re-vision of an earlier production, an earlier invention. Hence, hermeneutics is dependent on what is said or written. There is a crucial rhetorical event (invention) priotr to interpretation" (41).

Mailloux, on the other hand, defines rhetoric in such a way that "emphasizes the cultural effects of and response to a text and ignores the rhetor's activity of purposeful production" (42). Lyon takes exception with Mailloux's discussion of how interpretation works, particularly for his mention of "translation" and "transformation" (42c). She contends that by collapsing rhetoric and hermeneutics, Mailloux's approach glosses significant distinctions between the two concepts as it relies on a logic that slides from hermeneutics to rhetoric: "hermeneutics is argument is rhetoric." This risks reducing rhetorical theory to "linguistic situations" alone (45c).

Continuing, Lyon discloses a preference for keeping hermeneutics and rhetoric distinct. She examines three interpretive-productive modes to attenuate the distinctions: rhetorical invention, hermeneutical invention, and rhetorical reading. Rhetorical invention applies to a certain contextual novelty (not wholly made up because of the accruals of language), whereas hermeneutical invention is much more closely aligned with paraphrasing. Hermeneutical invention, like rhetorical reading, is "a mediation" (48d, 49a).

Finally, Lyon reasserts what is useful from Gadamer's nuanced stance on the subtle distinctions between hermeneutics and rhetoric. Gadamer's fusing of horizons allows for prejudice, for bias, for the ways texts act on us and infiltrate us, as "the text becomes part of our being" (50). Lyon calls for caution over allowing interpretive modes to detract from rhetorical invention: "Rhetoric's increasing affiliation with textual reception, specifically Gadamer's hermeneutics, while increasing concern with discourse and text, potentially diminishes many aspects of textual production and rhetoric" (50).

• Consider the ways hermeneutics, particularly philosophical hermeneutics, might tie in with "wonder" as a shared dimension of invention (from conference).
• Lyon's critique of Mailloux's use of "translation" considers translation as discursive/discursive or linguistic/linguistic, but never discursive/extra- or non-discursive, never linguistic/visual. I don't mean that this is the sort of translation Mailloux considers, either, but it does seem to be one limitation of the critique. How would the hermeneutics/rhetorics discussion shift if production, translation/mediation, and interpretation were opened to encompass non-discursive forms as would be necessary to carry this over to the digital order?

"I believe the concept of invention allows us to begin to separate hermeneutics from rhetoric; moreover, this process of differentiation shows both where rhetorical invention lies and how inventive rhetorical invention can be" (39).

"My point here, that rhetoric and hermeneutics both engage processes of production and reception, is not controversial. The controversies turn on the extent to which each is characterized by production and reception and the degree to which any type of production or reception is similar in the context of rhetor and audience purposes." (43).

"Hermeneutics is a theory not about the effect on an audience, but about the truth-seeking approach of an educated interpreter" (44).

"Hermeneutics may require an argument; interpretation does not" (45).

"Furthermore, I suspect one can make too easy an argument for rhetorical situation as encompassing more than linguistic situations, starting with the example of the Titanic and working up to armed robberies and bad dates" (45).

"It is my belief that we learn more about the concepts and our practices from the difficult task of differentiating hermeneutics and rhetoric than from that of collapsing them" (46).

"In Gadamerian hermeneutics, the interpreter stops interrogating and manipulating the text and allows the text to interrogate our prejudices and intentions and finally to be applied in our present situation" (49).

"The point of hermeneutical invention is to produce a new position for the interpreter" (50).

Terms: rhetoric, invention, hermeneutics, Gadamer, Mailloux, interpretation, reading, theory, discourse, mediation, language, audience, production, reception, translation, transformation, understanding, horizon, wonder

Related sources:

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. "Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and the Critique of Ideology: Metacritical Comments on Truth and Method." The Hermeneutics Reader. Ed. Kurt Mueller-Vollmer. New York: Continuum, 1992. 274-92.

Mailloux, Steven. "Articulation and Understanding: The Pragmatic Intimacy Between Rhetoric and Hermeneutics." Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time: A Reader. Ed. Walter Jost and Michael Hyde. Princeton: Yale UP, 1997. 378-94.

Mailloux, Steven. Rhetorical Power. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989.

Postied by at 12:04 PM | to Article

Thursday, May 3, 2007

Pemberton, "Modeling Theory and Composing Process Models."

P emberton, Michael A. "Modeling Theory and Composing Process Models." CCC 44.1 (1993): 40-58.

Pemberton examines models in composition studies by taking into account Flower and Hayes' cognitive process model of writing and its mixed reception. In one sense, then, this essay is an account of uptake. But there're more. Pemberton opens up many generative, provocative questions about the status of modeling in rhetoric and composition. He works through a stasis of definition (what are models?) and explains some of the givens (models simplify) and assumptions (models are mechanistic and positivistic; they are "partial isomorphs" of any complex phenomena) that have inhibited the production and circulation of models in the field.

To demonstrate the range of possible critiques of models, Pemberton cites Duhem, who argued against models because they weren't positivistic enough; on the other end of a spectrum, he refers to critics of Flower and Hayes' models who disclaimed them because they were too positivistic. This would indicate a full range of critical and evaluative treatments that is not explicitly tied to the activity of inventing models. Such critiques, perhaps, are more common when models are scarce or when their persuasive viability is undermined by their hybridity (as they often mix the discursive and non-discursive, the visual and the abstract, bridge the theoretical and its basis in data).

The essay is divided into seven sections: Opening, Models as Conceptual Frameworks (42), What Constitutes a Model? (44), Models as Simplifications (47), Models as Misleading Representations (48), Implications for Theory and Composition Discourse (52), Conclusions (54). Even though this is a follow-up to Flower and Hayes' model (addressing, very generally: what has come of the modeling of writing behaviors in the wake of Flower and Hayes?), it expands well beyond that moment by adding a layer (turning to the meta of modeling practices, modeling theory). Where models are treated as critical frameworks, Pemberton provides the following illustration:

Local<---------------------------------------------->Global
Data - - - Models - - - Theories - - - Paradigms

His point with this is that each of the elements are "hierarchical," "interdependent," and "contiguous." Of course, even as they potentially bridge data and theories, models (when they are scarce and monumental, as with Flower and Hayes') are easy targets for critique. Simplification and misrepresentation are hazards (and exceedingly common bases for critique), as Pemberton rightly points out, but these should not prevent us from learning to make models, from using models to persuade and to mobilize (as Latour mentions).

Returns: terminological confusion related to "models" (44b), subject and source for a model as relates to Kuhn's 'preferred analogy' (45b), the principle of selection (research is always reductive and limiting (48)) (46b), Emig's inquiry paradigm (model as... or method as...) (54c).

Also work through Berthoff's critique of reductionism. How can visual models be abstract? General vs. abstract // study vs. sting (Barthes)...power of expansion and third meaning? (47b)

Pemberton ends the essay with a series of questions that, should we take up the work of modeling, we ought to sort through, address, etc.

Phrases: positivism (40), composing processes (41), paradigms (41), empirical scholarship (41), theory-building (41), modeling theory (42), conceptual frameworks (42), distillation of data (44), 'possibility' proofs (45), Kuhn's 'preferred analogy' (45), partial isomorphs (45), mechanistic (46), simplifications (47), incompleteness (53).

"To Duhem, meaningful understanding was intimately linked to scientific rigor, mathematical exactitude, and representational precision; since models were simplifications, their descriptions were unreliable and their utility questionable at best. In an age when positivism had not yet been supplanted as the dominant ideology guiding scientific inquiry, Duhem criticized models for their failure to be positivistic enough" (40)."

"Comparatively little attention has been paid, however, to the issue of modeling in composition studies, despite its central role in the interpretation of research data and the sheer number of models which exist to describe writing behaviors" (42).

"Before we can accurately interpret, evaluate, or employ any model of composing processes--or fully understand how several such models can coexist--we must be thoroughly informed with the knowledge of exactly what a model is, how it can be used effectively, and what its limitations are" (42). Significant here is Pemberton's mention of thresholds for coexisting models. How many can we have? Why not x+1? How many are too many? When they are dynamic and abundant rather than static and scarce, how is their intervention (or bridging between data and theory) different?

"The interdependence of these conceptual frameworks is reciprocal, operating in both a 'bottom-up' and 'top-down' fashion" (42).

"The terms 'subject' and 'source' can therefore be used to characterize the nature of the modeling relationship. We can assert, for instance, that any subject we wish to model--be it a tangible artifact or an intangible process--has a finite set of properties whose precise number is bounded, in part, by our ability to perceive and identify them" (45). Finitude?

"In addition, the model itself--or more properly speaking, the preferred analogy which is used to shape the model--will embody a number of intrinsic properties that do not properly belong to the subject being modeled" (45). See Wood, The Power of Maps, c. 5 and Monmonier, How to Lie with Maps, on generalization (rel. to abstraction).

"We must be careful, therefore, to guard against the urge to dismiss, preemptively, the value of a model merely because it contains imperfections" (46).

"The moment we decide what we want to investigate and how we want to conduct our research, we automatically delimit our field of inquiry and define its boundaries" (48).

"As I have already discussed the nature of such critiques, I will not belabor the issue further than to reiterate the point that incompleteness is an unavoidable epistemological weakness common to all models and all methods of data collection" (53).

"Researchers need to address questions such as: What are my methodological assumptions? What factors are likely to be included or excluded by my mode of inquiry? What assumptions shape the way I make my observations and interpret data? How are my representations likely to simplify writing processes, and how are they likely to misinterpret them? How to the epistemic tenets which ground my model compare with or connect to the tenets that ground the models of others?" (55).

Related reading:
Black, Max. Models and Metaphors. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1962.
Emig, Janet. "Inquiry Paradigms and Writing." CCC 33 (Feb. 1982): 64-75.
Lauer, Janice. "Heuristics and Composition." CCC 23 (Dec. 1970): 396-404.

Postied by at 10:38 PM | to Article, Models

Wednesday, May 2, 2007

McComiskey, "Introduction" to English Studies

M cComiskey, Bruce. "Introduction." English Studies: An Introduction to the Discipline(s). Ed. Bruce McComiskey. Refiguring English Studies Ser. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2006. 1-66.

McComiskey's introduction includes a section called "The Problem of Specialization," in which he explains Stephen North's three responses to specialization before proposing his own solution: integration. North divided the responses into secession (breaking apart), corporate compromise (one subfield takes on a managerial imperative), and fusion (periods of study are stabilized, but various perspectives and methods apply from across the subfields).

Reintegration--restoring wholeness where secession has occurred--is extremely challenging, McComiskey notes, perhaps to the point of not being possible (46). He cites the implicit valuing of literature in Ohmann's English in America (1976) and points out that subtle arguments for English studies' return to the glories literary study persist.

"No single methodology from linguistics or discourse analysis or creative writing or rhetoric or composition or literature or literary criticism or critical theory or cultural studies or English Education--no single methodology (or set of specialized methodologies) can solve a complex social problem" (32). This acknowledgement of methodological pluralism echoes North's premise in The Making of Knowledge.

"A truly democratic English department (one that exercises the power of each of its composite disciplines equally in the service of a larger goal) can, quite simply, never evolve out of a discipline that defines its scope and function purely in terms of literature" (34b).

"Secession, in other words, may alleviate some immediate problems relating to curriculum and budget, but it does not solve these problems in the long run; given time, they will recur, along with the divisiveness that comes with constant specialization" (36).

Is generalization still possible? Or is specialization a given? Constant specialization is, no doubt, a formidable force (or set of ongoing pressures and prescripts), but what can be done to revalue the generalist? And is a generalist's wide-angle forays of interest and engagement crucial to an integrationist approach to the super-discipline. In other words, to what degree must we not only understand each other but even forge collegial alliances (cooperatives) across specializations?

"Corporate compromise usually involves one discipline in English studies taking managerial responsibility for the others, ideally (but certainly not always) in a democratic fashion" (37b).

"I propose that the goal of this integrated English studies should be the analysis, critique, and production of discourse in social context" (43a).

"Social context" is a sticking phrase in McComiskey's basic proposal. He explains the choice with Ogden and Richards, Malinowski, and Dewey, but Latour's Reassembling lifts the lid on this phrase. I also want to question the emphasis on discourse relative to the non-discursive (i.e., visual), and also think about the terms included in the list: analysis, critique, and production. The first two tip toward a critical or interpretive rhetoric (hermeneutics), while only the third term is oriented toward production (heuretics) (look at Arabella Lyon for this).

Terms: English Studies, disciplinarity, integration, specialization, Burke, identification, consubstantiation, history, definition, raft, secession, corporate compromise, fusion, literacy

Related Sources

Easton, David. "The Division, Integration, and Transfer of Knowledge." Divided Knowledge: Across Disciplines, across Cultures. Ed. David Easton and Corinne S. Schelling. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1991. 7-36.

North, Stephen M., et al. Refiguring the Ph.D. in English Studies: Writing, Doctoral Education, and the Fusion-Based Curriculum. Refiguring English Studies. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2000.

Postied by at 9:19 PM | to Article, Specialization

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Bialostosky, "Should College English Be Close Reading?"

B ialostosky, Don. "Should College English Be Close Reading?" College English 69.2 (Nov. 2006): 111-116.

Don Bialostosky's contribution to the "What Should College English Studies Be?" symposium in the Nov. 2006 College English works through the question of whether it should be close reading.

His first thought: it should. From there, Bialostosky sorts through his favor for close reading, shifting the frame from the phrase's New Critical entrenchment to call for a way of working with texts that uses close to describe the compatibility of reading with the students' existing discursive knowledges (e.g., something like NLG's lifeworlds). Bialostosky refers to the "critical reading" curricular emphasis at Pitt as particularly exemplary in this regard, in what might otherwise be regarded as a blend of SRTOL and reading with an emphasis on "where students are at" when they come to the course.

It's a short essay at just five or six pages. Bialostosky makes clear that rather than appropriating the phrase "close reading," he seeks alternatives to it that help us formulate responses to this: What reading practices to we consider important enough to teach?

I'll return to this because, in making a case for distant reading as heuristic (and heuretic, euretic, eureka!), I want to argue for alternatives not only to New Critical close reading but to the reduction of reading practices to interpretive or hermeneutic activities. Instead, distant reading is also (perhaps foremost) productive, generative, and inventive, as well aligned, I think, with rhetorical mobilizations as with interpretive glosses or stabilized-for-now insights into the meaning of texts. Certainly it can contribute to each. But mustn't they must be held in check, made into hybrids rather than dyads? That said, distant reading practices must remain enactive or actionary; they must be additive in the sense that the new forms of knowledge they proliferate propel us into new ways of thinking rather than folding back into the project of criticism. I like Urban's discussions of inertial and accelerative for this.

Bialostosky also mentions the responses offered by I.A. Richards to New Criticism. This is another place I should return for drawing distinctions between the close reading (New Critics) and distant reading (Moretti).

Phrases: critical reading (111, 113), unexamined predispositions (112), New Critics (112), unexamined resources (113), discursive knowledge (113), ordinary language (113), productive attentiveness (113, 114), death of close reading (114)

"Paying close attention doesn’t guarantee even minimal understanding or response" (112).

"The New Critics were so successful in promulgating and institutionalizing this practice [close reading] that our students come to college English convinced that they can’t understand poetry, or literature more generally, because they have learned to distrust their initial uptake in order to highlight certain words and build from them a reading that will satisfy what they have learned is an institutional demand for deeper, hidden, symbolic meanings. I agree with Robert Scholes, who documents the pervasiveness of this practice, that this kind of close reading is a problem college English must address and not a practice it should continue" (112).

"So, paradoxically, I must conclude that close reading in its institutionalized New Critical instantiation has created the habits and expectations of reading literature that college English needs to resist and reform, or at least articulate and examine, not the habits and expectations it should uncritically cultivate" (112).

"If you wanted, as I do not, to call reading grounded in these repertoires “close reading,” it would be because they would bring literary works closer to students, to the discourse they know and use, instead of distancing, even alienating those works from the language students already know how to use and enjoy" (113).

"I want instead to open a space for considering alternatives to New Critical close reading by marking out, without naming, a pedagogical space where we teach productive attentiveness to literary texts" (113).

Here is a lengthy paragraph near the end of the piece in which Bialostosky lists questions that might be addressed in review essays that account for "productive attention to literary texts." I have switched it from a paragraph to a list:

"To what features of the poem or literary work or text do they direct attention?
How do they articulate the relations among those features?
What questions do they think are most fruitful in directing their students’ attention and to what sorts of evidence do they point their students in answering those questions?
How do they divide, subordinate, and sequence the parts of what they think worth teaching?
How do they articulate the relation between what is “in” the text and what is “outside” it?
How do they situate the poetic or literary work in relation to discourse in other spheres of communication including the vernacular and institutional ones from which their students come?
How do they situate it in relation to other literary texts?
In relation to historical and cultural texts?
What do they teach their students that literary works do, and what do they teach the students to do with them?
What traditions, arts, and disciplines inform their pedagogies—grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, linguistics, semiotics, ethics, politics, sociology, philosophy, among them—and from what sources in those disciplines do their reading practices draw?
Could they offer a theoretical argument for their reading practice grounded in those arts and disciplines?
Have they troubled themselves to articulate the practice they teach with other practices, to respond to criticisms addressed from other disciplines or sources, to differentiate their practices from those who teach under the same banner but teach differently?
How much of their critical orientation to other schools and practitioners do they share with their students and how and when do they share it?
What kind of writing do they ask their students to do, and how is it related to their reading?" (114).

Postied by at 5:48 PM | to Article, Distance

Monday, November 27, 2006

Hesse, "Who Owns Writing?"

H esse, Doug. "Who Owns Writing?" CCC 57.2 (2005): 335-357.

Hesse's address offers a meditation on the domain of writing and who ultimately is suited to act as steward over the domain. The idea of ownership indicated in the talk's title, Hesse clarifies early on, is not so much of intellectual property as of "the conditions under which writing is taught" (337). With an emphasis on practitioners, the address articulates the role of compositionists as those who, because they are knowledgeable about "the whole of" writing, are responsible for writing and writers (355).

Early in the address, Hesse refers to an essay generator and an automated essay-grading system. The computer-generated essay on aphasia scores high in the grading system, suggesting (with a chuckle from everyone in the audience) how absurd machine scoring is. He uses this scenario to bring up problems with school writing that will be graded with algorithms.

Hesse presents five spheres of writing: academic, vocational, civic, personal, and belletristic (349). Academic and vocational writing match with what he calls "obliged discourse", and he acknowledges that the profession must continue to live up to the expectation on students to perform obliged writing. The other three spheres are what he calls "self-sponsored discourse." Hesse is most concerned with the civic sphere as it has shifted from mass media to "self-sponsored" niches, thus moving the civic nearer to the personal and belletristic. He mentions Wikipedia as yet another example of an expansion in the domain of writing that compositionists should take into account, rather than continuing "to teach as if the civic sphere were still institutionally sponsored, as if there were extractable principles, guidelines, and rules" (353).

Key terms: "conflicted terms" (336), ownership society (337), digital grader (338), Turing test (341), objectivity (341), National Commission on Writing for America's Families (343), national press (343), Lakoff's conceptual frames (345), college catalog (346), obliged discourse (349), self-sponsored discourse (349), wikipedia (352),

"Our work ought to feel more important than it has in quite some time. And yet, even with all this attention--in fact, even because of it--the stars threaten to fall on our familiar worlds" (336).

"To ask who owns writing is to ask most obviously about property rights, the buying, selling, and leasing of textual acreages. But I'm rather asking who owns the conditions under which writing is taught?" (337).

"What I will do is suggest that those who teach writing must affirm that we, in fact, own it. The question is what we should aspire to own--and how" (338).

"I cut out the graph because I wasn't sure if the site would know what to do" (340). ^Brief though this is, the removal of the image is interesting in that it points to the difference between symbolic and iconic processing.

"In the machine dream, writing would become a sort of dull game, an interaction with software to produce a score" (341).

"I'm wondering if the word 'writing' may frame our work in ways that aren't always desirable. The term seems neutral enough, but it may well carry the sense of inscribing words on paper; that is, it may focus attention on the physical act of graphemic production, separate from thinking, with all the focus on correctness" (345).

"Our borders aren't fixed" (346). ^In fact, they aren't even our borders? Or borders at all?

"For various reasons, I think that as a profession we must continue to own up to the demands of obliged writing on our students. But we must also attend to self-sponsored writing, not only as target discourses but also as increasingly important forms of action in the world" (350).

"Make no mistake. We in 4Cs refract and frame no less than others. But we have something else--or if we don't have it, we have no particular right to be in this place, on this March morning. We have the lens of research and reflective practice, polished carefully and long, intentionally scratched at times, even melted. Ours is the knowledge of what writing is and what it can be, the whole of it, in every sphere" (355).

Postied by at 12:29 PM | to Article, Writing Technologies

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Fulkerson, "Composition at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century"

F ulkerson, Richard. "Summary and Critique: Composition at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century." CCC 56.4 (2005): 654-687.

Fulkerson's ten-year follow-up to earlier reports on the condition of composition studies concludes with premonitions about the field's disunity and the "new theory wars" (681). As a "map [of] a large and complicated region" (679), "Composition at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century" advances speculative claims (probabilities?) based on what Fulkerson calls "indirect evidence." Given that he ends up mentioning North's 1987 concerns in The Making of Knowledge about the sustainability of composition studies given methodological pluralism, it's worth raising questions about just how different "indirect evidence" is from "lore"--the tacit knowledge circulated informally by practitioners who represented the largest segment of the field (rel. to researchers and scholars). Fulkerson suggests that the divergence in the field at the turn of the twenty-first century goes well beyond methodologies, extending to matters "axiological, pedagogical, and processual" (681).

Fulkerson admits "frustration" as his motivation for trying to make sense of the field every ten years. He compares two teaching sourcebooks, one from 1980 and another from 2001, and based on a comparison of their tables of contents, concludes that the new chapters (ch. 5-8, pp. 656) represent "variations of the major new area of scholarly interest in composition as we begin the twenty-first century, critical/cultural studies (CCS)" (657). Of course, both teaching guides do very little to address writing technologies and new media; the more recent guide includes one essay by Charlie Moran.

To explain the disunity of the field that now applies to perspectives beyond methodologies, Fulkerson presents a grid, which he says the work of his essay will fill in.

Fulkerson spends most of the pieces, however, on expressivism, critical/cultural studies, and procedural rhetoric, as these are the perspectives best represented in the journals. Current-traditional rhetoric, on the other hand, lingers as a given. Fulkerson's presents a hard critique of critical/cultural studies, noting that it suffers from "content envy," finds itself more concerned with "'liberation' from dominant discourse" than with "improved writing" (660), involves indoctrination, and displaces attention to writing with too much emphasis on reading (665). He also addresses the current state of expressivism and procedural rhetoric (which he identifies as "the dominant tradition of composition in the 1970s and 1980s" (671). Accordingly, it's fairly clear that composition studies has grown more complex, and this Balkanization presents problems for the field and especially for teacher training. Fulkerson concludes with seven implications (complexity; disagreement about what is good writing?; smorgasbord confusion; public responsibility to articulate what we do; no ultimate answer; must be resolved at program level; and mess this creates for coherent graduate training).

Four general perspectives (rows):

1. Current-Traditional
2. Expressivism
3. Critical/Cultural Studies
4. Procedural Rhetoric (subdivisions: "composition as argumentation, genre-based composition, and composition as an introduction to an academic discourse community" (671))

Four questions (columns):

1. The axiological question: in general, what makes writing "good"?
2. The process question: in general, how do written texts come into existence?
3. The pedagogical question: in general, how does one teach college students effectively, especially where procedural rather than propositional knowledge is the goal? And
4. The epistemological question: "How do you know that?" which underlies answers to all the others. (657-658)

Conclusions and implications (679)
See responses in CCC 57.4 (2006) and also in the carnival.

Key terms: frustration (654), comp-landia (655), composition landscape (655), axiological consensus (655), pedagogical diversity (655), Kuhn's "paradigm shift" (656), content envy (665), indoctrination (665), process and post-process (669), indirect evidence (669), argument (671), genre (674), Bartholomae and discourse community (677), stasis theory (677).

"My central claim is that we have diverged again. Within the scholarship, we currently have three alternative axiologies (theories of value): the newest one, "the social" or "social-construction" view, which values critical cultural analysis; an expressive one; and a multifaceted rhetorical one" (655).

"These four chapters [5-8 in Tate et.al.'s A Guide to Composition Pedagogies] represent variations of the major new area of scholarly interest in composition as we begin the twenty-first century, critical/cultural studies (CCS), showing the impact of postmodernism, feminism, and British cultural studies" (657).

"Just as no one actually knows how widespread CCS composition courses are, the same is true for expressive courses grounded in the views and experiences of the student authors. We have lots of indirect evidence for both" (669).

"In contemporary composition practice, I see rhetorical philosophies taking three different emphases: composition as argumentation, genre-based composition, and composition as introduction to an academic discourse community" (671).

"Genre-based courses and CCS courses thus share an extensive focus on close reading of texts and on culturally determined patterns, but the goals of the reading differ. In the CCS course, the students are to read critically and cite the texts read in their own papers on related topics. In the genre course, the readings serve as discourse models from which students can generalize. Both approaches presume that texts are socially constructed and intertextual" (675).

Related sources:

Berlin, James. "Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories." College English 44 (Dec. 1982): 765--77.

Hairston, Maxine. "Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing." CCC 43 (May 1992): 179--93.

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

Postied by at 5:06 PM | to Article, Writing Technologies

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Fulkerson, "Four Philosophies of Composition"

F ulkerson, Richard. "Four Philosophies of Composition." Composition in Four Keys: Inquiring into the Field. Barbara Gleason, Louise Wetherbee Phelps, and Mark Wiley, eds. Mountain View, Calif.: Mayfield, 1996. 551-555.

In this brief piece, originally published in CCC 30 (1979), Fulkerson adapts a philosophical framework from M.H. Abrams's The Mirror and the Lamp (1953). Abrams devised a four-term analytical scheme applied to "artistic transactions" (551), consisting of pragmatic, mimetic, expressive, and objective perspectives. Fulkerson revises these terms, replacing the pragmatic and objective with rhetorical and formalist designations, in an effort to apply them to composition studies. The mid-section of the essay accounts briefly for each of the positions and names key figures associated with each:

• formalist: bases judgments on form (grammar, syntax, and spelling); focus on the sentence and universal norms; Out front: E.D. Hirsch (552).
• expressionist: committed to writing as self-discovery; grounded in the Dartmouth Conference; emph. "psychic equilibrium" (553); Out front: Macrorie, Donald Stewart.
• mimetic: good writing relies on good (clear, logical, rational) thinking; formal logic and rooting out assumptions in discourse; concerned with insufficient knowledge to write; heuristic systems; enact the "real" (553); Out front: Beardsley and Kytle.
• rhetorical: reflected in CCC; good writing is adapted for the "desired effect on the desired audience" (553); classical roots; Out front: Corbett, Richard Larson.

Fulkerson goes on to explain the challenge in classifying Elbow, an "Aristotle in modern dress," who, though invested in "free writing, collaborative criticism, and audience adaptation," still presses for students to consider audience. Because his teaching methods are interested in audience and because they jibe with his evaluative emphases, Elbow fits with the rhetorical philosophy. Fulkerson explains his concern with the pedagogy of "mindlessness" that confuses the motivating philosophy of the course with the evaluative emphases. "Value-mode confusion" is Fulkerson's underlying concern in presenting the four philosophies, which he hopes will "reduce such mindlessness in the future" (555). Consider that he reiterated a set of related concerns in CCC 56.4 (2005) with "Summary and Critique: Composition at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century." Also, this piece was reprinted in the Composition in Four Keys section on "Alternative Maps," along with Berlin's "Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories," and excerpts from North's Making of Knowledge.

Key terms: value-mode confusion (in the "bald" assignment) (554), modal confusion (555).

"Since the elements in an artistic transaction are the same as those in any communication, it seemed that Abrams's four theories might also be relevant to composition" (551).

"My thesis is that this four-part perspective helps give us a coherent view of what goes on in composition classes. All four philosophies exist in practice" (551).

"My research has convinced me that in many cases composition teachers either fail to have a consistent value theory or fail to let that philosophy shape pedagogy" (554).

"There is nothing wrong with an expressive philosophy, but there is something seriously wrong with classroom methodology which implies one variety of value judgment when another will actually be employed. That is model confusion, mindlessness" (555).