Saturday, February 16, 2008
Regan, "Type Normal Like the Rest of Us"
R egan, Alison. "'Type Normal Like the Rest of Us': Writing, Power, and Homophobia in the Networked Composition Classroom." Computers and Composition 9.4 (Nov 1993): 11-23. <http://computersandcomposition.osu.edu/archives/v10/10_4_html/10_4_2_Regan.html>
Regan accounts for her own move away from traditional interaction toward networked classrooms in the late 1980s and early 1990s, noting that she looked forward to using LANs for discussion. She also acknowledges apprehensions she felt and she call into question the promise of social equality online.
What are the types of exclusion manifesting in these presumably inviting, inclusive, and egalitarian spaces? Regan explores this question, particularly where homophobic views are expressed by students in one online interchange when, while, she explains, they were "on-task."
The article touches on points about silencing (how silencing works differently between conventional classroom discussions and LAN-based chats), and how the synchronous discussion platform lengthens the life of the utterances relative to ordinary in-class discussion. Regan acknowledges the work done by others, such as Kremers, on "wilding" and the perils of off-task conversations, but she is more concerned with on-task discussion and the ways exclusionary discourse is a part of it.
Accounting for a scenario involving homophobic language and another situation in which she left the room only to have a student use her terminal and screen name to tell the class to "type normal like the rest of us," Regan concludes that vestiges of authority will linger do matter how much we attempt to divest ourselves of it in the "liberatory" medium of the LAN interchange.
"I am not suggesting that we should shut down discussions of lesbian and gay issues because they might make us or our students uncomfortable. It is important, however, that we be aware of the possible consequences of those discussions, and it may be important that we take an active role in framing those discussions. The very way that homosexuality is introduced into the rhetoric and composition curriculum is problematic. Because I am particularly interested in computer-mediated classroom discussion, I have focused on these instances of student expressions of homophobia, rather than examining instances of institutional homophobia."
"This exhortation serves as a reminder of two important points: first, even the instructor who shares authority remains identified with institutional power, and second, any person who is "different" disturbs the classroom environment. The command to "type normal" is nothing less than a command to be normal; John's remarks were never unreadable, they simply did not conform to the standards maintained by his classmates and instructor.
Thus, even within a space where expression appears most free, institutional and social forms of authority remain."
Postied by at Tuesday, February 5, 2008
George, "Taking Women Professors Seriously"
G eorge, E. Laurie. "Taking Women Professors Seriously: Female Authority in the Computerized Classroom." Computers and Composition 7 (April 1990; Special issue): 45-52. <http://computersandcomposition.osu.edu/archives/v7/7_spec_html/7_spec_3_George.html>
George attempts to reconcile the principles of feminist pedagogy promoted by Adrienne Rich in her 1979 article, "Taking Women Students Seriously," with the tensions she experiences when teaching composition at the New York Institute of Technology. George acknowledges that the working conditions for women professors have improved since Rich presented her work; yet, it is not always so simple to relinquish all power and authority to students who tend to let loose with unfiltered crudity when they are asked to discuss topics using a LAN chat room. She refers specifically to a case where one student jokes about getting beers for class and then inquires about the teacher's sex life. George also includes a transcript of an interchange from a class taught by Kremers, a colleague of hers at NYIT. When several students begin to engage in an explicit sequence of the dozens, the teacher intervenes with, "Someone comment on how the dialogue is going." Next, a student remarks, "I think this is a sick bunch of students." This is a fairly complicated interchange. From it, George works toward claims about the challenge of balancing her principled feminist pedagogy with measure of control and authority: "My overall point here is that, as numerous theorists of collaborative and feminist pedagogy concur, students who have been culturally programmed and disempowered for so long have a great deal of trouble knowing what to do with power once it is given to them" (para. 17).
At the end of this short article, George asserts that it is a matter of responsibility to "tak[e] seriously my authority to control those reins" (para. 19) where students are "wilding" or acting up, particularly in those environs where authority is shared or where conventional authority structures are loosened. This argument runs parallel to Kremers' article in the sense that the giving over to underlife is never wholesale; some aspect of authority is withheld. And it would stand to reason that this could be made explicit--that everyone involved could be forewarned. Of course, these early networked conversations were relatively contained. The disruptive/contained dyad pertains here because the network does not span beyond the classroom scene.
Quotations:
The democratic principles of feminist pedagogy are also fostered by student work spaces, for they are much more ample than those in the traditional classrooms, indicating a professional respect for the students' authority. (para. 7)
This practice of privately consulting each student as others write independently reinforces to the entire class that a communal activity need not be equated with rigid repetition of boring drills, just as it proves that there is room for individuality and even privacy within group work. (para. 8)
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).
Thursday, November 23, 2006
Sirc, English Composition as a Happening
S irc, Geoffrey. English Composition as a Happening. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 2002.
How do we make the classroom a happening space, a space "no one wants to leave"? In English Composition as a Happening, Sirc winds through a series of statements--a gallery crawl--contrasting, allegorically, Modern Composition studies and the materially and processually radical avante-garde arts. In the figures of Marcel Duchamp and Jackson Pollock (among others) who have gone under-examined as compositionists, Sirc leads a full-on assault of the Modernist fortress of disciplinarity- and professionalism-minded Composition studies. The curatorial or juridical spirit of Modern Composition studies as well as its most notable proponent, David Bartholomae, the "Sherman Lee of comp", have reduced writing to an enterprise of the stuffy, unreadable, and tame: "We purged ourselves of any trace of kookiness, growing first suspicious, then disdainful, of the kind of homemade comp-class-as-Happening that people like [William] Lutz tried to put together" (7). Absent the imaginative, mystical, and passionate, comp's de-intensification leads to the commonplaces about despair and despondency. One glance at the narrowed range of "bread-alone" possibilities (conventions, "rarified materials" (11)) corresponding to Modernist Composition, and there's no surprise in seeing the glum faces: boredom predominates in this spiritless domain.
Sirc calls his project a "historical review"; he works from figure to figure, both from composition in the late twentieth century and also from the avante-garde arts to give a "re-reading of the field" (13). Marcel Duchamp, for instance, forces us to rethink the narrowness of material possibilities; post-process is only possible if we never consider Jackson Pollock's ongoing, intensely precise enactments of process and variation. Venturi's studies of "nonstraightforward architecture" might help us introduce a "new urbanism" to composition studies. Change the scene: make it more like the Vegas strip or like the "bold communication" of the A&P parking lot's "megatexture" (191): feature drift as method.
Sirc's tongue-in-cheek, rapid-fire style is, in itself, intense--a demonstration of exciting (sweat-inducing) prose emblematic of the through-going propositions in the monograph. As summarily as is possible, this project advocates for radical practice, for rejuvinating the happenings influences in the late 60's and 70's that have dwindled from the scene as the field has become a legitimate (self-defined) discipline with expanded channels for professionalization: an Modernist outpost perpetuating essayistic rationalism to the neglect of everything disallowed. Sirc challenges the processual and material orthodoxies of the field, and, in so-doing, presents a lively, kicky set of quandaries for keeping with us on the gallery crawl ahead.
Key terms: Venturi and basic architecture (1), museums (2), self-definition and Post-Happenings Composition (8, 35), turns and re-turns (14), gallery crawl (20, 286), hacienda (26), juried scene (38), mathematics of accordance (42), restricted teleintertext (56), travel narrative (65), derive (89), choosing (113), alert waiting (113), material gesture (113), prose web (114), basic writers (118), post-process (119), new urbanism (187, 222), "nonstraightforward architecture" (189), A&P parking lot (191), psychogeography (195), bread-alone composition (201), pleasure zones (223), successful writing (228), architectonics of Composition (232), Sherman Lee (266), academic gatekeeper (266), residual objects (272).
"Because designing spaces, I think, is what it's all about. It's a matter of basic architecture: Robert Venturi has shown that simplified compositional programs, programs that ignore the complexity and contradiction of everyday life, result in bland architecture; and I think the reverse is true as well, and perhaps more relevant for Composition: bland architecture (unless substantially detourned, as Lutz's) evokes simplistic programs" (1).
On Composition's Canon and citation: "As article after article appeared, once could trace the waxing and waning of theoretical trends: Langer, Polanyi, Vygotsky, Odell, Emig, Berthoff, Bruffee, Bartholomae, Berlin, Anzaldua, Foucault, and Freire. This narrow-banding is curious for a discipline that trumpets the value of linguistic richness" (7).
"Post-Happenings Composition never asks (as Comp '68 did so often) 'What's Going On?' To remove any doubt about precisely what was going on, Composition undertook the classical modernist project of self-definition" (8).
"Strict boundaries have become maintained in Composition, a separation of (profession-oriented) academy and life, one discipline from another, the specific discourse from a broader lived reality. This is not Freshman English as a Happening, this is Freshman English as a Corporate Seminar" (9).
"The reason the teaching of writing is permeated by dissatisfaction (every CCCC presentation seems, at some level, a complaint) is that we--bad enough--don't really know what teaching is, but also--far worse, fatal, in fact--we haven't really evolved an idea of writing that fully reflects the splendor of the medium" (9).
"Rarefying materials, as Composition does (the middle-brow preciosity or academic aloofness that drives the reading selections we anthologize), only makes the possibilities for Happening Composition more remote, particularly for students" (11).
"I'd like, then, to retrace the road not taken in Composition Studies, to re-read the elision, in order to remember what was missed and to salvage what can still be recovered. This, then, is a negative-space history, one that reverses the conventional figure-ground relations to find the most fruitful avenues of inquiry to be those untouched or abandoned by the disciplinary mainstream. The disruptive/restorative dynamic of my project means both rediscovering the usefulness of some materials of Composition that have faded from our conscious screen, and forcing a comparison of our field with the avante-garde tradition in post-WWII American art, running that story through our own traditional, disciplined history--or better, showing our history as already-ruptured, permanently destabilized by our attitude toward (really, ignorance of) the compositional avante-garde" (13).
"The cause of our current stasis? Doubtless the major influence has been Composition's professionalization, its self-tormented quest for disciplinary stature" (24).
"Just because the rest of the curriculum has banned enchantment in favor of a narrow conception of life-as-careerism that doesn't mean we have to go along, does it?" (28).
"The Happenings lesson to take from Jackson's art is (life-) process-oriented: his process fascinates not in order to discover how to paint like Jackson (reproducing forms, reinstituting rhetorics) but to empathize with him, to re-enter the compositional scene as Kaprow could, to consider how he solved problems (what he even saw as problems), how he met limits, considered materials, tried to make a direct statement in an interesting way--to think about what Jackson felt in the moments of composition" (82).
"But Modernist Composition never admits it doesn't know what's going on" (88).
"A prose web, then, is writing as doing things to a range of materials. Composition as material gesture. It means changing the axis of the image, supplying the (missing, now active) horizontal vector to disable the predictability of composition's strict verticality" (114).
"You know what our problem is? It's a failure of nerve in our myth-making; revealing that about the field might be Jackson's most useful function for CCCC" (115).
"The way students actually inhabit the writing classroom's cityscape is very much in keeping with the situationist notion of the derive, the method used to chart a city's psychogeography" (195).
"I bring in Bono because the writing classroom under the bread-alone program resembles nothing so much as a lame parody of MTV, as seen by the TV show designed, in effect, to be a lame parody of MTV, 'Puttin on the Hits': writing in the bread-alone composition class becomes lip-syncing the standards, and teaching becomes a question of judging the authenticity of the imitation" (202).
"All writing courses, regardless of their ideological advocacy, become Modernist when they close on received notions of form and function" (206).
"All a curriculum designed to reproduce uniformity in writing empowers is the system academic writing serves (no matter how counter-hegemonic its ideology, there remain those 'reformist-progressive social and industrial aims that it could seldom achieve in reality'). Why conceal it?" (219).
"Compared with the way post-Happenings Composition defines the classroom enterprise of college writing instruction, as a professional commitment to do a certain kind of work with a certain set of materials, Composition as a Happening is far less mediated, looser. It silences that tedious, already-wrote drone of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing. It is a pedagogy designed to un-build our field's spaces, a standard-stoppage, a composition theory (like Schoenberg's) that values the eraser end of the pencil (or the delete key)" (278).
!!: 1962 (20), rel. Fulkerson's axiology (155), trying on academic language (230).
- Related sources:
- Bartholomae, David. "What is Composition and (if you know what that is) Why Do We Teach It?" Composition in the Twenty-First Century: Crisis and Change. Ed. Lynn Z. Bloom, Donald A. Daiker, and Edward M. White. Carbondale: SIU Press, 1996. 11-28.
- Deemer, Charles. "English Composition as a Happening." College English 29 (Nov. 1967): 121-126.
- Rodrigues, Raymond J. "Moving Away from Writing-Process Worship." English Journal Sept. 1985: 24-27.
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):
- Current-Traditional
- Expressivism
- Critical/Cultural Studies
- Procedural Rhetoric (subdivisions: "composition as argumentation, genre-based composition, and composition as an introduction to an academic discourse community" (671))
Four questions (columns):
- The axiological question: in general, what makes writing "good"?
- The process question: in general, how do written texts come into existence?
- The pedagogical question: in general, how does one teach college students effectively, especially where procedural rather than propositional knowledge is the goal? And
- 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.
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).
Thursday, November 16, 2006
North, The Making of Knowledge in Composition
N orth, Stephen M. The Making of Knowledge in Composition. Upper Montclair, N.J.: Boynton/Cook, 1987.
North's 1987 "portrait"--importantly the first theoretical monograph in the field--sets out with a few central questions: What counts as knowledge in Composition? How will lore and practitioner-knowledge be valued as the field pursues professionalization and methodological legitimacy? What is the future of Composition given its methodological pluralism and related charges about dissolution or disunity? North describes his own method as anthropological. He begins with a brief history of the events that figure into the present climate for composition studies: the large number of practitioners relative to scholars and researchers, the devaluation of practice-as-inquiry and resultant devaluation of practitioners, and the primacy of lore (unregulated, informal, and tacit knowledge about writing and how best to teach it) in the field.
This is a deceptively simple portrait--both a history of modern composition studies and a speculative (skeptical?) opening up of questions about the deep problems facing the field with its methodological pluralism. North presents a typology for methodological communities or clusters. Each of the eight types is assigned a full chapter that includes a brief bibliographic gloss (key publications, read primarily through names and titles), a characterization of the community and a comparison of it to its nearest neighbors, and an explanation (including a list) of the typical procedures involved with the method. According to North, pure (method-free) practice (and practitioners) begins to count differently--as somewhat less than--with the 1963 CCCC and Kitzhaber's call for leadership and professionalization--exerting, in North's language, "authority over knowledge about composition" (15). The resulting methodological communities or modes of inquiry are distinguished by (aside from method), size in number (Practitioners are the most), relation to other modes, and the duality of identification (many would also refer to themselves as Rhetoricians, although North says this is not methodologically helpful) (61-63).
The eight modes of inquiry (which reflect some, not all clusters (137, 140)) are:
- Practitioners (the founding mode; practice as inquiry) (21)
- Scholars - Historians (rules include new events or new connections among events; two stages: empirical and interpretive; first-generation historians focused on pedagogy; second-generation on institutions and programs) (66)
- Scholars - Philosophers (most difficult to account for (91); challenge to impose coherence) (91);
- Scholars - Critics or Hermeneuts (a central mode of literary studies (116); favored by North; intermediary between historians and philosophers (116);
- Researchers - Experimentalists (replicable results to dis/confirm and certify (150)) (141);
- Researchers - Clinicians ("cases"; subject-oriented and fitting with psychological studies, cognition, etc.) (197);
- Researchers - Formalists (models or simulations; focused on formal properties of process or activity) (238);
- Researchers - Ethnographers (inscribers; Geertz-influences "thick description"-ists; few of them in 1987 according to North) (272).
As each group becomes more formidable (in number, publication venues, conferences, etc.), there comes an increased expectation that practitioners will fall in. Consequently, methodological pluralism can be framed as a contest--a "methodological struggle for power" (321)--that begins to recruit practitioners into particular methodological communities (^Grad programs as yet another arm of this?)
Defn.
Lore (22): "the accumulated body of traditions, practices, and
beliefs in terms of which Practitioners understand how writing is done,
learned, and taught." Healthy lore depends upon longevity and breadth (35).
Three functional properties of lore:
- "once somebody says that it has worked or is working or might work, it is part of lore" (24)
- "While anything can become part of lore, nothing can ever be dropped from it, either" (24)
- "once a particular nomination is made the contributor gives up control over it" (25). Share share alike: "Such tinkering with the contributions made by other Practitioners seldom seems terribly disturbing" (25).
Key terms: modes of inquiry (1, 15), methodological communities (1), methodological land-rush (2), practical knowledge (16), emerging science (21), practitioners (21), lore (22), practice as inquiry (23, 33), lore and pragmatic logic (23), lore's experiential structure (24), expressive, poetic, transactional writing (26), The House of Lore (27), practitioners' tolerance and latitude (28), textbook's catechetical function (30), rubber triangle (53), first- and second-order inquiry (60), rhetoric (63), praxis (65), narrative (69), thick description (277), paradigm (318), tacit knowledge (319), methodological pluralism (320), topoi to organize the field (338), inter-methodological coherence (370).
"Federal interest in English per se on this scale [crisis; 1958 NDEA; 1967 NCTE NITE] was relatively short-lived, but the momentum generated by the intense interest of these few years launched modern Composition. The broadest effects were on English teachers' self-perception as professionals" (12).
"Kitzhaber's [1963] challenge calls, in other words, for the exertion of authority over knowledge about composition: what it is, how it is made, who gets to say so and why" (15).
"It takes time to identify new modes of inquiry, to acquire expertise in them, and then to find or create outlets in which to publish their results. They have emerged very slowly" (21).
"These three modes [historian, philosopher, and critic] belong in the same methodological cluster primarily because they share the humanist tradition's reliance on what can be broadly defined as dialectic--that is, the seeking of knowledge via the deliberate confrontation of opposing points of view" (60).
"Even more to the point, [rhetoric] is not much help methodologically. Rhetoric can be defined as an art to be mastered; or, as for these Scholars, the various manifestations of that art as practiced can be conceived as an object or field of study. But there is not, in this latter sense, any inherently Rhetorical mode of inquiry" (64).
"The resulting demographic pattern [among philosophers] is rather like that of a marina: a small core of full-time residents; a larger group of long-term types, who may stay as long as two or three years, or move in and out with some regularity; and lots of one-time, seasonal visitors who nevertheless--by sheet [?] weight of numbers--leave their mark on the community" (92).
"I will admit to a certain bias in favor of this kind [hermeneutic-critical] of investigation; of all my work in various modes of inquiry, I was most interested in these case studies" (119).
"The first three of these [Experimentalists, Clinicians, and Formalists] constitute a methodological cluster quite as neat as the three Scholarly modes, sharing as they do the positivist tradition's fundamental faith in the describable orderliness of the universe: that is, the belief that things-in-the-world, including in this case people, operate according to determinable or 'lawful' patterns, general tendencies, which exist apart from our experience of them, and which are, in addition, accessible to the right kinds of inquiry" (137).
"After all, it [experimentation] has been the dominant mode of formal educational research in this country over the past 75 years or so. And while it has always had its share of vehement critics--who delight in pointing out, for example, the origins of many of its techniques in agricultural research, in formulations designed to deal with corn yield per acre--it is not a dominance that will surrender easily" (141).
"The natural urge is to move toward system, toward a vision of students not as discrete individuals, but as in some ways comparable units acting according to articulable general principles. Experimental knowledge responds to this urge very, very well. In it, the institutions and guesses of lore are assumed to have been transformed into a more powerful kind of truth, one by which the uncertainty, and so the stress, of what otherwise seems such a chaotic world might be better brought under control" (153).
"In terms of this study, it ["the paradigm-shift explanation for the revolution in Composition"] might be described as a power play, an attempt by one methodological community or cluster of communities to assert its dominance over the others. And this is the sort of movements that has in fact been most characteristic of the emergent field of Composition" (321).
"Versions of the conservative model may acknowledge that teaching writing is to some extent an art, but they are more likely to treat it more as a kind of technology, an applied science, as well, and to be far more attracted by the cumulative (and perhaps, by implication, Practitioner-proof) possibilities of that scientific dimension" (331).
"Nonetheless, my original question stands: By what sort of logic are these studies being strung together? Witte seems to handle the results of these methodologically diverse investigations as if they were so many Lego blocks: standardized bits and pieces of 'knowledge' which, whatever their origins, sizes, or shapes, can be coupled together to form a paradigmatic frame within which his own exploratory Experimental study will fit" (346).
"For both sides, it is a 'field,' a 'profession,' and a 'discipline,' terms that seem to be treated interchangeably, as if in obedience to an unspoken rule: Characterize Composition as paradigmatic or dialogical, coherent or chaotic as you like, but it is to everyone's advantage to treat it as a legitimate academic discipline" (364).
"It might not be too much to claim, in fact, that for all the rhetoric about unity in pursuit of one or another goal, Composition as a knowledge-making society is gradually pulling itself apart" (364).
"Is there any chance, then, for an academically full-fledged, autonomous, multi-methodological, knowledge-making Composition? Not, it would seem, without radical change. Composition faces a peculiar methodological paradox: its communities cannot get along well enough to live with one another, and yet they seem unlikely to survive, as any sort of integral whole called Composition, without one another" (369).
"Instead, I end up predicting that either (a) Composition as we know it will essentially disappear, reverting to something much like its pre-1963 form; or that (b) it might survive, but probably only by breaking its institutional ties with literary studies and, hence, English departments" (373).
"So, sad as it may be, I would rather take my chances on a fully vital Composition that fails than to settle for one that is never quite free to try" (374).
- Related sources:
- Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic, 1973.
- Kitzhaber, Albert R. "4C, Freshman English, and the Future." CCC 14 (1963): 129-38.
- Winterowd, W. Ross. Rhetoric: A Synthesis. New York: Holt, 1986.
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
Aarseth, Cybertext
A arseth, Espen J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997.
Aarseth's discussion of cybertexts or, that is, ergodic literature (ergodic from Gr., ergon - work and hodos - path), is carried on the shoulders of an ambitious and insightful set of terms and a seven-mode textonomy for describing ergodic literature across the typical (and unsuitable) poles of digital and print for typifying texts. Cybertext, then, works with examples from (literary) hypertext, video games, text adventure games, and MUDs in an effort to compel us toward a "more viable terminology" (74), while rendering productively murky many of the thought-to-be-clean distinctions between texts experienced in the phosphor of the screen and those experienced on paper. The digital-paper dichotomy, he says, suffers from limited analytical power (54). Aarseth's project is striking for his discussion of kinds of paths, his differentiation in terms among linear, multilinear, and nonlinear (3; multilinear dissolves the linear/nonlinear commonplace (44)); unicursoral and multicursoral (5-6); and interactivity (48). The linearity/nonlinearity dichotomy and discussions dependant on engulfing notions of interactivity (48) are unsuitable, he argues, to the more viable terminology he seeks. He also builds on Barthes' discussion in The Pleasure of the Text of tmesis or skipping in reading. Cybertext, ultimately, is more a perspective than a category (24); writing as a cyborg activity increasingly reminds of the inadequacies of the Shannon-Weaver communication model for describing the complex, emerging dynamics involved with cybertexts.
Aarseth's approach emphasizes the experience of the texts (not necessarily a hermeneutics); he views text as phenomena rather than as a string of signifiers (20), and he reads cybertexts across their aesthetics, their constructions, and their uses. The cybertextual perspective is especially useful because they merge paper and digital texts into a cohesive analytic-descriptive framework.
Aarseth explains his tentative "textonomy" in terms of scriptons, textons, and a traversal function. Scriptons are strings of signs (information) "as they appear to readers"; textons are strings of signs "as they exist in the text"; and the traversal function is "the mechanism by which scriptons are revealed or generated from textons and presented to the user of the text" (62). Built on these neologisms, Aarseth's seven-term typology includes the following modes of traversal (together, their variables make possible 576 unique combinations or "media positions" (64):
- Dynamics: the fixity, variability, or unavailability of scriptons;
- Determinability: A determinate text has the same scriptons each time; the scriptons adjacent to any other scripton vary in an indeterminate text;
- Transiency: The passage of time triggers the appearance of scriptons in a transient text (alt. intransient);
- Perspective: If the user has a character in the world, the perspective is personal (alt. impersonal);
- Access: If all scriptons are accessible at all times, as in a codex, the access is random (alt. controlled);
- Linking: Explicit, conditional, none;
- User Functions: explorative (forking), configurative (scriptons are created or chosen), interpretive (hermeneutic), textonic (able to write or program--extend or change text) (63-64).
Nonlinear text: "An object of verbal communication that is not simply
one fixed sequence of words may differ from reading to reading because of the
shape, conventions, or mechanisms of the text" (41).
Text: "Any object with the primary function to relay verbal information"
(62).
Key terms: feedback loop (1), mechanical organization (1), reading (1-2), linearity (3), cybertext (5, 17), forking paths (5), unicursal and bivia (5-6), linear, maze, net (6), footnote (7), database (10), hypertext (12, 77), textonomy (15), textology (15), theoretical restraint (18), technological determinism (19), hermeneutics (20), computer semiotics (26), artificial life (AL) (29), emergence (30), permanence/transience (30), dual materiality (40), nonlinear text (41), nonlinear/multilinear (43), linear paradigm (46), RB tmesis and skipping (47), interactivity (48), cyborg aesthetics (51), Analytica (60), text (62), scriptons and textons (62), reader (74), network and link (83), anamorphosis (180), metamorphosis (178).
"The concept of cybertext focuses on the mechanical organization of the text, by positing the intricacies of the medium as an integral part of the literary exchange" (1).
"In a cybertext, however, the distinction [between play and performance] is crucial--and rather different; when you read from a cybertext, you are constantly reminded of inaccessible strategies and paths not taken, voices not heard" (3).
"The cybertext reader is a player, a gambler; the cybertext is a game-world or world-game; it is possible to explore, get lost, and discover secret paths in these texts, not metaphorically, but through the topological structures of the textual machinery" (4).
"Cybertext is a perspective on all forms of textuality, a way to expand the scope of literary studies to include phenomena that today are perceived as outside of, or marginalized by, the field of literature--or even in opposition to it, for (as I make clear later) purely extraneous reasons" (18).
"The various effects produced by cybertextual machines are not easily described by these textological epistemes [philological, phenomenological, structural, semiotic, and poststructural], if they can be described at all. I might achieve something by trying each one, but since all of them so obviously conceive the material, historical, and textual artifact as a syntagmatic chain of signifiers and little else, that approach would most likely prove fruitless and desultory, and it would almost certainly not illuminate the idiomatic aspects of ergodic texts" (24).
"The crucial issue here [in Aarseth's discussion of computer semiotics] is how to view systems that feature what is known as emergent behavior, systems that are complex structures evolving unpredictably from an initial set of simple elements" (29).
"When the relationship between surface sign and user is all that matters, the unique dual materiality of the cybernetic sign process is disregarded. Without an understanding of this duality, however, analyses of communication phenomena involving cybernetic sign production become superficial and incomplete" (40).
"To construct a fundamental dichotomy between linear and nonlinear types of media is therefore dangerous; it produces blind spots even as it creates new insights" (47).
"The word interactive operates textually rather than analytically, as it connotes various vague ideas of computer screens, user freedom, and personalized media, while denoting nothing" (48).
On cyborg: "[Manfred] Clynes constructed the term from the words cybernetic organism and used it to describe the new symbiotic entity that results from the alliance between humans and technology in a closed, artificial environment such as a space capsule" (53).
"When I fire a virtual laser gun in a computer game such as Space Invader, where, and what, am I?" (162). ^In "The Death (and Politics) of the Reader."
"Even if we can no longer use the word author in a meaningful way (after all, today's complex media productions are seldom, if ever, run by a single 'man behind the curtain'), it would be irresponsible to assume that this position has simply gone away, leaving a vacuum to be filled by the audience" (165).
"The ergodic work of art is one that in a material sense includes the rules for its own use, a work that has certain requirements built in that automatically distinguishes between successful and unsuccessful users" (179).
"The idea of the new is always ambiguous, and if the use of these neologisms seems contradictory and self-defeating in a study that seeks to demonstrate the ideological forces behind similar neologisms (interactive fiction, hypertext, etc.), my only defense is that I try to make my concepts less dichotomic and more analytic than their alternatives" (182).
- Related sources:
- Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975.
- Weiner, Norbert. Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. New York: Technology Press, 1948.
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
Yancey, "Made Not Only in Words"
Y ancey, Kathleen Blake. "Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key." CCC 56.2 (2004): 297-328.
Yancey repeatedly points out to the 2004 CCCC audience in San Antonio that "we have a moment" primed for composition in a new key. This new composition involved expanded notions of writing brought about with rapidly changing digital technologies. Yancey's pastiche text celebrates contributions from past chairs while establishing composition in a new key relative to four aspects or considerations:
Quartets:
1. Writing outside of school; electracy as a legitimate third literacy;
2. Disciplinary background; FYC as raison de etre;
3. Programmatic change (new curriculum, renewed WAC, writing majors);
4. Curricular control and assessment.
Yancey explains that the new model of composition is anchored by the circulation of writing, the canons of rhetoric (which are co-operating, not discrete), and the deicity of technology (312). She also notes that much of what came about conceptually with process has gone unquestioned and that we should wonder why writing for teacher continues to prevail.
"At this moment, we need to focus on three changes: Develop a new curriculum; revisit and revise our writing-across-the-curriculum efforts; and develop a major in composition and rhetoric" (308).
"Never before has the proliferation of writings outside the academy so counterpointed the compositions inside. Never before have the technologies of writing contributed so quickly to the creation of new genres" (298).
"And I repeat: like the members of the newly developed reading public, the members of the writing public have learned--in this case, to write, to think together, to organize, and to act within these forums--largely without instruction and, more to the point here, largely without our instruction" (301).
"Relevant to literacy specifically, we can record other tremors, specifically those associated with the screen, and in that focus, they return us to questions around what it means to write" (304).
"What should be the future shape of composition? Questioning the role of technology in composition programs--shall we teach print, digital, composition, communication, or all of the above?--continues to confounds us" (306).
"Thinking in terms of circulation, in other words, enables students to understand the epistemology, the conventions, and the integrity of different fields and their genres" (313).
"This new composition includes rhetoric and is about literacy. New composition includes the literacy of print: it adds on to it and brings the notions of practice and activity and circulation and media and screen and networking to our conceptions of process. It will require a new expertise of us as it does of our students. And ultimately, new composition may require a new site for learning for all of us" (320).
"These are structural changes--global, educational, technological. Like seismic tremors, these signal a re-formation in process, and because we exist on the borders of our own tectonic plates--rhetoric, composition and communication, process, activity, service and social justice--we are at the very center of those tremors. (321)
Terms: "reading circles" (300), "writing circles" (301), digital morphing (307d), transfer (315), deicity (318).
- Related sources:
- McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. 1964. Cambridge: MIT P, 1994.
- Prior, Paul, and Jody Shipka. "Chronotopic Laminations: Tracing the Contours of Literate Activity." Writing Selves, Writing Societies: Research from Activity Perspectives. Ed. Charles Bazerman and David Russell. Fort Collins, CO: The WAC Clearinghouse, and Mind, Culture, and Activity, 180--238. 1 June 2004 <http://wac.colostate.edu/books/selves_societies/prior>.
- Trimbur, John. "Composition and the Circulation of Writing." CCC 52.2 (2000): 188--219.
Selfe, "Technology and Literacy"
S elfe, Cynthia L. "Technology and Literacy: A Story about the Perils of Not Paying Attention." CCC 50.3 (1999): 411-436.
Selfe wages an argument about uptake, attitude, and attention toward technology in the field of compositions studies. She opens with characterizations of boredom and avoidance, suggesting that many in the field presume technology to be antithetical to the humanist project of composition studies. Selfe warns of the "perils of not paying attention," citing statistics about the ubiquity and tendential force of technologies (70% of jobs with a BA will require familiarity with computers, etc.).
The largest portion of Selfe's talk is concerned with the 1996 Clinton-Gore administration report called Getting America's Children Ready for the Twenty-First Century, which committed to unprecedented expenditures on technology in educational settings (amounts disproportionately high when compared to spending on more conventional literacy initiatives). Selfe's contention: we haven't paid attention to it (481). Furthermore, she finds it disconcerting that, as of 1999, there were no published statements on technological literacies from MLA, NCTE, CCCC, or IRA. Of course, technology literacy initiatives don't necessarily change the conditions of access interfering with literacy education.
Selfe goes on to support her claim that literacy is always political (424). Clinton-Gore commitments to technology spending are directly tied to larger motivations for keeping an advantageous position in the expanding global economy, which increasingly depends on such technologies (Gore: the Global Information Infrastructure is a "metaphor for functioning democracy"). Boost in education, then, are part of a complex "economic and political agenda."
Compositionists must pay attention across scales, both to the larger forces of technology change, and also to local sites and situated knowledge. She calls this change in scales "attention to action," and it involves "paying critical attention" to a long list of sites and activities: curriculum committees, standards documents, and assessment programs; professional organizations; scholarship and research; all levels of classrooms and courses; computer-based communication facilities; school systems; school board elections, pre-service and in-service ed programs and curricula; libraries, community centers and other non-traditional public places.
To wrap up, Selfe notes that humanists and scientists both have much to gain from more critical attention to technology in these multiple sites.
"Given this situation [insights from CCCC colleagues], however, I find it compellingly unfortunate that the one topic serving as a focus for my own professional involvement--that of computer technology and its use in teaching composition--seems to be the single subject best guaranteed to inspire glazed eyes and complete indifference in that portion of the CCCC membership which does not immediately sink into snooze mode" (412).
"Allowing ourselves the luxury of ignoring technology, however, is not only misguided at the end of the 20th century, it is dangerously shortsighted" (414).
"As composition teachers, deciding whether or not to use technology in our classes is simply not the point--we have to pay attention to technology" (415).
"By paying critical attention to lessons about technology, we can re-learn important lessons about literacy" (419).
"In other words, the poorer you are and the less educated you are in this country--both of which conditions are correlated with race--the less likely you are to have access to computers and to high-paying, high-tech jobs in the American workplace" (421).
"Thus, the national project to expand technological literacy has not served to reduce illiteracy--or the persistent social problems that exacerbate illiteracy" (423).
"A situated knowledges-approach to paying attention also honors a multiplicity of responses to technological literacy" (430).
Terms: persistence of print (413), "pay attention" (413), Bordieu's "doxa" (415), educational policy (416), myth of literacy and large-scale literacy projects (419), illiteracy (428), Haraway's coyote way of knowing (429), local knowledges (430)
- Related sources:
- Bordieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. New York: Cambridge UP, 1977.
- Giddens, Anthony. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Berkeley; U of California P, 1985.
- Latour, Bruno. Aramis or the Love of Technology. Trans. C. Porter. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996.
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
Lloyd-Jones, "A View from the Center"
L loyd-Jones, Richard. "A View from the Center." CCC 29.1 (1978): 24-29.
"A View from the Center" was delivered by Lloyd-Jones as the first annual chairs address at the 1976 CCCC in Kansas City. Lloyd-Jones attempts both to characterize the field's status and assert its legitimacy while also accounting for who we are. He begins by referring to a commitment to language as the primary trait of composition studies. From there, he sets up and knocks down a series of metaphors more or less suitable for describing the deep structure of composition studies: political, foundational (keeping with the conference's theme, "What's REALLY basic?"), architectural, and anatomical/skeletal.
Resonant with his title, the model of centrality Lloyd-Jones chooses is one of the rural telephone operator, Mrs. Peterson who is, without being celebrated for it, highly connected and also highly knowledgeable about the inner workings--discourses, relationships, activities--of the locale. To run with the comparison just a bit, the invocation of Mrs. Peterson could be framed as the following question tied to rhetoric, expertise/authority/legitimacy/respectability and involvement: how will compositionists perform their centrality, both in the academy and beyond?
Other points:
- In his discussion of metaphor, Lloyd-Jones makes use of tenor and vehicle as helper terms to account for the trope of metaphor. These echo I.A. Richards in The Philosophy of Rhetoric.
- Lloyd-Jones is overt in his skepticism of computers and "deductive electronic gadgets" in what he calls an "age of quantification."
- Without using a vocabulary of networks, this is a talk arguing for composition's centrality, the role of compositionists as well-connected language mavens and also as "negotiators, explainers, and referees" (50). A high degree of connection is preferable; without it, we "deserve our present basic position, that is, our traditional place in the damp cellar of the house of the intellect" (50).
- In his discussion of differing views on the deep structure of the field (the best metaphor, even), Lloyd-Jones winds up preferring mutability over rigidity.
- Lloyd-Jones also mentions "keeping up" and the problems involved with knowing everything (enough) when doing work across the disciplines.
- There is an unusual religious subtext here, and it's especially evident at the end with the line, "Keep the Faith, Babies." Um?
"In an age of quantification, allegiance to the metaphor is subversive, because it upsets the deductive electronic gadgets we have elected to be our masters" (45).
"The metaphor, with its dogged insistence on outright nonsense, simply puts the machine to sleep. Only a human mind can find wisdom in absurdity, and that is how we know we are not machines" (45).
"Metaphor crafting is the ethical badge of membership in our guild" (46).
"We know, as the computer does not, that if we say our love is a rose, we are not just confessing to some botanical perversion" (46).
"One metaphor lies, but several in concert lead" (47).
"We are of more than one mind about what really is the deep structure [of the field]" (48).
"I don't want to see the view from the center to be the view along a political line, but rather the view from the middle of the universe" (49).
"Anyway, we do not expect to know everything; we want to master the spaces between everything" (49).
"Keeping up with new work is getting harder all of the time" (50).
"But if we do not try to be in the center of all knowledge, to report the view from the center of how disciplines interact, we deserve our present basic position, that is, our traditional place in the damp cellar of the house of the intellect" (50).
Faigley, "Literacy after the Revolution"
F aigley, Lester. "Literacy after the Revolution." CCC 48.1 (1997): 30-43.
In this CCCC chair's address from 1996, Lester Faigley speaks to the moment of the mid-1990's as a stark contrast to the moments (involving social conditions) of the 1960s and 70s that gave rise to composition studies. Sizing up composition against the historical moment in which it was more "favored," Faigley points out the discipline's changing status. More to the point, Faigley is concerned with two counterpart revolutions: a revolution of the rich and a digital revolution. Both revolutions are interlaced, and they have major implications for composition studies. The first concerns a changing political economy and related issues of a redistribution of wealth, layoffs, economic depression, trends toward a global economy (300-301), downsizing, and trust on the "invisible hand of the unregulated market" (302).
With the second revolution, Faigley's talk becomes anticipatory, predicting the coming of the Internet as a force to have a major impact on higher education. He names the "new literacy" of digital communications technologies, and notes that students often already know these technologies well beyond the scope of our limited encounters with them in our composition curricula (he gives a nod to the curriculum at Texas): "I do not foresee colleges and universities remaining unaffected by these developments for long" (306). Faigley also says we should reserve judgment about the Internet being good or bad, and we should recognize the overlap of online communications and "significant public issues" (303). He is especially concerned about the Internet's role in social movements (307), and he builds toward the realities of limited access (307).
Throughout, Faigley invokes metaphors related to water: wave, rip tide, "swimming against the current" (302), tides. Given the new literacies involved with technological change, he mentions the possible decline of the essay (308). The outlook for composition is favorable, Faigley says, because "we are not tied to narrow disciplinary turf" (309), "we can cut across traditional disciplinary boundaries" (309), and "the need for what we teach will only increase" (309). But he follows with a set of concerns in these three questions:
- Can we do anything to stop the decline in publicly supported education?
- Can we promote a literacy that challenges monopolies of knowledge and information?
- Can we use technology to lessen rather than widen social divisions?
To end the address, he invokes Berlin's Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures and also echoes the network concepts in Lloyd-Jones by reiterating the importance of working together as opposed to working along.
"Most disappointing, the discipline's success has not influenced institutions to improve the working conditions of many teachers of writing" (300).
"I'm going to talk today about how larger forces of change affect how we see ourselves and what we do. These changes are of such a magnitude that they have been labeled revolutions--one a technological transformation called the digital revolution and the other an economic, social, and political transformation called the revolution of the rich." (300).
"Today no one is calling for taxes to ameliorate poverty on money earned by speculation. Instead government is identified with bureaucracy, inefficiency, and waste" (301).
"The revolution of the rich has been facilitated by another related revolution--the digital revolution of electronic communications technologies" (302).
"But as personal computers become enormously powerful in memory and speed, they began to challenge the unproblematic relationship between familiar pedagogy and new technology" (303).
"The ingenious solution was to flatten communications hierarchy, making every node equivalent so that the loss of any one node would not collapse the system" (304).
"We as teachers have little control over who gains access to higher education and even less control over who gains access to the Internet" (307).
- Related sources:
- Berlin, James A. Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures. Urbana: NCTE, 1996.
- Birkets, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994.
- Hairston, Maxine C. "Breaking Our Bonds and Reaffirming Our Connections." CCC 36 (1985): 272-82.
Saturday, September 9, 2006
Trimbur, "Composition and the Circulation of Writing"
T rimbur, John. "Composition and the Circulation of Writing." CCC 52.2 (2000): 188-219.
Trimbur makes his purposes clear before working through a somewhat long and complicated argument about renewing attention to circulation and thereby recuperating the classical canon of delivery in the context of composition studies. The problem is that delivery has dwindled into a given; it has been quietly domesticated into prevalent notions of the composition classroom as an uncomplicated middle-class space. In an effort to restore delivery, Trimbur calls for heightened consideration of (and emphasis on) the material circulation of writing. Delivery, he explains, isn't merely technical, but it is also political and ethical (190).
Trimbur sets out to accomplish the following:
- redefine delivery because it has been neglected by compositionists;
- account for neo-Marxist cultural studies curricula that emphasize working with "different forms and products";
- draw on Marx to look at how circulation materializes "contradictory social relations and processes";
- and discuss writing assignments that attend explicitly to matters of imbalance between use value and exchange value.
In questioning the prominent invocations of cultural studies in composition studies, Trimbur suggests, drawing on Marx and commodity as a "category," the entanglement of use value and exchange value. Each are inseparable from modes of production which implicate traces of production in the things themselves. Composition should make this focal in considerations of texts that circulate publicly or, that is, public writing.
"To anticipate the main line of thought, I argue that neglecting delivery has
led writing teachers to equate the activity of composing with writing itself and
to miss altogether the complex delivery systems through
which writing circulates." (189)
"Imagining cultural forms and products circulating through a continuous cycle of relatively autonomous but interlocked moments has some important consequences" (197).
On cultural studies curricula: "In other words, in the hope of fortifying student resistance to the dominant culture, such assignments actually smuggled in and restored unwittingly the close text-based readings of the specialist critic as the privileged practice of the writing classroom--the old story of explaining and having views" (198).
"Here he designates the commodity as the "first category in which bourgeois wealth presents itself " (881) and, in effect, provides a name for what circulates through the circuit of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption as well as the theoretical starting point for Capital" (207).
"The process of production determines--and distributes--a hierarchy of knowledge and information that is tied to the cultural authorization of expertise, professionalism, and respectability" (210).
"If anything, this wish for such a transformation [switch to public writing], although surely understandable and well-intentioned, amounts nevertheless to what I've already mentioned as the 'one-sided' view of production that Marx critiques--the fallacy that by changing the manner of writing, one can somehow solve the problem of circulation" (212).
"What I am trying to do is amplify the students' sense of what constitutes the production of writing by tracing its circulation in order to raise questions about how professional expertise is articulated to the social formation, how it undergoes rhetorical transformations (or "passages of form"), and how it might produce not only individual careers but also socially useful knowledge" (214).
"The aim of education should be practical but not in the service of capitalist utility" (216).
Terms: in loco parentis (193), "real world" writing (195), microethnography (199), "new revisionists" (201), Marx's linear model of circulation (205), commodity (206), public intellectual (212), "passage of forms" (repeated)
- Related sources:
- Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen, 1979.
- Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Trans. and Foreword Martin Nicolau. New York: Penguin, 1973.
Hall, Stuart. "Encoding/Decoding." Culture, Media, Language. Ed. Stuart Hall et al. London: Hutchinson, 1980. 128--38.
Trimbur, "Essayist Literacy and the Rhetoric of Deproduction"
T rimbur, John. "Essayist Literacy and the Rhetoric of Deproduction." Rhetoric Review 9.1 (1990): 72-86.
Trimbur works through an indictment of the "monological regime of silence and facticity" implicit (albeit with paradoxes and contradictions) in essayist literacy (72). Consider the difference between literacy studies' framing of essayist literacy (text as "self-sufficient vehicle of communication, a non-indexical account that supplies the contexts necessary for interpretation within the text itself" (73)) and that of composition studies (essayist text involving a "self-revelatory stance, flexible style, and conversational tone" (72)). The former, Trimbur explains, manifests (infests?) schooling through textbooks and consequently sustains a prevailing mythology tying the essay to natural modes of communication which make use of direct, factual language rather than figurative or abstract representations.
Trimbur historicizes the (causal?) precedents of the banality of essayist prose in its presumed rhetorical vacancy. The ubiquity of essayist literacy has ideological implications reproduced through systems of schooling. Trimbur introduces what he terms a rhetoric of deproduction, which anticipates that essayist literacy inheres an arhetoricity: the text is merely to be decoded (treated as authoritative; read in school for comprehension only); traces of authorship and persuasive effects are removed.
"Our students read essayist prose, that is, in an undifferentiated way, much as they would read a newspaper or their textbook in a sociology or microbiology course, for comprehension, to extract meaning and information" (72).
"My argument is that the ideal text of essayist literacy results not from inherent or 'natural' properties of literacy per se but from the fact that essayist literacy positions readers and writers to treat written texts as if they were transparent reflections of the natural order of things" (75).
"Text, as Olson defines it in opposition to utterance, is monological; It has the capacity to speak for itself" (77).
"In other words, the rise of essayist literacy involves the historical struggle for a cognitive order to replace the personalism of traditional authority with a new method of verification based upon empirical evidence" (79).
"The discourse of essayist literacy thus codifies the apparent artlessness of the plain style into a systematic concealment of the social processes of producing and using texts. Texts appear to stand alone and to speak for themselves because they have been, as it were, deproductionized" (81).
"The transformation of statements into fact-like entities in contemporary scientific discourse employs and extends the rhetoric of deproduction we saw at work earlier in the formation of essayist literacy" (82).
"Like the scientific essay, textbooks result from a larger set of historical pressures to create a public sphere of universal reason and civic discourse" (83).
"These gestures [giving quizzes and referring to the text], moreover, are disciplinary in character: They connect our students' reading of texts to the teacher's gaze and in subtle ways reinforce the culture of silence in the classroom by positing a moment of semantic closure when students comprehend what the text means and there is nothing further to be said" (85).
* Enlightenment "natural order of things" (73), ideal text of essayist literacy as given (74), frictionless prose (80),
- Related sources:
- Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Harper, 1972.
- Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Fact. London: Sage, 1979.
- Olson, David R. "From Utterance to Text: The Bias of Language in Speaking and Writing." Harvard Educational Review 47 (1977): 257-81.
Friday, September 8, 2006
Rice, "Writing About Cool"
R ice, 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.
Redd, "Dolla Outa Fifteen Cent"
R edd, Teresa, M. "'Trying To Make A Dolla Outa Fifteen Cent': Teaching Composition with the Internet at an HBCU." Computers and Composition 20 (2003) 359-373.
Redd begins with an account of the ongoing economic struggles of HBCUs and the impact of such funding shortfalls on technological access. The article introduces a technology profile of Howard University; Redd, a professor of English who teaches composition and leads a WAC initiative, tells of the role of computers in Howard's writing courses, underscores the realities of the digital divide with statistical support (363), and finally turns to pedagogical resourcefulness or, that is, how to "make a dolla out of fifteen cent."
Computers first appeared in Howard's composition program in 1990. Soon thereafter, Redd taught in a wired classroom, but it was only because she was invited by the engineering program to teach in a blended curriculum. Much of the fanfare about technological improvements reflect changes in disciplines other than English. Because of ongoing access problems, teachers tend to ask students to partake in "low-level cognitive activities" (365).
Redd's pedagogical response involves doing "culture work": creating "safe houses" for African American English, engaging in intercultural collaboration via email (students from Howard working with students from Montana State), and "publishing Afrocentric material on the Web" (365). To conclude the article, Redd refers to the HBCU Technology Assessment Study, which warns of the continuing risk of a broadening digital divide.
Terms: digital divide (360), wireless umbrella (361), Howard Legends web sites (369).
"Twenty years ago when Computers and Composition first went to press, there were no computers for composition at Howard University" (359).
"To finance this high level of technology, Howard has assumed a higher level of debt. But by investing in technology, we have leapt ahead of practically every HBCU, most of which depend upon relatively slow T-1 lines (NAFEO, 2000), instead of high-speed T-3 connections like ours" (360).
"The shortage of wired classrooms is typical at HBCUs." (361).
"Contrary to what current theories would have predicted, both the Spelman and Howard students were not interested in 'freeing' themselves from race within the colorless space of the Internet but in situating 'their cyborg selves within an African American discursive tradition' and making 'their racial identity visible to a networked diasporic community' (p. 236)" (369).
- Related sources:
- Johnson, Steven. Interface Culture. San Francisco: Harper Edge, 1997.
- Pratt, Mary Louise. "Arts of the Contact Zone. Professing in the Contact Zone. Ed. Janice Wolff. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2002: 1-18.
- Selfe, Cynthia, and Richard Selfe, Jr. "The Politics of the Interface." CCC 45 (1994): 480--504.
Carlton, "Comp as a Postdisciplinary Formation"
C arlton, Susan Brown. "Composition as a Postdisciplinary Formation." Rhetoric Review 14.1 (1995) 78-87.
Carlton levels a complicated argument about whether or not composition ought to be framed as a discipline. She begins with North's concerns about a preponderance of lore and multiple, contending methods from The Making of Knowledge in Composition, and she echoes North's "ambivalence" about conferring disciplinary status on composition studies. Perhaps, Carlton suggests, a postdisciplinary characterization is more appropriate, given that postdisciplinary practitioners "reproduce the complex features representative of disciplines" and they "generate material disciplinary apparatuses that make representation possible" (79) even while they "think and act beyond the limits of the traditional discipline" (79).
Carlton considers the rise of doctoral programs in composition (a turn commonly viewed a synonymous with professionalization and credentialing, which also render permanent a laboring underclass of contingent faculty). Especially with the production of composition studies (a kind of institutional "power play"), we must continue to be concerned with how we represent disciplinary activity (both textual and extratextual) in such a way that accounts for "a complex set of cultural practices" (79).
Included here is a recap of a disagreement between Janice Lauer and Patricia Harkin at the '91 CCCC in Boston over the status of lore as a legitimate form of disciplinary knowledge (reread this section). Carlton prefers a postdisciplinary stance (an appropriation of the "post" logics figured in postructural currents) over the antidisciplinary stance. Finally, the article argues that we must expand on programmatic and curricular gains and resist compromising lore or favoring a monolithic methodological orientation to gain disciplinary status.
Terms: "postdisciplinary" (78)
"Many of us in composition studies oscillate among these three attitudes of ambivalence, celebration, and hostility; but I believe that ambivalence is the most productive stance, as it acknowledges the complexity of composition studies' relationship to the disciplinary apparatus" (78).
"Without denigrating our recent epistemological and ideological ventures, we can still claim that their continued transformative power is limited by the extent to which we are able to make good decisions now about how to structure the current institutional spaces we inhabit and how to construct additional institutional spaces for ourselves" (80).
"I agree with Rankin that if a type of knowledge or relationship is to flourish within the university beyond a single classroom or a small, local community of practitioners, it must be coded in a way that makes it congruent with contemporary ideas of what knowledge can be" (82).
"A rhizomatic structure runs counter to the prevailing norms of disciplinarity. It constitutes a material, extratextual critique and alternative to a university norm" (82).
"Why a teleconference? By using new technology, the practitioners represent their discussion as 'cutting edge' knowledge. By using expensive technology, the practitioner conference acquires 'value.' These appeals to disciplinary, university codes of authority allow a postdisciplinary practice to be smuggled in under the very gaze of the disciplinarians" (83).
"Instead, we need a critical mass of compositionists in tenured positions, not a few isolated and outnumbered representatives, if we are going to expand the spaces for cultural critique and democratic action" (84).
- Related sources:
- Bourdieu, Pierre. An Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977.
- Lauer, Janice. "Rhetoric and Composition: A Rhizome." CCC Convention. Boston, 22 Mar. 1991.
- Winterowd, W. Ross. Contemporary Rhetoric: A Conceptual Background with Readings. New York: Harcourt, 1975.
Thursday, September 7, 2006
LeFevre, Invention as a Social Act
L eFevre, Karen Burke. Invention as a Social Act. Studies in Writing and Rhetoric Ser. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987.
Invention as a Social Act is a landmark book on rhetorical invention. Lefevre introduces "a more adequate terminology" for rhetorical invention, complicating commonplace associations between the "generation of ideas" and the Platonic view of invention as inside-out, wrought from a transcendent interiority moving toward pure forms. Lefevre is clear about individualism having a proper place, but she contends that it is "overdone" and that the solitary, inspired inventor (rel. to Emersonian self-reliance; seed metaphor; and invention as private episode) is inadequate for its neglect of environmental factors constitutive of thought and language.
Lefevre sets up contrastive terms early on: narrow-broad, rhetorical-general, and reflective-dynamic (5). Reflective invention relates to copy theory; dynamic invention relates to inquiry and the creation of something new. She explains why composition studies, in the 19th and 20th centuries, favored the Platonic view: the influence of literary studies (15), Romantic figure of the inspired writer (17); and capitalism and individualism (19). In an effort to complicate the Platonic view, she proposes a continuum running across four views on invention (we might consider these as scalar): Platonic perspective, internal dialogic perspective, collaborative perspective, and social collective perspective.
George Herbert Mead on invention as collaboration: gesture, attribution or interpretation, and response or adjustive reaction (62). Before the final chapter (implications), Lefevre works through an extended consideration of the relation between thought and language.
Limitations of the Platonic view:
- "A Platonic view of invention leads us to favor individualistic approaches to research and to neglect studies of writers in social contexts" (23).
- "A Platonic view depicts invention as a closed, one-way system" (24).
- "A Platonic view abstracts the writer from society" (25).
- "A Platonic view assumes and promotes the concept of the atomistic self as inventor" (26).
- "A Platonic view fails to acknowledge that invention is collaborative" (29).
Terms: Bateson on skin and boundedness (29), Tillie Olsen's "leech-writers" (30), dialectical process (35), deep temporal structures (41d), Aristotle and social context (45), Moffett's categories of discourse (reflection, conversation, correspondence, publication) (48), systems of invention (50)*, daimonion (56), idealogue v. dialogue (56), Sullivan's "supervisory patterns" (57), tagmemic invention (Young, Becker, Pike) (58), Elbow's "safe audience" (61), Lasswell's resonance and vibration (65), copy theory (95), Piaget's "autistic thought" (102), Vygotsky on "knot" (118) and "cloud" (119), Lasswell "ecology of innovation" (126), Gage on "stasis" (138).
"This study argues that rhetorical invention is better understood as a social act, in which an individual who is at the same time a social being interacts in a distinctive way with society and culture to create something" (1).
"Invention becomes explicitly social when writers involve other people as collaborators, or as reviewers whose comments aid invention, or as 'resonators' who nourish the development of ideas" (2).
"More particularly, composition theory and pedagogy in nineteenth and twentieth century America have been founded on a Platonic view of invention, one which assumes that the individual possesses innate knowledge or mental structures that are the chief source of invention" (11).
"To understand rhetorical invention, it is useful to restore this double meaning of 'action' and think of the act of invention as having two parts: the initiation of the inventive act and the reception or execution of it" (38).
"[Laswell's] 'clustering' of creative thinkers has led some to conclude that creativity is not merely a chance manifestation of biological or psychological factors, but is subject to environmental influence" (66).
"Applying this continuum to existing inventional theories allows us to see that composition has favored Platonic and internal dialogic views of invention, and that while the field has begun to acknowledge some collaborative aspects of invention, it has neglected others and has virtually ignored a collective view" (94).
- Related sources
- Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine, 1972.
- Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980.
- Lasswell, Harold D. "The Social Setting of Creativity." In Creativity and Its Cultivation. Ed. Harold H. Anderson, 203-21. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959.
Monday, September 4, 2006
Hawisher et. al., Computers and the Teaching of Writing
H awisher, Gail E., Cynthia L. Selfe, Paul LeBlanc, and Charles Moran. Computers and the Teaching of Writing in American Higher Education, 1979-1994: A History. New Directions in Computers and Composition Ser. Norwoord, N.J.: Ablex, 1996.
Computers and the Teaching of Writing is a layered history, pulling together selected pieces of composition studies, changes in software and hardware, narratives by people involved in early computers and composition work, considerations of policy, politics, and access, and the formation of computers and composition as a legitimate academic subfield consisting of its own specialized knowledge, its own research agenda, its own journals and book-length works, and its own conferences and related professional gatherings. CTW presents a chronology of the formation of computers and composition, organizing detail-heavy accounts of what was happening at the time into particular periods or eras rather than celebrating scenes or particular figures.
Hugh Burns and Ellen Nold are particular celebrated in this volume. Burns's 1979 dissertation, "Stimulating Invention in English Composition through Computer-Assisted Instruction" and Nold's 1975 article, "Fear and Trembling: The Humanist Approaches the Computer" figure centrally, according to the authors, in the early formation of computers and composition. Annual awards, one for a dissertation and one for an article, were later established to honor each of these landmark works (198).
The book is organized as follows, to each chapter a corresponding period:
1979-1982: The Profession's Early Experience with Modern Technology
1983-1985: Growth and Enthusiasm
1986-1988: Emerging Research, Theory, and Professionalism
1989-1991: Coming of Age--The Rise of Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives and a
Consideration of Difference
1992-1994: Looking Forward
Each chapter also includes the following segments: Considering Contexts (comp scholarship focus), Observing Trends (pedagogy and technology focus), Recognizing Challenges, and Our Colleagues Remember. Collectively, the project is an assertion of legitimacy for computers and composition and also an articulation of a substantial and complex tradition dating back to the 1960's. Still, it focuses on a relatively small start-up community (just ten members at the 1983 meeting of The Fifth "C" SIG) (81), which raises all sorts of questions. It is also interesting to consider this historical account alongside cases like the one Jeff makes about the discipline's missed opportunities.
^Hmm: "invisible writing": Marcus and Blau, "writers write invisibly on darkened computer screens" (27); counts of conference sessions as evidence (on process in 1983 CCCC) (71)
"The present book is the first full-scale effort to define computers and composition within its history" (xii).
"Electronic technology is not simply a medium for the mass-delivery of a managed curriculum" (4).
"Computers entered our scene at a moment when there was a loud and public call for the improvement of writing instruction, and at the beginning of what was to be a long and difficult period of retrenchment in American public education [re 1975, "Why Johnny Can't Write," and the related "literacy crisis"] (23).
"Patricia Sullivan, working in 1982 on interface design for the library at Carnegie Mellon, had a difficult time convincing her English department that what she was working on was English" (51).
?? "HYPERCARD would popularize and extend the use of hypertext in English studies, but all the groundwork for our field's later enthusiasm for hypertext was in place by 1985" (78).
"Of the many papers presented at these conferences, only a few focused on theoretical issues associated with technology" (95).
"The kids were interacting with paper, not with each other" (129, from Hamilton-Wieler).
"In 1986, for most of us, the computer was still a stand-alone machine, one marvelous in its capability--and on used by a single writer, writing alone. Yet by 1988, many of us--not yet most of us--would see the computer as a means of connecting to a virtual space in which we might participate with others in the construction of knowledge" (135).
See 282+ for highlights in "Perspectives of the authors after reading this manuscript."
Terms: "soft technological determinists" (1), computer as agent (2), community (2), electronic territory (6), techno-evangelists (13), generation gap (13), "writing crisis" (19), magical thinking paradigm (30), military discourse (106), add-on (111), ecology (124), burst/dissipation pattern (145), white coat syndrome (164), systems (174), "research community" (216)
- Related sources
- Cooper, Marilyn. "The Ecology of Writing." College English 48 (1986): 364-375.
- Emig, Janet. "Writing as a Mode of Learning." CCC 28 (1977): 122-127.
- Nold, Ellen. "Fear and Trembling: The Humanist Approaches the Computer." CCC 26 (1975): 269-273.
Sunday, September 3, 2006
Vielstimmig, "Petals on a Wet Black Bough"
V ielstimmig, Myka. "Petals on a Wet Black Bough: Textuality, Collaboration, and the New Essay." Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies. Eds. Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe. Urbana, Ill.: NCTE, 1999. 89-114.
Spooner and Yancey perform a collagist convergence in "Petals on a Wet Black Bough." They are chiefly concerned with the new essayism proliferated in the associational cut/paste practices of writing the screen. They experiment with collaborative personae (hence the fused author-figure). The conventions of academic exposition, normative conceptions of coherence, and the rise of associative intelligence in the midst of hypertext are chief among their concerns. Ultimately, they ask when and how teachers will be prepared to admit new/net essayism into the schoolroom and, as well, how assessment will keep pace.
Vielstimmig (German for many voiced) mentions the Emersonian self-reliant spirit that infuses much American education.
Three maxims: Assessment has to fit pedagogy (110). Pedagogy has to fit textuality (110). Can changes in pedagogy not be far behind? (111): "If what we're going to value is the essay proper--whether it's Bartholomae's or Elbow's--then by all means, let's turn the Internet off" (110).
"The new essay seems to have its own logic: intuitive, associative, emergent, dialogic, multiple--one grounded in working together and in re/presenting that working together" (90).
"This is not an argument against The Essay or against 'print classic' or conventional logic. It is an argument toward another kind of essay: a text that accommodates narrative and exposition and pattern, all three" (91).
"Speak for yourself, pal" (92).
"Ironically, both Spellmeyer's and Prince's purpose in reminding us of the essay's history is to restore it to its prior position: as a place for exploration not governed by the scholastic" (93).
"In some critiques of 'experimental' academic works (like this one?), there's a fundamental question about what counts as coherence, cohesion, and other interpretive conventions" (99).
"It is disappointing, though, how much influence is moving the other direction: that is, too many online essays merely reproduce offline textual conventions" (102). ^Solid ties to scholastic-reductive blogging ventures.
"Associational thinking may be another, more concrete and synthesizing, intelligence altogether" (108).
Terms: essay as a confinement (92), "rhetoricity of coherence" (101), Turkle's "aesthetics of simulation" (105), Venn diagram (to establish difference and relationship) (108)
- Related Sources
- Kirsch, Gesa. "Multi-Vocal Texts and Interpretive Responsibility." College English 59 (1997): 191-201.
- Phelps, Louise Wetherbee. "Dialectics of Coherence." College English 47 (1985): 12-30.
- Wittig, Rob. Invisible Rendezvous: Connection and Collaboration in the New Landscape of Electronic Writing. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1994.