Berlin,
James A. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges,
1900-1985. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1987.
Tag: rhetoric
Olson, “The Death of Composition as an Intellectual Discipline”
Olson, Gary.
"The Death of Composition as an Intellectual Discipline."
Olson 23-31.
Swearingen, “R&C as a Coherent Intellectual Discipline”
Swearingen,
C. Jan. "Rhetoric and Composition as a Coherent Intellectual Discipline."
Olson 12-22. [A]
Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto”
*Haraway,
Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism
in the Late Twentieth Century." Simians, Cyborgs and Women:
The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. 149-181.
Grabill, “The Written City”
Grabill,
Jeffrey T. "The Written City: Urban Planning, Computer Networks,
and Civic Literacies." Bruce McComiskey and Cynthia Ryan, eds.
City Comp: Identities, Spaces, Practices. Albany: SUNY Press,
2003. 128-140.
Rhetorweight Boxing
During a conversation tonight about anthologies ("Anthologics," a future
entry), somebody mentioned Cross-Talk in Comp Theory and, you guessed it,
the Bartholomae-Elbow debate. There are others, but I don’t know them (or
I do, but I don’t want to disturb sleeping giants). I should know them,
list them. But for now I’m casually proposing a collection made up of the
close-handed fisticuffs, an all-time greats in the knock-down-drag-outs of RC
scholarship. Each conflict would be framed as a round with notes
explaining the vitriol’s sources, escalations of fired-up writing, and so on. A
celebration of irreconcilability and over-my-dead-body investments in method,
curriculum and the discipline. Who wouldn’t order a copy of such a thing?
Porter, Rhetorical Ethics and Internetworked Writing
Porter,
James E. Rhetorical Ethics and Internetworked Writing. Greenwich, Conn.:
Ablex, 1998.
Triadicity
Two I think of initially: the discourse triangle
(Message
– Writer – Reader) and the rhetorical situation (Writer/Speaker – Audience –
Context). Followed by: Aristotle’s: Ethos, Pathos, Logos; Berthoff’s:
Reference, Word, Referent; and my own: Legos, Mentos, Wormholes, and so on. I
made that last one up just now. I’m not convinced that it gets at anything
particularly profound. Heck, it only took a few seconds to think up.
Kress – Literacy in the New Media Age (2003)
I’m just eight pages into Gunther Kress’ Literacy in the New Media Age.
I’ve read the chunk before the preface (what is this thing, a superpreface, an
antepreface, pre-preface?): "The Futures of Literacy: Modes, Logics and
Affordances." This much is clear: image and text function according to
distinctive logics. With text, word follows word. It’s sequentiality
involves a distinctive commitment, both for writers and readers, to paths
and naming. Text inheres time, whereas image inheres space, Kress tells
us. Image involves a kind of commitment to location, and while Kress hints at
the importance of perceptual paths for readers of images, that point doesn’t get
extended early on. Next, Kress discusses media and affordances; these few
lines are a sample of what he’s got going here:
1. Multimodality is made easy, usual, ‘natural,’ by these technologies. (5)
2. The new technologies have changed unidirectionality into bidirectionality.
(6) (i.e. with the email, you can send and receive)
3. Writing is becoming ‘assembling according to designs’ in ways which are
overt, and much more far-reaching, than they were previously. (6)
4. The affordances and the organisations of the screen are coming to (re)shape
the organisation of the page. (6)
5. It is possible to see writing becoming subordinated to the logic of the
visual in many or all of its uses. (7)
In Search Of
We capped our discussions of Smit’s The End of Composition Studies
(2004) and
Cosgrove and Barta-Smith’s In Search of Eloquence (2004) in 712 this afternoon.
Smit opens for us with six chapters leading down the skeptic’s
infinite regress into complandia’s hopeless abyss before turning to his
recommendations for reform. His plans for a refurbished curriculum aren’t
as despairing as his account of the impossibility of teaching writing. No
screeching demons, no ravenous hellhounds. In fact, the curriculum pretty well matches with
Writing Across the Curriculum efforts. Smit turns out to be a proponent
of a first-year course called "Introduction to Writing as a Social Practice"
(185). Upper division instructors would share responsibility for teaching the
course; "They must," Smit contends, "be part of a broad university-wide program
that introduces all novice writers ‘slowly but steadily and systematically’ to
new genres and social contexts, a program that encourages students to develop
their ‘structural, rhetorical, stylistic facility’ over time (Rose 112)" (188).
The second tier of Smit’s curriculum involves discipline-specific courses
emphasizing writing, and the third tier involves "writing outside the classroom"
(190). I’m sure I’ll sound glib in characterizing it so flatly, but much
of it sounds, well, familiar enough. A more radical turn, however, comes
in Smit’s proposal for graduate training: