How Far Can We Drift?

I’ve been re-reading Cynthia Haynes’
"Writing Offshore: The Disappearing
Coastline of Composition"
over the past two days. I’d read it this spring, even
referred to it in my CCCC paper and in my dissertation prospectus. But
this time I wanted to work at it more slowly, soak in it.

This time around, I kept finding floating crumbs that made me think this is
the 50-page scholarly article version of China Mieville’s The Scar. I
probably can’t do justice to this in the time I have right now, but I will try.
Considering that The Scar is an adventure on the high seas about a
hybrid, hodge-podge floating city (Armada, as dappled and remade as composition
studies) and the fetishistic Lovers who command the peculiar conglomeration,
there are surprising tie-ins. [Spoiler alert.]

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Carnival: Trimbur and Writing Studies

Following Donna’s

renewed call
for the late February Trimbur carnival, here are a couple of
floats
in response to

"Changing the Question: Should Writing Be Studied?"
from Composition
Studies
31.1 (2003).

For now I’ll try to keep it to just two or three ideas. I’ve heard
passing mention of "writing studies" as an alternative name for the knot (bow?)
where rhetoric and composition are tied together. When I used it myself
once, I think someone suggested that the "writing studies" designation is
typically claimed by discourse analysts–those whose encounters with texts are
measured for pattern and (ir)regular features. Perhaps that’s only of value
inasmuch as it sheds light on my own baggage with the phrase: a moment of
correction, definition, and re-association. And whether this is right or not is
less the point, I think, than the contemplation of writing studies’ orientation
to particular methods and research agendas. As I read Trimbur’s article, I also
thought about another passing conversation with a colleague who described
someone else’s work in film this way: "[S.h]e does film studies, not production.
Students who take film classes want production rather than all of the history,
theory, and methodology that go along with film studies. They’re impatient
and even bored with film studies." That was the gist of it, anyhow.
Out of this half-remembered conversation comes one question about a shift from
workshop to seminar room and toward writing studies: at the cost of what?
If the answer is that we study writing (n.) at the expense of writing (p.v.),
the proposition becomes considerably messier. Of course, nobody is saying
this explicitly, but to what degree is a quiet displacement of something else
implied by the asking?

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Certainties

B. Franklin left it at death and taxes, right? As I teach SU’s research-based
second semester writing course to seniors (and only seniors), I’m feeling the
weight of the death-n-taxes counterpart in academic writing: length limits and
deadlines. Two unavoidable encumbrances. Give either of them a liberatory shrug–whatever–and what happens? So we need, instead, to
declare two-thousand words by Friday, and so on, arbitrary though it might seem. What, besides length
limits and deadlines, structures the writing activity one does for academic credit?
Sure, there are sentences and paragraphs (utterances, gestures, etc.), but I’m not talking
about language forms. Length limits and deadlines certify the institutionality of
the writing. Institution-free, the writing need not adhere to either
staple, right? With blogging, for instance, what of deadlines? What
of length limits? But figure blogs into a course, what will happen if matters of
length limits and deadlines or frequency, even if left to such vagarisms as
"flexible" or "open," are not otherwise determined? Just a few
thoughts…

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Courseware, Training Wheels

Thanks to everyone who threw in a
congrats. May I never grow tired of
waves of encouraging comments. (Makes me consider, for half a minute, the
possibilities in announcing that I passed exams every week until the diss is
finished. Entry #1419: For the Hundredth Time: Pass! Pass!)

For a few minutes now, I’ve bee thinking about Blackboard. IHE
has this little
news piece
on Blackboard and law suits over patents. Blackboard, as I
understand it, fancies itself the first to develop the web-in-a-box-ware used by
so many colleges and universities for delivering online courses (or augmenting
F2F with innovations like discussion forums). The legal loops are only
marginally interesting to me. I mean, even though I think it is
far-fetched, I can understand why Blackboard must, in the interest of solvency,
claim as its property the idea of rolling together things like message boards,
bulk email, and announcements into an unforgettable discombobulware.

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Still-Unbuilt

Classes begin one week from today, and so I’ve been wrenching and soldering
the course I’m slotted to teach. The syllabus must be ready one
week in advance of the semester (i.e., today) so that our plans and projections
can be vetted, held up alongside what’s acceptable. And once the syllabus
is vetted and approved, TAs are awarded their precious copy codes. That said,
I’m teaching an online section this semester, and so it’s entirely possible that
I won’t make a single photocopy over the next sixteen weeks. It’s a
section of Studio II, the second course in SU’s two-course composition
sequence, a course normally taken during the second semester of the sophomore
year. But the section I’ve been appointed is designated for "seniors
only," which means that there will be ten or so seniors enrolled who will
graduate in May and who have yet to take WRT205 for any number of reasons.
Rather than explain my plan here, feel free to check out the

syllabus
if you’re so inclined. You should be warned that the front
piece looks like garbage in IE, but I’ve checked it for CSS compliance and it’s
looks dandy in Firefox, Netscape, and Safari–just like I want it to look. And
yeah, I have been futzing with style sheets just for kicks in the last day or
so.

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