{"id":6497,"date":"2006-01-31T22:00:24","date_gmt":"2006-01-31T22:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.earthwidemoth.com\/blog\/2006\/01\/31\/i-will-not-know\/"},"modified":"2006-01-31T22:00:24","modified_gmt":"2006-01-31T22:00:24","slug":"i-will-not-know","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.earthwidemoth.com\/blog\/2006\/01\/31\/i-will-not-know\/","title":{"rendered":"I Will Not Know"},"content":{"rendered":"\u23f3 Approximate reading time: <\/span> 2<\/span> mins<\/span><\/span>

Close to five this afternoon, I was waiting for a ride home from D., and I
\nhad a few minutes to pass in my office. I’d already booted down the laptop
\nand stowed it in my backpack. I didn’t have the gusto to continue readings (for
\nnext week already) from the two seminars I had today, and I was feeling somewhat
\nblaze after a full day on campus overflowing with six hours of intense
\ndiscussion. So I straightened up one of my office shelves and got to
\nleafing through a few odd journals casually handed off to me by a colleague last
\nyear. There were five or six yellowed issues of Composition Studies<\/i>
\nand JAC<\/i>; I fixed on JAC<\/i> 8 (1988), specifically David Foster’s
\n"What Are We Talking About
\nWhen We Talk About Composition?"<\/a>, which ends<\/p>\n

\n

As informed readers and deliberately inclusive thinkers, we
\n must be the measure of our discipline. Science cannot claim ascendancy in any
\n area of human knowledge, particularly in that complex blend of
\n knowledge-streams we call composition. We must be wary of those who,
\n uncomfortable with the ambiguities of discourse and complacent with the
\n quantitative, empirical perspective, would have us assume that perspective
\n alone. As informed readers, we must juggle and juxtapose the claims of
\n different modes of inquiry, recognizing what each contributes and what each
\n lacks. To ref use this invitation to an intellectual pluralism, to settle in
\n its place for a single perspective, is to invite the punishment we all hated
\n in grade school: having to write the same sentence one hundred times. In this
\n case, it would be “I will not know. I will not know. I will not know…"<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Stimulating find, I thought, and then I started to wonder
\nwhether what we are talking about when we talk about composition in 2006 is so
\nradically remade from what we were talking about when we talked about
\ncomposition in 1988. And then my ride was waiting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u23f3 Approximate reading time: <\/span> 2<\/span> mins<\/span><\/span>Close to five this afternoon, I was waiting for a ride home from D., and I had a few minutes to pass in my office. I’d already booted down the laptop and stowed it in my backpack. I didn’t have the gusto to continue readings (for next week already) from the two seminars I had…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[49],"tags":[178,403,445,539,144,143],"class_list":["post-6497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academe","tag-composition","tag-disciplinarity","tag-knowledge","tag-limits","tag-methods","tag-research"],"yoast_head":"\nI Will Not Know - Earth Wide Moth<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.earthwidemoth.com\/blog\/2006\/01\/31\/i-will-not-know\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"I Will Not Know - Earth Wide Moth\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"\u23f3 Approximate reading time: 2 minsClose to five this afternoon, I was waiting for a ride home from D., and I had a few minutes to pass in my office. 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Foster sets up a tension between scientistic and humanistic approaches to composition by giving a reading of three seminal texts: Beach and Bridwell's New Directions in Composition (1984), Hillocks's Research on Written Composition (1986),\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Writing Technologies"","block_context":{"text":"Writing Technologies","link":"https:\/\/www.earthwidemoth.com\/blog\/category\/writing_technol\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6482,"url":"https:\/\/www.earthwidemoth.com\/blog\/2006\/01\/12\/jacing-around-w\/","url_meta":{"origin":6497,"position":2},"title":"Bibliometrics JACing","author":"Derek Mueller","date":"January 12, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"I got caught up reading the Moretti Event over at The Valve, but I still have a minute to post a few notes about something I was thinking about earlier today.\u00a0 I read the introduction to David Smit's The End of Composition Studies yesterday; there, he has this to say\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Methods"","block_context":{"text":"Methods","link":"https:\/\/www.earthwidemoth.com\/blog\/category\/method\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7008,"url":"https:\/\/www.earthwidemoth.com\/blog\/2006\/07\/27\/swearingen-rc-a\/","url_meta":{"origin":6497,"position":3},"title":"Swearingen, “R&C as a Coherent Intellectual Discipline”","author":"Derek Mueller","date":"July 27, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Swearingen, C. Jan. \"Rhetoric and Composition as a Coherent Intellectual Discipline.\" Olson 12-22. [A] The creation of graduate programs in rhetoric and composition between 1975-1985 marked a sea change for the field; following this initial point, Swearingen notes several of the earliest conditions that enabled the firming up of the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Writing Technologies"","block_context":{"text":"Writing Technologies","link":"https:\/\/www.earthwidemoth.com\/blog\/category\/writing_technol\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7094,"url":"https:\/\/www.earthwidemoth.com\/blog\/2007\/05\/30\/maureen-dalygog\/","url_meta":{"origin":6497,"position":4},"title":"Daly-Goggin, Authoring A Discipline.","author":"Derek Mueller","date":"May 30, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Daly-Goggin, Maureen. Authoring A Discipline: Scholarly Journals and the Post-World War II Emergence of Rhetoric and Composition. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000. Searchable text available in Google Book Search. Daly-Goggin presents a study of nine major journals in rhetoric an composition over 40 years as evidence of the discipline's emergence:\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Reading Notes"","block_context":{"text":"Reading Notes","link":"https:\/\/www.earthwidemoth.com\/blog\/category\/reading_notes\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7086,"url":"https:\/\/www.earthwidemoth.com\/blog\/2007\/03\/08\/provisional-bib\/","url_meta":{"origin":6497,"position":5},"title":"Provisional Bibliography","author":"Derek Mueller","date":"March 8, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Below the fold, a provisional bibliography for the dissertation prospectus. Anderson, Chris. The Long Tail. New York: Hyperion, 2006. Ball, Philip. Critical Mass. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004. Barabasi, Alberto-Laszlo. Linked. New York: Perseus, 2002. Bazerman, Charles. \"A Relationship between Reading and Writing: The Conversational Model.\" College English\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Dissertation"","block_context":{"text":"Dissertation","link":"https:\/\/www.earthwidemoth.com\/blog\/category\/dissertation\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.earthwidemoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.earthwidemoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.earthwidemoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.earthwidemoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.earthwidemoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6497"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.earthwidemoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6497\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.earthwidemoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.earthwidemoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.earthwidemoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}