Prelim Proposal

Well, that was a long drought and I've regretted not keeping up with the blogging, since prelims continue to loom over my head as we get closer and closer to November (my expected date for the exams). I'm nervous, but more importantly I'm stressed and frustrated trying to get the proposal written.

So far, I'm framing the discussion about what freshman composition should be and what work it should do. I'm really not sure of the answer to that question, but I believe that, especially in the context of new media, freshman composition ought to respond to multiliteracies and everyday practices. Hence, the focus of my proposal.

But I'm really struggling about how to make this all fit. I know invention fits, since invention deals with generating ideas. I view invention as involving all the 5 canons of rhetoric; and think it needs to be revised in order to include all these acts within it. Perhaps McKeon's architectonic productive art? Really, though, invention relates to the teaching of writing in new media concepts because I believe all modes can be used as sites for invention, and often times heuristics that have little to do with writing have been used. For instance, heuristics that ask writers to describe an idea in terms of a person, or collect "samples" from different modes/media/etc have often been used to generate ideas and compose essays. Theories of invention can help us think about the potentials of/for new media in the classroom, and suggest -- like Gregory Ulmer -- that new media is/can be a rhetoric of invention anyway (i.e. hypertext promotes the reader making connections and generating a text on her own).

So that's that. But then I'm not sure how to connect experimental, personal, and digital composing. The only link I can see at this point is that they all approach writing from an alternative -- resistant?-- approach to "traditional" models of composing. Personal writing is just that: writing about personal experience in ways to resist, or enhance, academic paradigms; experimental writing can be digital, personal, or otherwise, and it often uses different modes or styles of writing to compose. And, of course, digital composing itself uses digital technologies to compose various texts: essays with images/sounds, videos, photos, drawings, websites, etc. Many discussions about digital composing center on questions of literacy/literacies, and how different modes offer different power relations and bodily experiences. In addition, I've seen a lot of digital/new media texts discuss the role of rhetoric as an integral one; that is, people like Jody Shipka, Anne Wysocki, Stuart Selber, and others seem to envision digital technologies as steeped in questions about audience, purpose, and contexts. If students understand rhetorical principles, they can better compose multimedia digital texts.

Now, I'm wondering if print-based technologies are entirely useless now, or if not useless, painfully out of vogue. But mostly I'm wondering if we can import ideas from digital/multimedia composing to print composing, and vice versa. How can new media texts benefit from being juxtaposed with print-based texts? Or is there no reconciliation?