10 Years Ago Today...

...I received my acceptance letter from Skidmore College. I was reminded of this event by a friend's Facebook status post in which he reflected on his own Valentine's Day "anniversary" of sorts. 

      It's funny, now, to think that 10 years ago today I had not even been to college yet, and had little inkling of what an acceptance from Skidmore would do for me. Cliche as it is, it was truly the most memorable-- and most formative-- experience of my life.

   It was at Skidmore where I first got a C on a paper; led an organization; studied 1000 years of history at a time; cried in a professor's office; got into a theoretical fight with a classmate (a harbinger of what was to come, I'm afraid); presented at a conference; taught my first class; and took risks with writing. It was at Skidmore where I was first asked, by a professor, for my opinion on something because it mattered to her -- and to the department.  It was at Skidmore where I learned how to teach, just by having been taught so well by so many others. It was at Skidmore where I learned to think critically about everything, not just what was put in front of me. But most importantly, it was at Skidmore where I learned I had a voice and how to use it. Yes, my parents are the single most influential part of my life, for they told me I could do and be anything, always, but it was Skidmore, and the professors there, who told me I had to use that voice.

    The motto of Skidmore, now, is "Creative Thought Matters." It's admittedly cheesy, but I think that now more than ever I am learning how important that statement is. I teach so many students each semester who do not know the value of creative thinking. They have interests, and many of them want to learn about their interests. But I see so many colleges and programs that do not want to foster a sense of creativity and critical thinking in places where it matters-- where it has weight, substance; where it can be seen and heard and felt.At Skidmore, I was always treated as a whole person, not just a student who got good grades. My ideas were valued, appreciated, respected-- even if they were incorrect or naive. There was just something about the professors I encountered there who knew that undergraduates, not unlike young children, need space to develop and take risks and think and speak freely. They knew that people have many, many facets, and they developed programs that would extend interests, hone skills, and-- most importantly-- plant new seeds so that other facets could develop. 

     It was at Skidmore where I found my vocation. Previously, I had wanted to be an English professor ("But, wait", you might be saying. "Isn't that what you want to do now?"). But during my junior year, a new professor told me that if I wanted to be an English professor, I'd better go into Rhetoric and Composition, because there weren't any jobs elsewhere. And when I protested, she  outlined for me the non-financial reasons I should do it; the first one being that my papers were about rhetorical concerns and that she felt I had something real to contribute to the field. When I left her office, I thought about what she had said, and dismissed it until a few weeks later when I had time to research. I found out that being a Rhetoric and Composition scholar was what I had always wanted. Weeks later I thanked her for suggesting that, we had continued to be in touch up until 2 years ago. I mention this anecdote because I doubt that this kind of thing happens at too many other places; at how many places are students directed to go into a field because their professors learn about them as people? Without her, I would be a struggling Victorian scholar with no real job prospects, but more importantly, I would be without the commitment to teaching and pedagogy that being a Rhet/Comp scholar has given me. 

     So 10 years from that momentous Valentine's Day, I look back at the scholar I have become. I look at what my parents worked tirelessly to give to me, and I couldn't be happier -- and more in awe-- of what a simple Valentine's Day letter could bring. Without Skidmore, without the education I received there and the opportunities I was given, without the facets I developed, I know I would not be ready to write my dissertation on a subject I care deeply about. I suppose that Valentine's Day befits the sentiment in a way that no other day does... how could I have known, then, the profound influence a Valentine's Day acceptance would have? I think Skidmore must have known what they were doing and the lifelong love affair such a Valentine would bring.

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?

No posts for a long time...

Well, the plan for blogging all my readings has fallen through... it was working for awhile but then life gets in the way. The good news: I have been keeping up with reading (primarily). Now I want to use this post to sketch out some ideas for the prelim proposal, even though I'm not nearly done reading and need to have the texts with me. But here goes.

My proposal is centered around three major areas that characterize my academic interests: composition theory/pedagogy, rhetoric and rhetorical invention, and digital/personal/experimental writing. There are significant overlaps across the lists, despite their apparent differences. I have chosen these areas because they represent, for me, the major issues that my later work will center around. The first list, Composition theory/pedagogy, centers around the key issues in the field such as the theory/practice debate; issues of literacy; process versus post-process; and the field as a discipline. These issues are significant because they are the major issues in the field.
The second list, rhetoric and rhetorical invention, attempts to place rhetorical invention (one of the 5 canons of rhetoric) within the history of rhetoric as a field. Since the two are so closely aligned throughout the history of rhetoric, it makes sense that this list investigate the relationships between these two areas. Invention is an interest of mine because it bridges rhetoric and teaching: the key areas that make up my prelim list.
Finally, the third list blends three areas of study because these areas emerge from similar (postmodern) issues. Both digital and experimental writing are often discussed together because they emerge from similar concerns about the ways that writing is changing in response to technology. Personal writing shares these concerns, and has provided significant inroads to thinking about the ways in which personal writing resists conventional codes and norms.
To provide more detail, I will elaborate the choices of texts in each list. The texts in the composition theory and pedagogy list represent, as I stated earlier, key issues in the field. I begin with key texts about the disciplinary development. Texts like Maureen Daly Goggin's Authoring a Discipline, James Berlin's Rhetoric and Reality, Sharon Crowley's Composition in the University, and Susan Miller's Texutal Carnivals offer contexts for understanding the discipline's development. Goggin explores the key journals and publications of the field since its early inception in the 20th century. For Goggin, looking at the history of publications offers key insights into the field: what has been valued in what circumstances; what areas of study have been the most influential; and how the
publications represent the discipline. Berlin writes a history of composition instruction since 1900 in universities. Berlin creates a taxonomy by which to understand this history: objective, subjective, and______. This taxonomy classifies the approaches to teaching so that readers can understand how the theories have responded to ideological/historical concerns, as well as to see the various ways in which the field has coalesced around these issues. Crowley and Miller raise different issues about the place of composition in the academy. Crowley also traces the history of the discipline, but focusing this history around the idea of subjectivity and the abolition of the field because it promotes a certain subjective position culled from the 19th-century notions of humanism. Miller examines the role of teaching composition, and equates it with secondary status.
Other areas on the list explore central questions like the role of teaching in relationship to theory. Several texts on my list take this up, and many texts take this up indirectly. Texts like Harris, Faigley, Ede, Berlin, Kameen, McComiskey, Dobrin, and several others deal with the place of theory in composition studies. It seems that this is the central issue defining the field, especially since so much of what we do centers on our position in the academy. Especially with declining funds and the pressure for universities to streamline budgets, composition's place in the academy remains tenuous at best. These texts raise the question: what counts as knowledge in the field? What responsibility and or obligation do we have as a field to submit to academic pressure and publish theoretical research articles? Why has teaching continued to have such a low status in the academy?

My own questions about this list center around the theory and practice debate, especially as it relates to teaching: how can we theorize teaching so that it makes practice sustainable and accountable to who is in our classrooms? How might we use what we learn in the classroom to enhance theory -- but also to create spaces for new theories or articulations to emerge? What might composition studies contribute to the overall discourse about writing, cultural studies, and education in general that renders it indispensable for university education -- a fact that, despite critiques, budget crises, and a plethora of other obstacles, demonstrates the pervasive commitment to writing and teaching? Finally, how can praxis (the blend of theory and practice in Freire's terms) allow for new versions of the writing curriculum/classroom to emerge; versions that take into account influences of new media writing, educational theory, and everyday life.

McComiskey

McComiskey, Bruce. Teaching Composition as a Social Process. Logan, Utah: Utah State UP, 2000.


McComiskey reframes process theory in composition by arguing for a 3-part pedagogy which he calls "social-process theory." This theory asks students to attend to the 3 components -- the cycle -- of composing: textual, rhetorical, and discursive. The goal for him is to teach students to intervene in public discourses in productive ways.

Key Terms:
social process: "social process composition pedagogies treat critical writing as rhetorical inquiry and political intervention into the cultural forces that construct our subjectivities" (3).

Cultural production/contextual distribution/critical consumption: (taken from postmodernism and cultural studies); the "cycle of composing" which is the 3 levels of composing (defined above).

"I agree that a balanced approach to the 3 levels of composing leads students to the fullest and most effective understanding of their writing processes" (7).

"I propose a cyclical model of the writing process, one that acocunts for the composing strategies of individual and collaborative writers as well as the socio-discursive lives of texts" (20).

"Invention heuristics based on this cycle encourage students to understand language and culture as socially constructive forces (production) conditioned by contexts (distribution) and negotiated by critical subjectivities (consumption)" (20).

"...I argue that the most fruitful meaning for the 'post' in post process is 'extension,' not 'rejection,' and I offer social-process rhetorical inquiry as a pedagogical method for extending our present view of the composing process into the social world of discourse" (47).

"...it is important for students to learn that their critical knowledge is significant only insofar as it is made public" (132).

"And it is only through the postmodern turn toward pragmatic, public discourse that students can learn these socio-rhetorical strategies. I believe that the development or awakening of 'critical consciousness' alone...is insufficient. It is crucial that students also learn to transform their critical knowledge into communal discourse, audience-centered communication with the intention of influencing cultural practices through persuasive writing" (133).

I have so much to say about this book that I wrote a 2 page argument about it... I won't reproduce it here. But suffice it to say that I have quite a few problems with this text -- mostly because McComiskey's pedagogy is, to put it simply, oppressive and coercive: his values become the value of the composition class, and to me, these values are not at all criticized or examined. To put it another way, teaching students to intervene in public discourses through persuasive writing privileges one kind of writing over another, not to mention that public discourses are inherently problematic (and therefore should be corrected).

Harris

Harris, Joseph. A Teaching Subject: Composition Since 1966. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall,
1997.

Harris attempts to offer a view of composition studies since 1966 by a cluster of 5 key terms: growth, voice, process, error, and community. These "keywords" help him to engage in critiques of prevailing views of composition, and to offer his own view that composition is a "teaching subject" (ix).

Key quotations:
"We have yet to find ways not only to have our teaching better informed by theory but to make our theories more responsive to the scene of teaching" (14).

"One way to help such students imagine themselves as intellectuals, then, is to ask them to look closely at how they already go about reading the many various texts they meet from day to day -- both in school and outside of it" (19). (JH's concl. w/ the "gap" between experience and academy).

"First, I want to argue against how the relations between theory and practice are usually imagined -- which is, to put it simply, that the one leads to the other, that first one figures out what the theory is, and then applies it in the classroom" (40).

"Second, I want to argue against the sort of narrative of progress that still informs many histories of composition" (40).

"My aim here instead is to try to get at what it might have meant to teach writing 'as process not product'. For while it seems clear to me that the process movement helped establish composition as a research field, I am not nearly so sure it ever transformed the actual teaching of writing as dramatically as its advocates have claimed" (55).

"It seems to me that a teacher can fairly quickly explain the various aspects of composing, schedule plenty of time in the semester for students to revise and edit their work thoughtfully, and then get on with the main business of the course: to help students articulate, extend, and perhaps rework the positions they take on in their writing" (57) --->Harris's argument.

"To really change the teaching of writing, then, it seems to me that a view of process must go beyond the text to include a sense of the ongoing conversations that texts enter into -- a sense, that is, of how writers draw on, respond to, and rework their own previous writings and those of others" (68).

"Both sides of this argument, in the end, rest their cases on the same suspect generalization: that we and our students belong to different and fairly distinct communities of discourse, that we have 'our' 'academic' dscourse and they have 'their own' 'common'(!) ones...similarly, our teaching will and should always be affected by a host of beliefs and values that are held regardless of our voices as academics" (105).

"...our goals as teachers need not be to initiate our students into the values and practices of some new community, but to offer them the chance to reflect critically on those discourses of home, school, work, the media, and the like -- to which they already belong" (105). ----> Ulmer!

"What I do want is a sort of teaching that aims more to keep the conversation going than to lead it toward a certain end, that tries to set up not a community of agreement but a community of strangers, a public space where students can begin to form their own voices as writers and intellectuals" (116).

I see Harris advocating for Elbow's "believing game" in many places, esp. 114-115. I like this as it helps me see the connections between the two. It also helps me solidify my reading of Elbow as being concerned with the socially constructed aspects of texts, writing, and processes.

Harris takes up the central debate of theory vs.practice in a way that places students first. He clearly advocates for a model of informed practice, that theory and practice should meld together in the classroom; perhaps that there's no real distinction between the two. I especially like the idea that Harris asks us to rethink teaching as a practice of critical reflection and engagement through this reflection; that is, students don't need to learn "academic discourse" as an abstract monolith but rather engage the discourse through their own communities, values, and discourses.

James Berlin

Berlin's Rhetoric and Reality examines writing instruction in American Colleges from 1900-1985. Berlin offers a 3-part taxonomy to understand the trends of rhetoric and composition: objective, subjective, and transactional. For Berlin, we need to think about the connection between rhetoric (which he argues works better defined as rhetorics) and the social contexts in which a rhetoric emerges.

Key terms/Quotations:

Rhetoric = rhetorics, since rhetoric is diverse, historic, contingent. Rhetoric = "production of discourse" (xi).

Objective rhetoric: reality and truth within external (material world); writers record reality exactly as it happened to transfer unfettered to the reader. "current traditional" rhetoric/modes

Subjective rhetoric: Truth located within individual and only accessible to him or her; can't be transmitted. In the writing class, writing can't be taught, but the teacher provides the environment for the student to find her truth. Classroom practice consists of metaphor, journals, and peer groups.

Transactional rhetoric: Truth emerges from interaction between individual and the world.
3 forms: classical, cognitive, and epistemic
Truth is uncertain; concerned with "total range of human behavior" (15).
New knowledge is important; this new knowledge emerges from interactions
language constitutes all reality and experience.

Mike Rose's Lives on the Boundary

I loved re-reading Mike Rose's Lives on the Boundary. Rose departs from "scholarly tradition" to recount his experiences as a struggling student in South LA. His aim is to examine the social conditions of teaching/education, as well as to critique the various ways in which the educational system -- and its arbitrary standards of literacy -- not only stereotypes the students, but has lasting effects on their ability to learn and teachers willingness to teach.

For me, what's most useful about this book is the way in which Rose doesn't explicitly theorize; if he does, it's based strictly on the experiences he has with individual students. This seems an answer to the theory/practice debate, in that it offers a model of theorizing not only based in material reality, but one that doesn't try to abstract the person from the situation. As Rose discusses various curriculums he had, he reveals his approval of academic discourse; that is, he believes in teaching students academic discourse because it will help them get to where they are going. For me, this is useful because it doesn't merely critique academic discourse as oppressive; instead, he understands that the methods by which it is purported and guarded are oppressive. In a word, Rose's book could be summarized as "access": he wants all to be able to access the standard of literacy that we've come to take as basic -- while understanding that there are different models of literacy to take into account.

In terms of the theory/practice debate, then, Rose is surely a practitioner. The self he constructs in the book suggests that he isn't interested in theory, except in how it can help him teach. However, I would argue, too, that what he discusses in the book advocates a blended model of "informed practice," where theory and practice blend so seamlessly into each other that it's impossible to tell which is which.

100th Post and Bruce Horner

Bruce Horner's Terms of Work for Composition: A Materialist Critique takes up a "cultural materialist critique of work" in composition studies, because the issue of work -- variously defined -- plays such a crucial role in composition. Horner thus advocates for a "material social critique" (of writing) that acknowledges, theorizes, and resists context/ labor conditions. Essentially, Horner wants the field to recognize the "materiality" of all the work we do, especially student work, which, in his courses, comprises the main text.

Key quotes:
"Rather than denigrating or praising what passes for intellectual work for its intellectuality, we need to insist on the material social conditions making that work possible and shaping it; we cannot use its 'intellectuality' as a basis for denying its materiality" (9). Crucial point in book; sums it up, I think.

On pp 14-18, Horner characterizes the theory/practice debate under the head "Work in Composition". He divides the field in two categories: those concerned with "professionalization", and those concerned with teaching. One reason for such polarity stems from the marginal status of composition in relation to English studies and in the academy as a whole. Thus, those interested in "professionalizing" adopt theory; they publish in journals, conduct research studies, and essentially "threaten to distance Composition from its material ties to and identification with teaching" (15).

But the practitioners aren't much better. According to Horner, "these faculty define their own knowledge in terms of their experience of what 'works' in the classroom, and pride themselves on their dedication to teaching and their students. In so doing, however, they increase the marginality of their position in the academy and subject themselves to ever more degrading working conditions"(15).
The solution is invariably to adopt a material social critique; however, Horner is cautious to advocate not for a "balance...but intervention at the point of their interrelations" (27). That is, he urges the field to ignore the distinction between theory and practice:

"...in order to address the material conditions of our labor, we must abandon such distinctions, in effect making it our work to articulate the interpenetration of all these as constitutive of our work. This will require initially foregrounding the ways in which contradictions embedded in distinctions between intellectual and non-intellectual labor and the commodification of intellectual labor play out at the site of composition" (29).

"The cultural materialist alternative for which I would argue would insist, instead, not only on the political, strategic nature of specific representations but on the necessity of their being so -- that is, it would insist on both recognizing the inevitably contingent character of representations and understanding one's choice of representation in terms of the specific material contingencies of one's teaching" (35).

"...I would argue for representing students as above all else as workers, working on themselves, Composition, the academy, and the social generally" (35).

"The alternative challenge Composition faces is how teachers and students can confront the ways in which each material act of writing and reading mediates, in the sense of actively re-forming and transforming, and is mediated by social identification, difference, and power, both responding to and reconstructing or revising these" (37).

"Here let me emphasize that it is within such oppositions that the term 'student work,' like the term 'women's work,' appears as an oxymoron, by definition less or other than real work -- than, say, the work of men. And of course, these conceptions are part of a chain, or nest, of binaries derogating teaching, the academic, the feminine, the personal, and so on which distinguish labor from work, feeling from thought, experience from intellect, the personal from the social, composition from academic disciplines, and the academic from the real" (53).

"...compris[ing] all the activities of its provocation, composition, distribution, and reception and the involvement of these with the other: work, in short, as material social practice, where agency meets structure" (66) --- possibly the definition of m-s-p?

"What I am suggesting, however, is that in addition to these curricula, we need to acknowledge as well a curriculum 'hidden' from or ignored or dismissed by the dominant, one that promotes alternative or oppositional interests" (117).

"The composition course identifies academic work as a material social practice. Even in its most debased, skills and drills forms, it takes as its primary focus the materiality of the writing that constitutes the bulk of academic work. In focusing on the materiality of academic 'discourse,' of whatever stripe, it threatens continually to reveal the location of academic disciplinary work in the material realm. That is to say, Composition reveals what most disciplines deny: the contradiction between the apparent stability of their disciplinary subject as an abstract, reified entity, and the necessity for its continual, material reproduction through pedagogy generally and writing in particular" (146).

"The discourse of academic professionalism limits how we think of the work of Composition, defining legitimate work as the acquisition, production, and distribution of print-codified knowledge about writing: the production and reception of scholarly texts. In this discourse, the 'work' associated with such activities as teaching is deemed 'labor,' the implementation of the work of professional knowledge, and thus susceptible to proletarianization" (173). ----> theory/practice

"But as the Amherst tradition and the work of Coles and Bartholomae illustrate, the material practice of tradition -- including writing and writing style -- is not to be so easily divorced from theory or any of its 'components'"( 200).

"This commodified view of scholarship provides a different perspective from which to understand the theory/practice debate. The work of theory, or, better, 'theorizing,' is not typically imagined as material practice but as commodity whose properties reside in the 'theory' itself, understood as existing outside the material realm" (226).

I have quite a bit to say about this book; mostly that I disagree with a lot of the readings of schools/ theories that Horner evinces as evidence (i.e. expressivist pedagogy, the Amherst school, etc). In addition, I believe that the project-- while useful and productive for us and our students -- still imposes a particular set of values on the students that I find problematic. Horner would have it that by taking the students seriously, by considering them workers, we value them and can overcome the marginalization that they and us have encountered. But I can speak from experience that this would not, and does not, work with all students... and not because they're apathetic, either. Finally, I think that this does not effectively theorize the theory/practice debate outside the position of, "well, we need both." In other words, Horner's approach, in accounting for the material social residue of theories and practices, suggests that we can transcend these binaries in favor of something more productive and resistant. But can it? I guess I was expecting much more from this book, since it's been touted to me as "canonical". And what's up with the fact that Horner denigrates the very curriculum he installed at UWM? Anyone?

More Slacking... and Keywords

I've been on a blogging (but not reading) hiatus, due to teaching and my stint reading AP exams in FL. Now that I have some time, the blogging resumes with a book I read about 3 weeks ago... and have yet to post about.

Since the last post, I've read:
Writing/Teaching Paul Kameen
Kitchen Cooks, Plate Twirlers, and Troubadours ed Diana George
The Making of Knowledge in Composition Stephen North
Sidney Dobrin's book
Balancing Acts eds Anderson, Buley-Meissner, Chappell

Now for the Keywords:

Heilker, Paul, and Peter Vandenberg, eds. Keywords in Composition Studies. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton-Cook. 1996.

This book is a collection of short essays on keywords in composition studies. However, as the editors declare, the essays explore the multiple valences and definitions of each word to resist consensus. In essence, the book tries simultaneously to record and resist meaning.

Instead of talking about important quotations/key terms as is my m.o, I'm going to list the key quotations under the word they describe. I have selected terms which I found most useful for my exams/projects; these selections do not represent the breadth of the book or the overall usefullness of the book in general.

Composing/Writing:
"This idea, that writing is not the transcribing of thought but rather the process of creating insight itself, sets the stage for the next major construction of writing and composing in composition studies, the one epitomized in the 1981 work of Linda Flower and John R. Hayes: writing as thinking, as a recursive cognitive activity, as problem-solving; composing as the goal-directed orchestration of a set of distinctive, hierarchical, highly-embedded thinking processes" (41).

"It should be noted that writing as learning is the strand of meaning from which the often-invoked images of writing as exploration and discovery arise" (41-2).

Essay:
"One thing many of the above have in common is their assumption that the essay-- whether interpreted as an aesthetic of the personal, a search for ontological truths, or a medium for social construction -- remains separate from poetry, fiction, drama, and so on. Others are more critical of such distinctions" (86).

"As we scan different readings (and thus, always, engenderings) of this word and its origins, it would appear that the essay can not signify any bona fide genre. Rather, the term might best be considered an 'open rubric' the intention of which can only be defined locally by the 'rule makers' of specific discourse communities: i.e., the teacher, the test maker, the editor, the publishing company. As paradigm shifts in our technology and culture continue to force us to revamp our definitions of literacy and writing, the debates over the appopriate meanings for the 'essay' will most likely become even more heated and, perhaps to those outside academic communities, increasingly irrelevant" (87).

Invention:
"It has been generally accepted that these 'sets of instructions' are equivalent to what are routinely caled 'heuristic procedures,' what Richard Young, in his 1976 bibliographic essay, refers to as any 'explicit plans for analyzing and searching which focus attention, guide reason, stimulate memory and encourage intuition.' That which is said to qualify as an inventional device or heuristic procedure, however, has been deliberated throughout the history of composition studies" (132).

"While each of [Young's] theories constitute heuristic procedures, their differing forms and functions are the result of differing approaches to the composing process" (133).

(According to LeFevre): "Invention thus 'becomes an act that may involve speaking and writing, that at times involves more than one person; it is furthermore an act initiated by writers and completed by readers, extending over time through a series of transactions and texts" (134; qtd in LeFevre 1).

"Expanded definitions of invention see it 'not just as a method of retrieving what we already know, but as a process that constitutes our inquiry" (134; LeFevre 123).

"Paul Kameen uses the term 'imagination' to describe these forms of 'modern invention' that are strategies 'for the methodical acquisition of new knowledge': classical invention is thus a 'fairly mechanical special case of creative thought that imagination absorbs into its broader systems'" (134; Kameen 85-6).

Young writes: "It is becoming increasingly apparent that as new and significant methods of invention emerge we need to develop a more adequate terminology which distinguishes various arts or methods of invention from the art of invention, that is, the members from the class" (134, Young 17).

Pedagogy: (Karen Fitts)
"Pedagogy -- with no adjective -- became (retrospectively at least) current-traditional pedagogy, then process pedagogy (composed of diverse forms of teaching undergirded by broadly ranging assumptions) and finally critical pedagogy. That pedagogy entered composition studies not routinely linked with an adjective suggests it was then assumed to be self-evident, separable from theory" (168).

"Richard Fulkerson argues that, as a general rule, theory and practice began to be conflated in pedagogy only in the 1980s; before that, it was accepted teacherly practice to discuss the characteristics of good writing without also imagining how writers might write or how teachers might enable writers" (168).

"Woods writes that the discipline-centered see pedagogy as a civilizing influence; it offers values, skills, and precepts to primitive beings, whereas proponents of a student-centered pedagogy perceive themselves as giving voice to (inherently good) humanity" (169).

"Divergent as these perspectives are, they hold in common at least one trait: their localized focus on individual teachers and individual students" (169).

"Freire's primary contribution was in revealing the interactions between education and society, thus elevating pedagogy to its prominent contemporary position as an agent for social change" (169).

Practice/Praxis:
"In composition studies, practice is often joined with theory in a hierarchal binary in which theory informs practice but practice doesn't inform theory" (187).

"Recognizing practice as a mode of inquiry contributes to new understandings of knowledge making" (187).

"A decisive contribution to the contemporary age of politics was Paulo Freire's introduction of praxis to composition studies in the early 1980s. For while practice almost inevitably is set off against theory, praxis erases this polarity through the means of dialectics. Raymond Williams contends that in its modern sense, developed in Hegelian and Marxist thought, 'praxis is practice informed by theory and...less emphatically, theory informed by practice'" (188).

"Praxis thus restores theory and practice to one another..." (188-9).

"In any case, the commitment to greater social and political equity through classroom practices is especially characteristic of feminists, marxists, multiculturalists, and other oppositional pedagogues" (189).

Rhetoric:
"Rhetoric is buffeted by storms of signification coming from two directions. From one direction comes the general public's perception, reinforced by the popular media, of rhetoric as bombast, figurative language designed to cover up either deception or shallow substance" (213).

"From another direction comes the implied meaning, embraced within most academic circles, of rhetoric as the subject matter that gets taught in composition courses" (213).

"For most of this century, rhetoric, supported by a tradition of philosophical/theoretical scholarship, has been invoked to rescue composition from its seemingly anti-intellectual baggage of word-, sentence-, and paragraph-level pedantry" (213).

"The only characteristic these [three] theories share is that their proponents seem to envision their rhetoric as being able either to explain how speakers and writers behave in certain situations or to direct speakers and writers to generate language that has certain, presumably effective, characteristics" (214).

Shaughnessy

In Errors and Expectations, Mina Shaughnessy offers "a guide to the teacher of basic writing" by suggesting that the "errors" students make do, in fact, have a logic and an explanation. Teachers of basic writing need to be able to understand these errors as part of a process, and help the student determine why he or she is making these errors. Shaughnessy emphasizes process over product, and while she advocates practice with grammar/mechanics, at the same time she places great importance on proofreading as the final stage of writing.
Important Quotes:

For me, what's most useful are the several sections where she discusses -- indirectly -- invention.
But there are some gems about learning and writing, too.

What I liked the most about this book is that Shaughnessy advocates meeting students "where they are;" her approach is definitely a student-centered one where what the students know is brought into contact with what they do not know, or do not know they know.

As I read, I kept being struck by how much Shaughnessy emphasizes the social nature of language and writing. While one might argue that she uncritically presents academic discourse as the ideal for BW students to master (and I would agree with this critique); Shaughnessy does promote reflective practice and place students at the forefront of teaching writing. It's interesting to see how James Berlin has critiqued Shaughnessy for espousing a cognitive (process) approach, which, for him, means that she ignores the socially constructed nature of language/writing. There are, however, several occasions where Shaughnessy directly discusses the social aspects of language.

Aside from the privileging of academic discourse: it would seem that Shaughnessy is a tad prescriptive (though I do believe in prescriptive teaching if it's reflected upon and it works). My major critique: the implicit assumption that the oral discourse students bring with them to the writing classroom is a hindrance. While Shaughnessy takes careful pains to equate BEV, for example, with SWE, oral dialects/discourses show up throughout her book as problematic and a hindrance to the process of learning to write academic discourse.

Elbow

Peter Elbow's Writing Without Teachers offers a guide to establishing a "teacherless classroom" based on the idea that the best way to learn to write is to get feedback from a familiar and diverse group of people who have no stakes in the outcomes.

Elbow bases his model on his own experiences as a writer/student. teacher of writing, and member of a therapy group. His main contribution here is the notion of freewriting and the ways that the teacherless classroom can help overcome people's fears about writing. It's certainly a member of the "process movement," and many scholars have critiqued Elbow for his "expressivist" notions of writing. These "expressivist" notions of writing privilege a solitary author, writing in isolation (in fact, several scenes are presented where Elbow discusses his own --solitary -- struggles to write), and that truth emanates from the individual's experience. The main goal of expressive writing is to find your authentic voice, and transmit that voice onto paper, as accurately as you see it.

While there are a great deal of these elements in Elbow's book (seen even if you only counted the number of times "organic" emerges), I'd like to argue two things about it: 1) Even if it is expressivist, it doesn't mean it can't be critical; and furthermore, first-year students, especially, often need to hone their "voice" and reflect on their experiences, as their voice has been squashed; and 2) that Elbow's book isn't entirely based on this model. His emphasis on the communal, social nature of the teacherless class --where no one's status is more privileged than the other -- is crucial for learning to write. That is, you cannot just send signals in the dark. You need feedback from an array of individuals.

Another key component of Elbow's book is the appendix essay on the "believing game," which offers a new route to critical (academic) thinking by way of acceptance, believing, instead of "doubting." For Elbow, in order to see contradictions, fallacies, or problems, we should really listen to others' viewpoints -- believe them -- and then we can see where they're beneficial, and for whom. I've always loved this idea, and want to try it out.

Finally, the major draw of Elbow's book for me is its practicality. He focuses on the practice -- the work -- of writing, without glamorizing it at all. In addition, he links theory with practice by theorizing from practice, and then doing it-- in other words, there's little, if any, distinction between the two for him.

Elbow's book helped me to understand Berlin's Rhetoric and Reality and vice versa. I have found that I disagree with Berlin's reading of Elbow (and some other expressivists, since Berlin categorizes them without much explication of their differences). However, I have also come to see how Elbow's book is great on paper, but what do we do in institutional contexts where, all too often, there's neither time nor sanction for this kind of work? What do we do when there is, in fact, a teacher?

Faigley

Lester Faigley's Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition is structured around the central question: Why hasn't composition studies responded to postmodernity in the academy? (I'm paraphrasing). Faigley argues that composition studies as a whole has ignored or neglected to significantly import elements from postmodern theory into its teaching/theorizing. He attributes this to the staying power of process pedagogy, which codified Comp. as a discipline but rendered postmodern theory obsolete. He makes this argument by exploring renditions of the subject/subjectivity that textbooks, process pedagogy, and student writing has produced.

Now, before I continue, I want to mention that Faigley's book is dated 1992, so some of his claims are dated and thus no longer true. I'm sure that there have been significant changes in the field since then, where claims of the subject's discursive construction have become commonplace and even contested -- in favor of other, more groundbreaking theories that critique the postmodern subjectivity as problematic. Similarly, Faigley's claims about electronic writing/networking/ computers have been retheorized, if only because it's been almost 20 years since his book has come out.

Key quotations:
"But while composition studies is concurrent with some characterizations of an era of postmodernity, it has by and large resisted the fragmentary and chaotic currents of postmodernity, and it has remained in many respects a modernist discipline, especially in its prevailing conceptions of the subject" (xi).

"The argument that runs through this book is that many of the fault lines in composition studies are disagreements over the subjectivities that teachers of writing want students to occupy" (17).

"This turn [the turn toward pomo theory] in composition studies is a recognition of the mutuality of theory and practice -- a recognition that, as Foucault argues....'Theory does not express, translate, or serve to apply practice, it is practice'(208). This revised notion of theory situates the practices of composition textbooks that encourage the orderly application of reason in a long theoretical tradition of the advancement of reason dating from the Enlightenment" (38-9). (* see also p. 44 for a longer discussion of theory/practice).

"The classroom successes of process pedagogy have drawn attention away from how judgments of writing quality reflect larger cultural assumptions about the purposes of literary education. Such was not the case throughout much of the history of writing instruction in America. Literacy instruction was closely associated with larger cultural goals, and writing teachers were as much or more interested in whom they want their students to be as in what they want their students to write" (113).

"I argue that shared assumptions about subjectives [sic] -- the selves we want our students to be -- still shape judgments of writing quality" (114).

"...what might happen if we were to disrupt standard classroom practice and introduce new forms of written discourse? Would it be more difficult to preserve the rational, autonomous subject? We can now ask this 'what if' question because different groups of writing researchers have brought new forms of writing to the classroom through the use of electronic written discussions on networked computers and the use of nonsequential writing known as hypertext" (165).

"The utopian dream of an equitable sharing of classroom authority, at least during the duration of a class discussion, has been achieved" (167).

"The dispersal of the subject in electronic communications technologies suggests that we need new ways of talking about subjectivity and raises the issue of what metaphor of the subject might be most useful for articulating a postmodern ethics" (227).

"The multiplicity of subjectivity is not necessarily a thing to fear because in classrooms it fosters discursive richness and creativity. But it does require theorizing and, if teaching practices are to be involved, new metaphors for the subject" (230).

This last quotation, for me, speaks to Faigley's larger project in the book: that theory is divided from practice. That is, composition studies has theorized a great deal, but this theorizing about postmodernity has not trickled down into new teaching practices that move away from a modernist subject. Faigley does suggest that the discussions of process theory have trickled down, but that these theories aren't quite enough; they still, according to Faigley, privilege certain kinds of subjectivities that harken to current-traditional rhetoric or worse.

There's a lot that's useful here, though the dated-ness is something to keep in mind. I'm not totally enamored with the book, because I think Faigley himself fails to see how his own beliefs (esp. regarding personal writing) are not theorized; I also think that more examples are needed to demonstrate his points. When he discusses textbooks, he talks about two; in discussions of his own students' writing, there's ONE. Makes me question his research practices. There is also a LOT of theory here, in ways that doesn't always connect with composition studies. At times I feel the connection is forced or overlooked. Faigley doesn't cite people like Karen Burke LeFevre, much feminist scholarship, or sophistic rhetoric that takes up the questions of postmodern theory before his book came out (Vitanza, for ex)...

Overall, though, his book is helping me see the disconnects between theory/practice and the ways in which composition has dealt with it, both in its own scholarship and in relation to other disciplines (ie linguistics, literary studies, cultural studies).

44,

Slacking on the posting...

In my attempts to be productive in all areas of my life, I've been seriously slacking on posting. Since the last post, I've read:
Rhetoric and Reality by James Berlin
Keywords in Composition Studies ed by Paul Heilker and Peter Vanderburg
Fragments of Rationality by Lester Faigley
Writing Without Teachers by Peter Elbow
A Teaching Subject by Joseph Harris
Rhetoric and Composition as Intellectual Work ed Gary Olson.

Whew!

For now, suffice it to say that I've been reading.. a LOT. But I'm actually enjoying it. The library, however, probably hates it, since I now have the PE/PN section of almost every library in WI collected in my apartment. Good times.

Good news: I'm really starting to see how the texts "talk to" each other, how they are responding to similar concerns in different ways, and different concerns altogether. I've decided that the major issue I want to focus on (for the prelim exam, perhaps) is how composition studies has conceived, and treated, the split between theory and practice. Additionally, how has the split (and subsequent calls for joining the two) affected the discipline of composition studies as a: field/discipline, subject, practice, and epistemology? Can there be a reconciliation of theory and practice, and what would that mean for the teaching of composition/rhetoric?

Ede

Ede, Lisa. Situating Composition: Composition Studies and the Politics of Location. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 2004.

Ede's book attempts to situate composition by tracing, briefly, its history and development as an academic discipline. For Ede, the professionalization of composition has had positive effects, of course, but also some negative ones that warrant reexamination. One of these negative consequences is the turn away from practice; we need to theorize practice because theory is a form of practice. She coins the phrase "practice makes practice" and she deploys it to demonstrate the need to use what we do in the classroom as a way to help us think through theoretical issues as well as to become more reflective about our own commitments. She responds to the charge that composition is "post-process" by examining major texts as well as her own experience, and she suggests that, in fact, process is indeed everywhere. Essentially, she wants her book to be a call for being more accountable for our own practices.

Key ideas: "practice makes practice" (16); others
"thinking through practice"-- "Such a thinking entails not only thinking about practice -- about teaching, writing program administration, research, and so on -- but also attempting to use practice as a means of thinking through complex scholarly and professional issues" (16).

"...I will argue that the nature and impact of the writing process movement are anything but obvious, and that there are a multiplicity of meanings that can be attributed to it. Some of these meanings are paradoxical. I will argue, as I noted earlier, that from one perspective nothing so unified and coherent as a writing proces movement ever existed, and that its nature and role in the 1970s and early 1980s were as much tropological as material. But I will also argue that, despite claims that composition is post-process, signs of an ongoing commitment to process are everywhere evident. I will argue, in other words, that depending on where and how you look, there both was and was not a writing process movement" (64).

While I see the value in engaging multiple perspectives, and while I do think that it's quite useful to locate oneself -- i.e. reveal biases, commitments, assumptions, etc -- at the same time I think that Ede does not make this claim well enough for me to buy her argument. She constantly repeats phrases, sentences, and even ideas; her writing is often poorly constructed, and I feel that too often, she does not quite develop ideas in as much depth as is needed. For example, in her discussion of Crowley's Composition in the University, (a work she cites as a major component of her argument), she discusses it for about three pages total. She fails to apply her own charges to Crowley (or Miller, on whom she spends even less time!) I think, overall, that Ede is way too self-centered; even statements that have nothing to do with her begin with "I believe" or "It seems to me..." We all need these from time to time, but not in every sentence or every other one.

For me, though, the biggest problem of this text is that it reads like a collection of unrelated essays that were forced together. I wanted Ede to stop explaining her own teaching practices so heavily (in fact, in almost every example, she returns to her own ideas/experiences/practices), and instead to look at how others are using reflection in their own work. She seems to operate from the assumption that just because beliefs, practices, commitments, etc aren't directly foregrounded, that they haven't been reflected upon or adequately situated. Finally, she also seems to rely on generalizations that don't get explained or really theorized.

A useful component: thinking through practice. I think that the value in this book is that it emphasizes the need to locate ourselves as practitioners, and specify our own locations. However, this seems to stand in direct tension with Ede's statement that she does not value personal narratives. Hmmm...

Goggin

Goggin, Maureen Daly. Authoring a Discipline: Scholarly Journals and the Post-World War II
Emergence of Rhetoric and Composition. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000.

Goggin uses a historical study of 9 seminal journals in the field of Rhet/Comp to demonstrate how the discipline coalesced, as well as to show how the journals have shaped the field (and its concerns). At stake for Goggin is how we imagine and define ourselves as a field, and she calls for reimagining the field outside of English departments, by which she means an interdisciplinary approach. Goggin's methodology is to emphasize the "dialectical relation with a discipline" (xiv): that a discipline is shaped by its journals/publications, but that those also play a key role in the discipline's development. For rhet/comp, then, this is important because it's not merely a standard historical narrative of the field; instead, it shows the various ways in which constraints, conventions, attitudes about teaching/writing/scholarship, etc have played key roles in the ways our ideas about writing, teaching, and knowing have developed.

Key terms: "discipliniographer" --one who writes/shapes a discipline through writing
"density of publications" -- levels of productivity in journals
"create, preserve, and use knowledge" -- 3 aims of any discipline

Key points of her book:
"With the emergence of disciplines and the rise of departments, rhetoric as a system was dissected. Theory was separated from practice, practice from product, and all 3 from pedagogy" (13).

"In response to mounting pressures, teachers and scholars scrambled for practical methods of teaching a wider range of new, nontraditional students in basic writing. This scramble set up a tension between those who were turning toward more speculative projects to create, preserve, and use knowledge about writing, reading, and teaching, and those who sought more pragmatic and immediate answers to help them face new challenges in their classrooms. Ever at the front were continued efforts to raise the proverbial status of the field and a stronger push toward creating a discipline" (76).

"Rhetoric and composition began to define itself through a search for explanations, including empirical, historical, theoretical, and philosophical, of the ways literate and oral discourse practices were learned and functioned in various settings. A shift of attention away from practical and pedagogical issues in writing instruction toward understanding discursive practices and learning processes more broadly conceived is discernible in the professional literature published during this time" (79). [She's referring here to the period between 1965-1980).

"The conundrum of our field is to figure out how we are to explain and cope with a public who, paradoxically, is so absolutely certain that they know all there is to know about us when it is ceratin that they have absolutely no inkling who we are, what we do, why we do it, and how we do it" (191).

Goggin asks us to employ what she terms "marketing myopia" to reimagine ourselves.

"Whether we draw on Young, Becker, and Pike's definition of rhetoric or some other, we need to find powerfully flexible frames to redefine ourselves in ways that allow us to configure the triad of creating, preserving, and using knowledge" (205).

Goggin responds to Crowley by addressing similar issues; unlike Crowley, she doesn't advocate for the abolition of a particular trope or anything other than a recognition of our history and how it's shaped what we have come to believe and do. I think that Goggin does a bit better job in demonstrating how certain beliefs still remain. Crowley seems to suggest -- though often indirectly -- that certain beliefs have been overcome, though she marshals them against freshman composition for its adherence to humanist subjectivities. Together, Crowley and Goggin allow a fuller picture of the discipline because of their diverse approaches and how they demonstrate the field's commitments.

This is what I find most useful about this book; really, it was useful in seeing the history of publications and the relationship between published work and the field itself. However, there isn't much else that's directly useful in it for now. One major critique I have at this point is that the book isn't well-written. I know that publication is all too often rushed for tenure or other things, so I can't be too critical, but as I was reading (and then again as I wrote this post) I was reminded of this fact.

Later: Goggin's usefulness on invention.

Crowley

Crowley, Sharon. Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays. Pittsburgh, PA:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998.

Because the history of Freshman Composition reproduces humanist values and subjectivities, stemming from its beginning at Harvard in the 19th century, it ought to be eliminated from the present university requirements.

This is Crowley's basic point in her book; she writes an extensive history of composition that begins with rhetoric (in ancient Greece) and the role that rhetoric played in pedagogy, all the way through to contemporary versions in universities nationwide. After a brief period in which rhetoric flourished in educational programs, it rapidly went out of vogue in favor of literature and grammar courses. One reason for this is the open admissions -- but, as Crowley points out, even at Harvard in 1890, teachers lamented that its "elite" students could not write. Since then, various universities have required a writing course as part of the general education program, and Crowley traces the various iterations of this English course. Freshman English turned from rhetoric to grammar to literature and back again -- now being a site of contention for all involved.

Yet another important thread in Crowley's book is the issue of professionalization and disciplinary status. Crowley shows how rhetoric and composition as a discipline gained strength, but this was only in the last three or four decades. Previously, those who taught composition had high teaching loads and the lowest status of any at the university -- similar to today's circumstances. Crowley points out, too, that throughout the history of Freshman English, the people who teach it have never been awarded the appropriate respect or material conditions.

She marshals all of this history (her narrative of the history, that is) to demonstrate why the Freshman English requirement needs to be abolished. Crowley argues that it has deleterious effects on all involved: students, teachers/faculty, university, admin., etc. That is, by keeping the requirement in place, it constructs students as lacking basic skills; keeps teachers/the course "in service" of the university; removes possibilities for its practitioners (instructors) to publish or participate in the discipline; and, finally, promotes the "universal subjectivity" of students. Though Crowley wants to abolish the requirement of an English/writing course, she stresses that introductory level courses ought to take its place -- but on an elective basis.

For me, the most striking thing about Crowley's book is that it demonstrates just how long debates in the field have been going on; even more striking than that, however, is the fact that even in the 19th century when Harvard instituted its English requirement, the professors lamented that students could not write! This fact made me think, hard, about the things I believe and say about my own students! (One early Harvard professor even remarked, according to Crowley, that his students didn't read!) So I guess the question remains: what do we do?

I'm not sure we need to eliminate the writing requirement; I believe that it should be in place, but reframed drastically. One of the things I didn't like about Crowley's book was that she seemed to generalize the state of composition/English courses. That is, she argued against requiring composition based on its history; however, she does not argue for changing the course or imagine what a "good" required course might look like. I'm not sure if this is her project, but it would seem to me that we might meet her halfway or at least concede that the old models do not work while imagining new possibilities as we rethink how our discipline has upheld certain traditions, standards, values, and subjectivities. I would argue that we do need to reenvision our writing requirement by looking at what "work" it does and the effects that work has, and then drawing from that to rewrite the course. Crowley argues that most colleges/universities do not require other basic courses, and I'm not sure this is true. I know that I, and my students, have certainly had to take a mess of stuff (math, business, science, history/social sciences, psych, language, etc) that had little to no bearing on the rest of our coursework.

So what's useful? Lots. Mostly the history of composition that she writes; with that, the related issues of how composition studies has imagined itself in response to English, the university, and literacy in general. For later work, I think I would just concentrate on the issues she raises across the historical trajectory.

Questions: What does it mean that the same issues (ie students don't read; they can't write) have been driving questions since the beginning of the universal writing/English requirement?

Do we need to shed our ties to this requirement in order to imagine new and better possibilities for the field?

Munster

Anna Munster's project in Materializing New Media is to reframe the history/reception of digital culture away from Cartesian notions, and to suggest a new way of understanding it. She introduces the term "baroque" to do so; the baroque, as I understand it, orders the chaos of digital spaces. For Munster, the central question is how to make meaning in digital cultures; throughout the chapters, she returns to questions of borders and fluid exchanges across them.

Munster makes fewer assumptions about her audience than Hansen, I'd say, though she does presume that her audience is somewhat familiar with certain concepts and the ways that they have been discussed in the past. She also assumes that her audience has an interest in digital culture, aesthetics, and recognizes the importance of an aesthetic theory in a time of digitality. Finally, I would say that Munster assumes her audience is interested in, and supportive of, a "world without borders"; and understands that as an important part of the future of global relations.

For me, the most intriguing part of the book would be Ch. 2, which we didn't read. As I glanced through it, it might have laid out (for me, at least), some key components or examples of what she was discussing.

While a bit more difficult than Hansen, I somehow found myself understanding Munster better -- though I still was not able to fully articulate what she means by "baroque" and "folding." I felt that these were similar terms to what Ulmer calls 'felt' -- but I'm not sure. So, I'd like to talk about these in more detail, if possible.

I also noticed that at times Munster alludes to (very indirectly) some filmmakers who take up similar questions. In Ch. 3, when she discusses the military technology, I couldn't help but think of Harun Farocki's work and Paul Virilio's scholarship. What, then, do films/visual technologies contribute to her theory? Can film -- rather, certain kinds of film -- be useful in her project?

Hansen

Mark Hansen's Bodies in Code presents the idea that the body is integral to virtuality and aesthetics. For Hansen, "all reality is mixed reality" -- that is, we relate to the world in "mixed" ways. Hansen defies the mind-body split, and examines several pieces of relational art to demonstrate his point.

Hansen definitely presumes an academic audience; even after reading some very difficult stuff this semester, I found myself struggling to get what he was trying to say. He assumes familiarity with digital theory as well as aesthetics, and I think Hansen also assumes that his readers have read his previous work (or other work that takes up similar issues). For some reason, I felt like this book was having a conversation with others that I wasn't privy to-- I don't know why.

Hansen believes that he is recasting the mind-body split into a reality infused with the bodily. Since we can't exist in the world as just a mind, we must use our bodies to take in the world. (Or something). In the digital age, it makes sense that Hansen tries to figure out a theory of aesthetics and relationality that takes digital technology into account.

I'd really like us to explain some of Hansen's points in finer detail. I read the selected chapters, but still have a very cursory sense of what he's getting at. (It's week 14).

Burke

Let me just preface this by saying that I still haven't gotten a hold of Shusterman-- stupid half.com/ Amazon keeps canceling my orders. Sigh.

In A Rhetoric of Motives, Burke calls on classical interpretations of rhetoric to explore its ethical implications. He writes that considering rhetoric as connected to persuasion (and other offices) helps us to refigure its purpose in ethical discussions. In CounterStatement, Burke creates a taxonomy based on form (which he argues in the Preface is against prevailing trends) to show the interrelation of rhetoric and aesthetics. Underlying both of these pieces, I think, is the idea that the body and mind are not separate, but intimately connected -- especially when responding to form.

Burke's writing style is another breath of fresh air. While still academic, the "we" and "you" is not only interesting, but a move toward establishing a connection with his audience. A famous rhetorician, Burke assumes knowledge of rhetoric and classical texts, but at the same time, I think, tries to offer his readers this vast knowledge as well. I think his project focuses on the relevance of rhetoric to contemporary times (around 1940s) and suggests that rhetoric has connections to the present, even if we might not think it does.

I'm wondering about Burke's discussion of form and how it maps onto aesthetics. I kept thinking of Baumgarten as I read this. How does rhetoric mirror, or align with, aesthetics? Let me explain that a bit. When Burke talks about form, he's focusing on poetry and drama (Aristotle, anyone?) and suggests that bodies respond to rhythms in particular ways. These are ideas that the sophists toyed with, of course. Clearly, from this, we can see how questions of the body do come up again in discussions of aesthetics. So, are rhetoric and aesthetics actually more aligned than we think? (Note: this idea is something I've been toying with after the activity Anne asked us to do in class where we mapped out our own questions).

It's interesting, though, that Burke brings these discussions up as a "counter-statement." Who, exactly, is he "countering"? And why?

Finally, I'd like to talk more about the question of motive -- since it seems to me that it's not quite "intent" but something more than that.

Steiner

Wendy Steiner's Venus in Exile traces the elusive beauty through the female form, the avant-garde, and history. Steiner attempts to answer why beauty dropped out of vogue, so to speak, and why its recent reappearance occurred. Finally, Steiner argues that beauty is important for social and political reasons.

This is the first text written by a woman, and a woman academic whose work usually tries to be accessible. (I've read brief stuff by her in the past, taken, I think from her last book). Steiner assumes a variety of knowledges, though she makes them quite accessible to her reader. Her writing is clearer than most texts we've read, and though she uses an academic register for the most part, I think her book reaches across academic boundaries somewhat. She assumes that her audience cares about art, and knows that beauty has been "exiled," if you will. This audience is likely hoping for beauty's victorious return, though without all the baggage it has carried. Thus, Steiner's book offers hope for those of us who want to give beauty its due.

I'm interested in the focused attention Steiner gives to works of art, performances, and literature. In fact, I saw the literature chapter as a bit out of place -- though I get her point. It was quite refreshing to read some critical analyses of actual pieces, if only because it gave me something concrete to think about (and sometimes look at). As I write this, I wonder why it was important to Steiner to closely read these works, especially since so much has been done that theorize art more abstractly. Is this part of her project, then? (To closely read art objects so that we can better understand them?)

The previous question also leads me to wonder about the form of the book. That is, why have the images as an insert in the middle -- which, at times, I found annoying to have to flip back. Why not have a layout that showed the image next to the text? Surely, this technology could be done at the time, as the book was quite recent. What, then, motivates the choice to include images as peripheral, in a book about art and beauty?

For the sake of argument, I'm interested in what Steiner's version of aesthetics looks like. For me, at least, it was hard to pin down, since it seemed that she was searching more for the elusive beauty, than to craft a theory about aesthetics and what all that means. It's quite difficult, however, to do one without the other. So, what are Steiner's aesthetics? And what's at stake for her?