Connecting Cultural and Academic Emphasis on Multi-Modal Discourse

If visual discourse has entered our domain, what is our relationship to it and how do we go about thinking critically of it?

With web-based communication in mind, Stroupe describes tensions between verbal “rhetorics and literacies” and “extra-verbal codes and languages” within the English profession and a reconsideration of Aristotle’s “verbal contentmaster” as the sole possessor of the dominant mode of discourse (Stroupe 14). (can you re-create this picture accurately with text?)

Because of resistance to iconic media within the English field, introductions to, and ongoing relationships with digital communication studies have been, and will continue to be on unsettled ground. Furthermore, the English profession’s great investment in print culture will continue to prevent “marginalized wings” of the discipline to get too close to the center. However, Stroupe suggests the tension between visual and verbal literacies can relax into a hybrid literacy that amplifies their continuity and extends their capabilities together. An advocate of digital communication, Richard Lanham, who finds the anxieties in the English field for these new modes unwarranted, believes digital expression “…attempts to reclaim, and rethink the basic Western wisdom about words” (Stroupe16). Lanham’s assertions prompt me to reflect on the new roles individual modes have taken on (such as text) and the effects of multi-modal, multi-layered discourse upon ideas and arguments. Initially, I just worry about the power of the media, but then I conclude there are too many academic applications of multi-modal discourse to let that worry wield much influence such as the documentary film.

Finally, in a historical analysis of the transition from oral tradition to the printing press, and from word processing and printing to digital communication, John McDavid asserts, “Each medium arises by building recursively upon its predecessor, taking the previous technology as content” (Stroupe 23). Stroupe uses McDavid’s ideas to suggest that “the rhetorics of literacy and digitality will be long intertwined” (Stroupe 23).

If bringing digital discourse into the classroom to work with textual is a priority of a given English department, how do they go about it in a meaningful way?

Mary Hocks observes through her own experiences transitioning to digital photography that its ability to empower us to revise and create “engage us in an exploratory process that allows us to experiment” (Hocks 202). Because visual displays can make meaning through both content (image) and form (color, arrangement, scale, etc.) and both the cultural popularity of and the common person’s access to creating and editing visual displays has greatly increased within a short amount of time, it is necessary to continue studying and teaching how to read and write rhetorically within the visual domain.

Hocks defines “two schools of thought [that] inform the current thinking about visual literacy” (Hocks 204). One finds that images work in a way much like words do in how meaning is made in syntax, proximity, and grammar, while the second school of thought finds images seductive and hazardous because of their imprecision (Hocks 204).

It’s puzzling to me to view images imprecise at times. For instance, I can say or write the word “apple” and that can mean any type of apple or even a computer; however, if I show you an apple that’s red or a Powerbook, you receive more precise information given you have seen or experienced the above but did not acquire its name. Furthermore, as writers of text, we may be susceptible to assuming that the audience has experienced or seen what we are saying in a similar way, much more so than as writers of visual discourse. In my own experience, visual information also aids in memorization and cognition of textual information because I think the semi-tangible visual sensation acts as a finder tab to the information from the accompanying the text. Valid claims rest on each side of the issue and it seems that both approaches should be implemented in some way when reading visual discourse, but visual discourse is rarely alone, it's usually within combinations of image and text, or image, sound, and text, etc.

What questions do we need to ask ourselves about the interplay of multi-modal discourse? What are the possible combinations of modes? How do different modes affect one another?

As for images being viewed as seductive, imprecise, and hazardous, can’t they also be less seductive, more precise, and less hazardous at times? images that come to mind are various photographs of casualties of war. Images of people in peril for instance convey a more realistically developed human factor than saying “soldier ‘x’ has been crippled by a land mine” while describing the look on his face or the environmental conditions surrounding. Showing soldier ‘x’ can be more precise in this case. When I hear soldiers’ names being added to the death toll in Iraq, or approximate numbers of Iraqi civilians who have died on a given day I can somehow depersonalize it; however, upon seeing an image of the above, I have to actively resist contemplating the reality of their experience.

Whether either of the two schools of thought take premise is irrelevant because both ways of thinking have their application. I certainly place more emphasis on how images work much like words do, but I’d even argue the unique capabilities that visual discourse provides. I guess I’m more interested in seeing where the technology takes us and what it has to teach us rather than being too cautionary of the imprecision and seductiveness of the visual mode of discourse. Stepping back from the university to look at culture, what about the value placed on communicating via digital media and how our identities are shaped by it even more so than in the classroom as stated by Giroux (Alexander 38)? This cultural emphasis has moved, and it will likely continue to move towards the center whether the academy is along for the ride or not. Realizing that text is no longer the sole mode of discourse, but one among several that also plays a fundamental role in all, is critical in my view. By embracing this post-modern approach to multi-modal discourse in English studies may just preserve the classical appreciation for the literary and the book rather than obscure it as traditionalists fear. If English programs wish to relate to an evolving culture in order to pass on the skills and appreciation of classical textual discourse, then they must also manifest the value youth place on, as Giroux puts it, “popular spheres” where their identities are shaped “through forms of knowledge and desire that appear absent from what is taught in schools” (Alexander 38). Because the landscape of English studies is changing to a more complex interplay of discourses doesn’t mean several sacrifices must occur and the printed word will be competing for attention; it means the printed word will take on new roles, applications, and the academy will have lots more work to do.

While the cultural value of discourse such as visual continues to increase, it is not only in the interest of English as a discipline, but in the interests of the students to learn how to think critically of these modes of communication. According to Anne Wysocki, “…critical reflection on the rhetorical and cultural contexts of all things visual is the most important lesson for learning visual rhetoric” (Hocks 205). This way, students can be active participants “as designers of their own histories and cultures” (Hocks 205). There appears to be plenty of ground to cover by way of composing digital works in English classrooms, but also, and perhaps more importantly, by way of testing the digital compositions in how “people see and read them” (Hocks 205).

One popular sphere in which students shape their identity outside the classroom is through the multi-modal rhetoric of the internet. Because text is working actively within, and adjacent to various other modes of discourse on the web, is it within English Studies’ domain and therefore its responsibility to teach active thinking as students participate in the influential discourse that takes place there? Hocks suggests that students begin engaging in “audience based analysis” by visiting a favorite website and asking themselves questions about form, related links, and surrounding advertisements (Hocks 206). For example, we might ask, “whose interests does this particular site represent?” or “what are the sites links, buttons, and banners persuading you to do” (Hocks 206)?

Enhancing a student’s ability to read and think critically of discourse via the web can also be approached by exercising composition on the web. Taking on roles from both sides of this type of digital communication helps students become more actively aware of the interaction between composer product and audience process on the web (Williams 22.3). “What are the available means of persuasion in the particular case of the web,” given process-product ambiguity (Williams 22.20)? This question will be approached much differently when we as traditional web readers try on the roles of web writers within the classroom. Rather than a text you read as a whole, the means of persuasion are within the writer’s formulation of “maps” through the information environments they construct. Do web users have an illusion of creating? Was I creating something when I read Choose Your Own Adventure books?

With students gravitating to multi-modal discourse outside of the classroom and developing cultural identity through it, it’s a question of whether English Studies wishes to play a part in guiding them by implementing or expanding digital media studies in English curriculum, rather than what will happen to the literary if English departments embrace multi-modal discourse. It seems unwise to me then, to hold on to the past this way with such rapidly changing technology, and thus culture. Furthermore, it may keep the book and text more relevant with English Studies being on location in domains of cultural identity, emphasis, and communication. According to Greg Ulmer, from the work Teletheory, “People will not stop using print any more than they stopped talking when they became literate. But they will use it differently—will speak and write differently within the frame of electronics” (Stroupe 24).

Doesn't text have a job to clarify the context of this picture?

REFERENCES

Hocks, Mary “Teaching and Learning Visual Rhetoric” Teaching Writing with Computers, Eds. Takoyoshi and Huot. NY: Houghton Mifflin. 2003. 202-215

Williams, Sean D. “Process-Product Ambiguity: Theorizing a Perspective on World Wide Web Argumentation” JAC. 2002. 22.2-22.20

Stroupe, Craig “Visualizing English: Hybrid Literacy of Visual and Verbal Authorship on the Web” Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World, Ed. Carolyn Hande. Boston: Bedford. 2004. 13-37

Alexander, Jonathan Digital Youth, Emerging Literacies on the World Wide Web Cresskill: Hampton. 2006. 33-67

Work v.s Play: (re)Defining the Pleasure of Learning - Todd Snyder

Work v.s Play:

(re)Defining the Pleasure of Learning

In the second chapter of At Play in the Fields of Writing: A Serio-Ludic Rhetoric, Dr. Albert Rouzie (our professor) begins with a discussion of America's long-standing fear of play in education. Some educators worry that allowing elements of play in the classroom will set up an expectation that "the hard work of literacy should be fun" (Rouzie 25).Education as entertainment??

Others simply cannot bring themselves to see play as anything more than a stage in cognitive development (as evidenced by the picture on your left).

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Conservative Educational Philosophy

v.s

Progressive Educational philosophy

**Live on Pay-Per-View**

********************************************************************The Tale of the Tape

- the work/play split privileges work

- the work/play split is not universal

- some view play as detached from the political realities of our everyday lives

- attempts to introduce play in the classroom are often viewed as fluff work

- the institutionalization of this split has perpetuated a work/play dichotomy in English Studies

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"The Split between work and play in our culture has continued to contribute to our alienation from creative connection to both work and play" - Rouzie

Dr. Rouzie's brief history of the work/play split in English Studies reminds us that our field has a long history of defining literature against the everyday realities of rhetorical expression, popular culture, and journalistic writing (33). Thus, teaching college writing courses came to be seen as nothing more than "alienated grunt-work" (Rouzie 34).

The Birth of Current-Traditionalism??

Luckily, the expressivist camp emerged on the scene! Scholars such as Walker Gibson and Peter Elbow began to advocate the need for play in the writing process. Enter:

Free - Writing

The Personal Essay

Process-Pedagogy

This, of course, is not the end of the story. Social-epistemic rhetoric, with it's focus on raising the political-consciousness of students, would change the game. As James Berlin points out in "Rhetoric and Ideology in the Classroom," proponents of this social-epistemic brand of rhetoric were "brought together by the notion of rhetoric as a political act involving a dialectical interaction engaging the material, the social, and the individual writer with language and the agency of mediation" (488). Enter:

The Political

The Socio-economic

An attempt to awaken critical-conciousness

Unfortunately, something was lost in social-epistimic rhetoric's rejection of expressivism - play. Social-epistemic scholars have long been critical of the play of language emphasized in what Teresa Ebert calls "ludic postmodernism," claiming that it has no political impact because it is inherently nonrhetorical (Rouzie 26). These attitudes have caused some to wonder why pleasure and fun must be absent from serious-minded academic work. Can play be serious?? In "Healing the Work/Play Split: A Serio-Ludic Rhetoric for English/Composition Studies," Dr. Rouzie promotes what he calls a "serio-ludic" brand of rhetoric. Serio-ludic rhetoric blends the goals of expressivism (a freer rhetoric) and those of social-epistemic camp (critical-conciousness) without ignoring the communicative possibilities of emerging technologies -- or society's inevitable shift toward the visual.

"Serio-ludic play has the potential to help suture the work/play gap by opening up a space for reflective, social, rhetorical, and unalienated creativity" - Rouzie

The rise of technologies such as the home computer, the internet, blogs, wiki's, Moos, and video games have opened up the possibility for the sort exploration Dr. Rouzie is looking for. Serio-leudic rhetoric resists the accepted (linear) conventions of academic writing. According to Dr. Rouzie, this emergent textuality

• is informed by the postructuralist play of language, assuming a destabilized text;
• is open to aesthetic impulses;
• brings together poetic and rhetoric;
• features a dramatic sense of role play grounded in the multiple susbjectivity of the composer and/or the collaboration of multiple authors;
• is purposefully and strategically liminal and hybrid
• embraces fragmentation, associative thinking, conflict, dialectical tensions and experimental forms as part of a rhetorical/aesthetic strategy;
• the juxtaposition of conventional and experimental forms and expression to explore the rhetorical qualities of each;
• the promotion of hypermediacy as a means to focus on media effects;
• the use of parody, satire, and humor;
• an electronic component that engages students in the creation of serio-ludically conceived hypermedia projects, probably done in collaborative groups;
• experimentation with texts whose rhetorical impact is altered through visual arrangement and invention, whether electronic or nonelectronic;
• integration of process into the product; and
• the use of found objects to be repurposed through bricolage (Rouzie 53).

Two scholars that have taken up the challenge of mending the gap between work and play are James Paul Gee and Geoffery Sirc. Let's check out Gee in action ...

In "Good Video Games, the Human Mind, and Good Learning," James Paul Gee argues that video games are a good place to start when trying to think about human learning. If you are looking for an embodied experience, Mr. Gee Recommends the following titles: Half-Life 2, Rise of Nations, Full Spectrum Warrior, The Elder Scrolls III, Morrowind, World of WarCraft.

"Am I the only one that senses a video game bias here?" - me

Do others wish that Gee would have written a little more about "Bad" video games?
Gee argues that the value of video games resides within their ability to allow the player to interact within the virtual world created by game designers. In good video games, players are able to test the consequences of their actions. What constitutes an embodied experience - interaction?

"Players must carefully consider the design of the world and consider how it will or will not facilitate specific actions they want to take to accomplish their goals" - Gee

For Gee, video games help to facilitate effective thinking. This is because such thinking is built from an individual's ability to perceive the relationship between the world and their own physical and mental abilities.

How might video games be used to educating youth and training future workforces?

doctors, scientists, military forces, police forces, automobile makers, automobile drivers, athletes, astronauts, rhet/compers.. ....... ..... ..... ...

* Side Note* Video Game Systems that I have owned

• Atari
  
• Nintendo
  
• Super Nintendo
• Sega Genesis 
  
• Playstation
  
• Playstation 2
• Playstation 3

Remember - I didn't own a computer until I was 20 years old 

Gee reminds readers that gamers do not want short or simplistic games. Instead, video game designers are forced to find new ways to challenge their audiences.

What separates the mindset of the gamer from that of most classroom learners?

Gee suggests that video games tap into "profoundly good methods of getting people to learn and to enjoy learning" (29). This is because video games both challenge and entertain us on an intellectual level. Perhaps we, as educators, should pay attention to this style of learning. Can hard work be entertaining? This does not mean that Gee wants us to simply allow workers and students to play video games. In fact, technology is not always the answer.

This is why I love James Paul Gee. His goal is to steer the educational masses away from skill-and-drill / scripted / standardized instruction. He wants to move toward something more / fun/ entertaining / challenging / satisfying. In doing so, Gee hopes to create an academic space where empowered learning can take place. Hence:

The James Paul Gee Principles of Empowered Learning

1. Good learning requires learners to feel like active agents - not passive recipients
2. Different styles of learning work better for different people - we need choices
3. Deep learning requires an extended commitment (for more principles turn to page 32 of Gee's essay)

Here is another clip of Gee discussing how video games help facilitate learning...

Dr. Rouzie and James Paul Gee are, of course, not the only scholars calling for a more playful classroom environment. In "Box-Logic," Geoffery Sirc argues that electronic composition has opened up the possibility for composition students to move away from the linear norms of the past. Sirc begins with a discussion of Marcel Duchamp's (a French avant-garde artist) Green Box (1934) - a collection of personal notes he made to himself while working a piece titled Large Glass. Sirc is inspired by Duchamp's project because

- it is a prose catalogue of sorts

- it is a collection of interesting/powerful statements

- it models what a daybook for writers could look like ....

Does the concept of the author as collector open up the possibility for true creative/emotional/passionate work?

"True connection with one's composition is when the work has a strong life in the writer, when it's part of an on-going project, which means it continues growing, appearing in variant versions. Thus, no draft is ever finished, especially in teh arbitrary scope of an academic semester" - Sirc

The two basic skills that Sirc focuses his courses around are practicing search strategies and annotating material. For example, Sirc's "Rap Arcades Project" asks students to read and analyze the online texts of hip-hop culture.

1. A Textual Journey - an intense study of search engines and strategies: various databases for articles, images, statistics, chat groups

2. Turning the internet into an arcade - Freedom to collect and explore 

Does this require us to (re)Define text?

Is this the end of the long reign of the strictly analytic?

"As composition teachers, we mount exhibits, prize certain works, neglect others, and in doing so, lead our local patrons through a tour of form, content and larger questions of cultural ambiance" - Sirc

Have we become Academic gate-keepers ??

This brand of pedagogy does, of course, bring with it a new set of problems ... this is especially the case when considering copyright laws...

If you haven't already ... check out DeVoss and Webb's "Grand Theft Audio"

How do copy-right laws hinder our ability to allow students to peruse the digiatal arcades of the internet?
The work of teaching new media (literacy) / the new essay/ is not always an easy task. 

Many contemporary students are able to use these emerging technologies ...
Some are able to effectively analyze them ...
Unfortunately, few are given the opportunity to produce/compose/original products/ rhetorics/ using these technologies. The work of Rouzie, Gee, and Sirc ... ask us to become .... active agents in our own learning ... to apply these rhetorical concepts / good rhetorical stratigies / to these new mediums.
And in doing so ... they ask us to ...
lighten up a bit ... (re)consider how we learn ...

Works Cited

Berlin, James. "Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Classroom." College English. 50.5 (1998): 477-494.

Gee, James Paul. Good Video Games and Good Learning. New York: Lang, 2007

Rouzie, Albert. At Play in the Fields of Writing: A Serio-Leudic Rhetoric. Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press, 2005. 

Sirc, Geoffrey. "Box-Logic." Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition. Wysocki, Anne Frances, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Cynthia L. Selfe, Geoffrey Sirc. Logan, Utah: Utah State UP, 2004. 111-146.

Meet Digital Youth In New Media

But this is what we are facing: a conception of literacy that is democratic in the fullest sense of the word: something we create together. (Vielstimmig 110-111)

"youth" are portrayed either as leaders in embracing democracy-enhancing technologies or as victims of chaotic platforms that erode our ability to communicate effectively and coherently. (Alexander 35)

"Isn't it possible that the singular state an intent channel flipper falls into is not, as it is often described, evidence of a 'short attention span,' but, rather, of a new kind of attention?" (Wittig qtd. in Vielstimmig 90).

Look at my cute little comic book "youth" trying with all their little attention spans and their chubby cheeks to make sense of all this new media. Are they victims or freedom-fighters? Jonathan Alexander warns us that "the figure of 'youth' is mobilized to attract attention to the debate . . . "

Do I have your attention?

". . . and perhaps even to claim a high moral ground in forwarding a disinterested position: After all, participants in the debate are arguing about our children's future" (36).

I watch my eldest son play Star Wars Legos on our XBox and feel guilty as well as amazed. I check the clock regularly because I have been warned against allowing him too much time playing video games. Perhaps I am a bad parent for allowing a six year old to play this at all. But look at him go! He has mastered the game, unlocked all its secret whatevers, and he feels damn good about it. I wonder how much the warnings from well-meaning parents have to do with their own discomfort at their inexpertise and a nostalgic longing for the good-old days that we all know never really existed?

So why are my digital youth represented here in comic book form? I was struck by Cheryl Ball and Ryan Moeller's analysis of a video by Robert Watkins called "Words Are the Ultimate Abstraction: towards using Scott McCloud for teaching visual rhetoric."
Watkins uses many different media (a variety of music, film, text, digital images...) to illustrate and argue that we must teach new media literacy through new media composition, and that this is a pursuit that should be taken up by English Studies. Watkins begins his exploration with Scott McCloud's book, Understanding Comics, which Watkins uses in composition courses to teach visual rhetoric. Comics, of course, are, and have always been, multimodal and collaborative, and as such may be a perfect avenue into "new media" as Anne Wysocki defines it.

Detour/Confession

I was never all that interested in comics until the last few years, in which my partner has started reading them voraciously and my sons have turned into superheroes. The first graphic novel I read was The Watchmen.
Here is a page from the book. You probably can't read the words, but that is okay because what I want you to notice is the way the pictures build on each other. They effectively zoom out frame by frame moving left to right and then top to bottom. In the first frame of the page, you may not know what you are looking at, and you certainly do not know who is talking. By the second frame, your attention is drawn to what eventually is revealed as background action (if there can be such a thing in this kind of composition): someone fixing a fallout shelter sign. By the last frame on the page, we realize that the person talking is across the street from the "action" we've been "watching." See the man sitting on the curb, reading a comic? In the next page or so we will jump into his reading consciousness and follow the comic book within the graphic novel, which weaves in and out of the whole text. I was flabberghasted by the postmodernity of this reading experience and I was quite literally overwhelmed by the sensory information I was receiving. I did not know how to read this text. I had to slow down and examine every picture, every word. Contrary to the limited attention span the new "digital" media is accused of causing, I was forced to be much more deliberate in my reading.

So, comic books being multimodal, multivocal, visual, textual, aesthetic, and collaborative, they may offer a framework for viewing and creating new digital media, and for understanding the ways in which this new media influences literacy. Vielstimmig asserts that the "ethos of the net is a 'collaborative' one" (91). I argue (and perhaps Watkins does also) that this is also the ethos of the comic.

"That's part of the problem: the old genres contain it. In other words, it seems pretty obvious that if we want traces and resonances of these collaborative processes--this collective intelligence?--represented textually, [materially?] we might have to invent new genres that wouldn't contain it, might have to refigure old genres so that they couldn't contain" (Vielstimmig 91 italics original).

• Do comic books show traces and resonances of collaborative processes?
• Are there no old genres that resemble new media texts?
• What would it mean to "refigure old genres so that they couldn't contain"?
• Is this a new way of thinking of writing and of literacy?
• Or has writing in a way always been collaborative, but we have been clinging to the romantic notion of invention by an individual self?

I think the quote from Lynn Z. Bloom is revealing: "Middle class composition teachers, ever Emersonian in spirit, stress the importance of self-reliance ('Your work must be your own'), even in nominally collaborative classrooms" (qtd. in Vielstimmig 96)

Emerson is always with us, isn't he? And romantic notions of how we write on our own. No work is entirely our own, as much as we hate to admit it. I think what I think because of many influences in my life, including textual influences. I express myself in writing the way I do because of another and overlapping multitude of references, many of them written. We are always borrowing, we just forget where we are borrowing from once it becomes part of our own thinking.

"All writing is pseudonymous" (Vielstimmig 97).

I am reminded while reading the Vielstimmig piece of Jane Tompkins's essay "Me and My Shadow"

(this is a link to the first page, for the entire article visit JStor through the library homepage). Tompkins wrestles with her own multi-vocality within this piece, describing herself as two separate writers: the academic essayist and the private diarist. We are always balancing many personae in our writing and therefore many voices.

Is all writing pseudonymous? collaborative? multi-vocal? Should it be?

We are legion

I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the "new" assumptions I'm reading: "new media," "new essay," new "digital youth." Comic books are not the only "old" form that is multimodal and collaborative. More to the point, there have always been associative ways of writing and thus of comprehending. Here are a slew of quotes juxtaposed for you to make connections with and among: GO ASSOCIATE!

The assumption or implication propounded here, I believe, is such "associative dynamics" are purely "free form" and thus without meaning; in other words, in embracing the freeplay of meanings we lose our ability to discriminate, and thus to make critical judgements. (Alexander 40)

In other words, coherence isn't universal, but situated, varying according to the choices and sophistication of the writer, but not in ways suggested by the collected lore of handbooks. (Vielstimmig 100)

In fact, one characteristic of contemporary essays is the attempt to cast the widest net of associations possible, then struggle to bring the gathered ideas into some meaningful relation. (Hesse 36, emphasis mine)

But, like the newspapers of 100 years ago, this new type of communication is messy and difficult to control. Not like literature that comes neatly packaged between hardcovers with already internalized instructions for consumption. (Ball and Moeller n. pag.)

If there is a difference between consumption and production, my suggestion is that we are "trained" associatively in consumption--we are trained to read poetry and fiction. (Vielstimmig 107)

Can you do it?

Ball and Moeller describe Lyotard as having "painted a depressing picture of adult education “a la carte,” whereby a student can pick up the skills she needs while bypassing the critical thinking bar in the university buffet (or production) line" (n. pag.)

In this clip from Charlie Chaplin's film Modern Times (with contemporary soundtrack), we see a common criticism of a production line: the human worker becomes a machine. Do you think our students are in this position? How or how not? Are we?

So all of the texts I've dabbled in for this blog deserve a lot more attention each individually, but that is not what I'm doing here. Instead I will pose some closing questions drawn from all of them:

• Is there a connection between Alexander's discussion of the rhetoric of "youth" and the discussion we have been engaging about the rhetoric of "literacy"?
• What is an essay? Is there a new essay and an old one? What do we write? What do our students write?
• What is this?
• Should we expect something more from webtexts than what we generally are getting?
• Can poetic and rhetoric be separated? can they be combined?

Consider the following link (click here)in terms of the questions Vielstimmig pose (112):[This link goes to Kairos. Click Kairos at the top of page and then find "Pulling the Difference" by Patricia Webb Boyd--the link does not connect directly to the article]

• Are the modes of discourse working cross-genre? Do we see poetic at work?
• Do we see the associative and multivocal?
• Is this an example of "writing for the screen"?
• Is there evidence (traces) of the process?

Finally, what's the difference between digital youth and Sonic Youth?

Works Cited:
Alexander, Jonathan. "Technology, Literacy, and Digital Youth." Digital Youth: Emerging Literacies on the World Wide Web. Cresskill: Hampton Press, 2006. 33-67.

Ball, Cheryl and Ryan Moeller. "Converging ASS[umptions] between U and ME; or How New Media Can Bridge a Scholarly/Creative Split in English Studies." <http://www.bgsu.edu/cconline/convergence/index.html>

Hesse, Douglas. "Saving a Place for Essayistic Literacy." Passions, Pedagogies and 21st Century Technologies. Ed. Gail Hawisher. Logan: Utah State UP, 1999. 34-48.

Vielstimmig, Myka. "Petals on a Wet Black Boug: Textuality, Collaboration, and the New Essay." Passions, Pedagogies and 21st Century Technologies. Ed. Gail Hawisher. Logan: Utah State UP, 1999. 89-114.

Blinded by the Letter; The Database and the Essay

“Blinded by the Letter Why Are We Using Literacy as Metaphor for Everything Else?”
Anne Wysocki and Johndan Johnson-Eilola

Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola begin by surveying our culture's understandings of the definitions and functions of literacy. After giving examples from movie stars, politicians, and scholars, Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola explain that “literacy” has been co-opted into a movement to remove people who are illiterate from adverse political, economic, and social conditions. This literacy campaign purports that having basic reading and writing skills is necessary to succeed in a culture inundated by visual and technological media.

An example of a campaign to fight illiteracy:




However, Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola assert that literacy is much more complex than this: “literacy alone—some set of basic skills is not what improves people’s lives” (353). Referencing Graff and Finnegan’s concept of the “literacy myth,” they assert that thinking of literacy as a “basic, neutral, contextless set of skills” enforces misconceptions that “there could be an easy cure for economic and social and political pain, that only a lack of literacy keeps people poor and oppressed” (355). This notion leads those who are literate to blame those who are not for their condition—to wonder why someone would not learn to read if it is the only obstacle between her and achieving her dreams. It seems to me that Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola suggest that this conception of literacy—which is used to gain power and maintain social and economic disparity—is that of white capitalist patriarchal society.

Who benefits from using illiteracy as a diversion from social, political, and economic situations?

Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola refer to a more traditional definition of literacy, highlighting the reader’s relationship to books: “To the book, then, the writers we have quoted attribute our sense of self, our memories, our possibilities, the specific linear forms of analysis we use, our attitude towards knowledge, our belief in authority of certain kinds of knowledge, our sense of the world” (359). This romanticized understanding of literacy, describes my own (and hopefully your) love affair with books but it does not describe my on-and-off relationship with technology. Why is “literacy” used to label our relationship to computers and technology? Wysocki and Johnson- Eilola suggest that literacy is a stand-in for “everything we think is worthy of our consideration: the term automatically upgrades its prefix” (360). Using “literacy” to explain one’s use of technology enforces the expectation that everyone should be proficient in computers and technology.

Do you see anything problematic about attaching “literacy” to computers and technology?

Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola ultimately identify three ways in which we generally define literacy:

• as a set of basic skills necessary in a civilized world
• as an ability that will aid the socially and economically disadvantaged
  
• as a means to help us understand ourselves (360)

If literacy is offered as a remedy for people in disadvantaged positions, what kind of literacy (e.g. technological, academic) it being promoted?

In the advent of postmodernism, Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola suggest that “literacy” changes as we privilege space over time. Information is available instantly; rather than sending and receiving information, we find ourselves in spaces of information (363). Existing in a technological world that is governed by space instead of time causes us to “rely on our ability to construct ourselves at some nexus between past and future, to have faith in the present as the point where past and future meet (exactly like) a reader progressing through a linear text, uniting what has gone before with what is now and with what will come” (364). A precursor to Johnson-Eilola’s chapter in Writing New Media, they hint at the postmodern dislodging of the solitary subject.

A postmodern view of literacy removes the reader from a linear historical context, away from a personal relationship with a text, toward “the possibility of remaking cultural meanings and identities,” and toward living “among (and within) sign systems” (365). Rather than seeing literacy as something to remedy the socially or economically disadvantaged, literacy becomes a way in which one can create, edit, and react to information (366). Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola write: “Literacy can be seen as not a skill but a process of situating and resituating representations in social spaces” (367). They attach “literacy” here to what they think is worthy of our consideration—to articulating the ever-changing social, political, and intellectual contexts of the reader, writer, and text.

Is the authors’ use of "literacy" any more functional than the other definitions they give us?


“The Database and the Essay Understanding Composition as Articulation”
Johndan Johnson-Eilola

Johnson-Eilola continues his study of postmodernism in “The Database and the Essay.” He explains that while scholars in rhetoric and composition have welcomed theories of postmodernism (as they apply to the roles of the reader, writer, and text), we still “teach writing much as we have long taught it: the creative production of original words in linear streams that some reader receives and understands” (200). Johnson-Eilola suggests that in our postmodern culture—in which we see writing as social and texts as interdependent—we use the methods of symbolic-analysis and articulation theory to understand textuality.

In an economy that values intellectual work more and more, “symbolic-analytic workers are regarded for their ability to understand both users and technologies, bringing together multiple, fragmented contexts in an attempt to broker solutions” (Johnson-Eilola 201). Meanwhile, to view writing as articulation is to see the writing process less as a purging of creative genius and more as a “process of arrangement and connection” across multiple social and textual contexts (202).

How might we promote the “process of arrangement and connection” in our classes?

While postmodernism and the death of the author has lead to a more flexible definition of authorship as applied to intellectual property (IP), Johnson-Eilola asserts that “textual content has become commodified, put into motion in the capitalist system” (203). He goes on to highlight changes in IP law that indicate there has been a shift in how we view text and communication. The Bender v. West Publishing ruling “signals the start of a trend away from valuing creativity in intellectual property and one valuing fragmentation and arrangement” (207). What this leads to, according to Johnson-Eilola, is a culture in which “texts no longer function as discrete objects, but as contingent, fragmented objects in circulation, as elements within constantly configured and shifting networks” (208). Similarly, legislation on databases has redefined texts as compilations of information from various sources rather than as cohesive wholes.

Do you agree that our understanding of and appreciation for creativity has changed?

It seems to me that Johnson-Eilola is suggesting that postmodernism has caused two main shifts in our conceptions of writing and textuality: the demise of the subject as capable of producing original text and ideas (reflecting social construction theory); and the commidification of text as intellectual capital. Both of these shifts are integral to IP law debates. In the face of these changes, Johnson-Eilola argues that “We cannot just give ourselves over to maximizing capital or completely fragmenting the self […] what we have to do is understand this system better, to participate in it, but critically” (212).

How does the commodification of knowledge affect our work?


Johnson-Eilola shares several ways that we can introduce postmodern understandings of writing and textuality to our students—in utilizing blogs, database design and search engines, nonlinear media editing, and web architectures. While Johnson-Eilola admits that blogs can appear to be a trivial genre, he claims that the way in which they compile bits of information appeals to a symbolic-analytic form of writing. Although rhetoric and composition teachers may not associate database design and search engines with writing, they embody the collaborative postmodernist sense of textuality and can be used to interrogate our understandings of what a text is. According to Johnson-Eilola, nonlinear media editing can evoke a new kind of composing process that encourages, “experimentation, arrangement, filtering, rehearsal and reversal” (224).

A new kind of composing process:



Do you think Johnson-Eilola presents the effects of postmodernism on rhetoric and composition accurately?

Ultimately, Johnson-Eilola calls for rhetoric and composition scholars/teachers to embrace postmodern definitions of writing and textuality; to critique how these new definitions affect our teaching, scholarly work, and culture; and to incorporate articulation theory and symbolic-analytic work into our classrooms.

Johnson-Eilola writes, “I’m trying to get to an understanding of writing more properly suited to the role writing plays in our culture” (205). Do you think he is successful in this?

Making Connections

Postmodernism has brought about new definitions of literacy, texutality, materiality, form, subjectivity, and writing. As we attempt to integrate these developments into our classrooms, I must admit that I sometimes have headaches and pedagogical crises that I blame on postmodernism. Teaching writing in open space and in nonlinear time can be daunting. However, I offer you several unconventional and amusing examples of form, textuality, and literacy.




Have you ever wondered who decided how we got stuck with Times New Roman? Check out the following Font Conference:



If you've never been one to take font too seriously, take a look at the effects of bad font on relationships:
http://squidandbeer.wordpress.com/2007/11/12/write-me-a-love-letter-with-a-heading-in-mrs-eaves-ligatures/

Check out 102-year-old Ed Rothander's take on English literacy:

Building a Rhetoric with Spider Web(s) & Cake: Melanie’s Wysocki Analysis

Wysocki’s OPENING NEW MEDIA TO WRITING: openings & justifications visually adheres to standard academic composition design principles—mostly. Its title, part large, all-cap, bold, sans serif font and part smaller, bold all lower-case font, overlays a screen print of text that bleeds from the top, left, and right corners, fading to white beneath the subhead. Size and placement emphasize the phrase OPENING NEW MEDIA TO WRITING. Screened text beneath the title appears in diagonal lines that read, in part (we cannot see the whole, and myopic vision figures in Wysocki’s STICKY EMBRACE argument) “all the rest,” “the last 15-20 years,” “like in the following quotation,” situating her discussion historically and contextually. Wysocki’s name appears on the top left side of chapter pages in vertical orientation. o p e n i n g s & j u s t i f i c a t i o n s appears on the top right side of chapter pages in vertical orientation. Page numbers appear to rest on their sides. Chapter sections are marked above the left text margin by the same screen print image that the chapter title overlays, only in smaller squares that fade from bottom to top and each of the five “OPENINGS” is marked with the same image in longer rectangles, to the right of which subtitles appear. The ACTIVITIES section uses horizontal, screen-printed bars containing section titles to announce activity and topic shifts.

Wysocki writes for an academic audience from a social constructivist perspective and evokes the image of a web as a construction trope. (social constructivist theory contends that knowledge is not neutral or independent of cultural norms and values, but “socially constructed in support of particular values and understandings” (answers.com)) Wysocki argues in both chapters from a social constructivist perspective, opposing current traditional emphasis on form. The web image rhetorically performs two ways: it visually recalls a spider web’s ethereal strength and connectivity. It metaphorically represents the World Wide Web, the space in which new media takes shape. Wysocki quotes Kress’s claim that we are at a time “’in the long history of writing when four momentous changes are taking place simultaneously: social, economic, communicational, and technological’” (1). The centrality of image in communication is “’challenging the dominance of writing’” (qtd. in Wysocki 1). Writing as we know it “circulates, shifts, and has varying value and weight within complexly articulated social, cultural, political, educational, religious, economic, familial, ecological, political, artistic, affective, and technological webs” (2).

This chapter introduces Writing New Media. Wysocki offers “openings—some range of active possibilities” for making “actively present in our classes how writing is continually changing material activity that shapes just who we can be and what we can do” (2-3). She outlines five needs to which her theory and teaching responds: 1. “The need, in writing about new media . . . for material thinking of people who teach writing”; 2. “A need to focus on the specific materiality of” texts; 3. “A need to define ‘new media texts’ in terms of their materialities”; 4. “A need for production of new media texts in writing classrooms”; and 5. “A need for strategies of generous reading” (Wyscoki 3).

Wysocki explains the “materiality of writing” as concrete circumstances that create our writing realities: technologies used to produce writing, the conditions in which they are produced, the classroom environment, or “socioeconomic conditions” that contribute to writing production, the “number of students in writing classes,” or the “networks” of writing distribution and publishing through which social and global relations of power are expressed (Wysocki 3). For writing faculty, “the materiality” of “teaching composition” can include “physical classroom conditions . . . the teacher’s physical health,” resources and support offered, “teaching load, salary, and job security,” student population characteristics, “relationships between the academic institution and state and commercial institutions” (Wysocki 4). Materiality of writing is important. Our agency and ability to affect change depends upon recognition of our position(s) within “contingent material structures” (Wysocki 4). We must know where we are, and where we have been, before we can figure out where we are going, how we can “construct new relations between the different structures that matter to us” (Wysocki 4)—how to spin webs that connect composition and new media. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_9-ntUMXWE
(what does Joan Osborne’s Spider Web have to do with this discussion? open the lyrics to see)

Opening 1: Wysocki argues that “new media needs to be opened to writing,” that writing faculty need to fill the materiality gap between individual texts and their contexts with rhetorical knowledge. Present-day teaching of composition in the new media lacks critical discussion of rhetorical considerations the materiality of new media choices offer compositionists and why (or even if) certain composing choices are made and others are not.

Opening 2: Wysocki suggests that the materiality of writing raises questions about the relationship between compositions and audience: “what we don’t see allows our practices and products to connect to each other in ways we may neither intend nor like and to shape the ways in which they are connected—and hence to shape what we are capable of doing and knowing” (qtd. in Wysocki 13). The materiality of our texts always contributes to meaning whether we make material choices about them or not. Digitality may offer compositionists new choices that were not previously available, or limit choices through technologies that have already made default design decisions previously available to compositionists.

Opening 3: Wysocki claims that new media text is conscious of its own materiality and uses its materiality to express values and meaning. It involves both composer and audience in dialogue; it is often characterized by interactivity.

Opening 4: Wysocki turns toward praxis in recommending that writing faculty ask students to use new media, to compose from “a wide and alertly chosen range of materials” (Wysocki 20).

Opening 5: Wysocki calls for writing faculty to approach composition in an open way that accepts alternative modes of writing and evaluating, in a spirit of generosity.

On pages 24-41, Wysocki outlines six classroom activities and assignments that enact her theory. These activities ask students to carefully consider new media choices they (and others) make in composition design and to be mindful about how those choices relate to ideas they emphasize (or de-emphasize). They attempt to get students, and faculty, to see composing and to compose in new, rhetorically aware and rhetorically effective ways.

Wysocki’s STICKY EMBRACE OF beauty chapter visually embodies the standardized form subverting, social-constructivist (see above) rhetorical design principles she asserts. The title overlays a screen print of feathery, flowery, Victorian wallpaper that bleeds off the top, left and right corners of the page, fading to white behind the subtitle. The choice of Victorian-era wallpaper is significant and, like Victorian sexual repression, implied but never overtly stated, lies quietly beneath the title’s surface, contextualizing and situating Wysocki’s piece. Title fonts and formats, THE STICKY EMBRACE OF beauty, visually echo two images Wysocki opens with: the HEAVY (i pictured, masculine) BODY STUCK TO THE BARCALOUNGER represented in all-caps, bold, sans-serif; and the curvy, thin image of the woman staring provocatively back from the Peek ad represented in all lower-case, flowing, curvilinear script; the b’s ascender in beauty gently touches the R of EMBRACE, and the long sweep of the y’s descender touches the top tips of “hin” in the word teaching contained in the subtitle, “On some formal relations in teaching about the visual aspects of texts,” below. These gendered fonts, their placement, their overlay on Victorian wallpaper, foreshadow ideas Wysocki examines throughout this chapter about how certain gender and power relations manifest
u n q u e s t i o n e d
in visual composition design principles.

Before Wysocki offers these images, quotes from Eagleton and Hine appear in small font above the first paragraph of her text, below the subtitle. Eagleton’s quote outlines three theoretic areas underlying Wysocki’s discussion: cognition, ethics, and aesthetics. Hine’s quote presents the idea of design as control.

This chapter's breaks from standard form seem to suggest gender, social, and historically specific messages. On page 149, the second paragraph’s last four lines extend beyond the right margin, and white space between the words “I’ll be arguing that” is tripled. Shaded horizontal bars appear beneath certain lines of text; on page 150, one of these broken, shaded, horizontal bars connects paragraph text to the Peek ad, overlaying, seeming to pierce the abdomen of the woman pictured, with its right-pointing arrow tip tilted down. Page 152 features a large oval illustration, a floral arrangement on which composing tools lie: a paragraph of text rests centered in the illustration. Another broken, shaded, this time vertical bar with a downward pointing arrow tip appears in the right margin of page 154, seeming to pierce an illustration of an apple. Page 164 reproduces black and white halftones of paintings by William de Kooning and Pablo Picasso.

Wysocki argues that today’s visual composition epistemologies cannot facilitate visual literacy because they separate form from content, privilege form, fragment content, and enact one-way, (literally) top-down communication that destroys reciprocity and dialogue. Her analysis of the Peek ad (148) attempts to explain her conflicted response to it. Applying Robin Williams’s “design principles,” noting how they lead to “professional, organized, unified” and consistent layout standards (150), Wysocki sees these as enacting certain unquestioned values. These values are historically grounded and consequential; they grew in post WWI industrial contexts that “entwined information and desire,” disseminating compositions that embodied fragmented content and valued efficient form—ideas found in current traditionalism. While such design principles offer framework for discussing composition elements, the framework enacts and replicates its unquestioned values. Thus composition elements are treated as abstract, disconnected, decontextualized, missing necessary social-historical grounding.

Rudolph Arnheim’s and Molly Bang’s visual communication principles for composition go further in recognizing value(s) informing visual composition principles. Arnheim’s ideas are gravitationally grounded, and Bang’s “principles of how we make meaning of abstract shapes” (Wysocki 154) rest on those grounds. But analyzing the Peek ad like detached, egocentric, masculine power portraits Arnheim notes that prevail in western cultures, like those of the pope, giving “visual expression to some divine or exalted power” is problematic, obviously (Wysocki 154). Analyzing the Peek ad like curved shapes or landscape elements Bang notes is also problematic; the woman’s living (specific) body does not correspond to lifeless (abstract) shapes or landscape. Reading the ad through the “archetypal” mother’s appeal is complicated by its un-motherly-ness, the powerful “counterpoint” Bang fails to address (Wysocki 156). For Wysocki, the principles of Arnheim and Bang rely on a “character-less self,” a “generalized body” (Wysocki 157). The uncomfortable abstraction remains yet requires viewers to see their “essential” selves “and experiences made visible” through it (Wysocki 157). Wysocki cannot see her essence or self in the ad or feel the ad connecting with her. Its composition lacks dialogue, reciprocity, but enacts reproduction of certain values.

If we accept Wysocki’s views of Arnheim, Bang, and Williams and agree that “form comes from one’s egocentric experiences and one takes pleasure in seeing these experiences comfortably inscribed in other objects,” and if the selves around which a culture of images are organized are heteronormative patriarchs, then the Peek ad’s appeal to the “generalized body” and Wysocki’s conflicted response makes sense (157). Is the “generalized body” male? Wysocki argues, (and i agree), that “formal approaches to the visual” are neither “neutral” nor “univeral” (Wysocki 158). They are political. They are powerful in their abstract, taken-for-grantedness, embedded in cultural framework. Can we see them at work in one of the most powerful rhetorics a culture can have, religion? Their grounding in groundless monotheistic patriarchy?
(what does this video set to Cake’s “Comfort Eagle” have to do with this discussion?)







Repetition of “standardized, linear” thinking manifests deeply in western culture and echoes unquestioned values of “unity, efficiency, and coherence” through factory lines, “parking lots,” “rows of desks,” academic texts. But Wysocki advises against reductive pedagogies that teach form separate from content, for “form is itself always a set of structuring principles, with different forms growing out of and reproducing different but specific values” (159).

Because of the influence of Kant’s aesthetic philosophy on western composition, Wysocki summarizes his three critiques (which align with Eagleton’s three theoretical strands) and examines the positions of Nature and form, or “intellectual design,” and the role of “universal thought” expressed in connective arcs of “understanding,” “reason,” and “judgment” (160-61). An oppositional dialectic emerges, nature vs. man, real vs. ideal, grounded vs. abstract, from Kant’s critiques, opposition which paradoxically embodies “universal thought.” For Kant, judgment allows recognition of beauty, connecting pleasurable feeling with “concept of the purposiveness of Nature” (qtd. in Wysocki 162). Yet Kant claims that a curious, counterintuitive disconnect between the beautiful object and judgment—disinterest—must exist. Aesthetic judgments “start with the object, but quickly” move to “appreciation of the formal relations suggested by the object” (Wysocki 162). Beauty following the line of “universal thought” universally pleases and is thus “formally inherent” (Wysocki 162).

But is there any such thing as “universal thought”?

Wysocki introduces Wendy Steiner’s ideas that Kant’s philosophy is not “disinterested,” rather, it is specifically masculine and speaks to specifically masculine interests. Femininity is rendered invisible by disinterested “universal thought.” Kant’s “certainty in the possibility of universal intellectual conditions—cannot be separated from how his sense of the world and its functioning grew out of his ability as a man of his time and place to look upon his experiences as being, necessarily, the experiences of all others” (Wysocki 164). Wysocki discusses Steiner’s use of Mary Wollstonecraft’s arguments that women’s so-called “inferiorities” result from unequal opportunities and that these “inferiorities” cause their enslavement “to sensation” against “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a response to Kant’s aesthetics” (164). Wysocki also shows how Steiner traces men’s so-called aesthetic “disinterest” through recent “art and literary practices” that widen gaps between the concrete, “factitious,” real and the abstract, ideal, unreal (165). Visually supporting this discussion are halftones of de Kooning and Picasso paintings that depict fragmented, disembodied, unrecognizable, ?supposedly beautiful? feminine forms. Their “beauty” eludes me; I cannot see it; it does not reciprocate. (is this why i dislike these paintings?) Wysocki suggests a reason why: this kind of “formal beauty has nothing to do with me or with you” (167).

Wysocki connects this analysis to the Peek ad and her conflicted response. She sees the body in the Peek ad “departicularized,” yet her formal training encourages her to see this as pleasing. At the same time, she recognizes disjunctive flaws in her formal training that disregard particulars of content and can lead to “objectification,” devaluation, even “violence toward women” (Wysocki 167-68). It angers Wysocki that her “very (learned) idea of what is beautiful, what is well-formed, is dangerous for women and any anestheticized Others” (Wysocki 168-69).

Wysocki concludes that a new sensual aesthetic grounded in “reciprocal relationships” is needed to replace this bifurcation of form and content with views of form as emanating from, and integrated with, content (170). She suggests seeing “beauty as coming out of the day-to-day necessities of our social existence—an ‘experience of community and shared values’”(qtd. in Wysocki 172). I argue that a foundation of this formal revision requires “building a [new] religion,” building a reciprocal rhetoric, that values feminine and masculine principles equally.

On pages 175-197, Wysocki outlines seven classroom activities and assignments designed to teach how content and form interconnect. These activities ask students to carefully consider how contexts and histories affect content, to see composing and to compose in new, rhetorically aware and rhetorically effective ways.

Work Cited

Wysocki, Anne Frances. “OPENING NEW MEDIA TO WRITING: openings & justifications.” Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition. Wysocki, Anne Frances, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Cynthia L. Selfe, Geoffrey Sirc. Logan: Utah State UP, 2004. 1-41.

--. “THE STICKY EMBRACE OF beauty: on some formal relations in teaching about the visual aspects of texts Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition. Wysocki, Anne Frances, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Cynthia L. Selfe, Geoffrey Sirc. Logan: Utah State UP, 2004. 147-197.