Prelude to a reading.

Exigence of the encounter: how do I respond to what I encounter, “building in encounter-possibilities” (Sirc 15)?

Temporal Liner Notes:

Blog writing where “passion” or “love of” are not the motivating forces of the composition (though “interest” sparks the composing process). Experiments in new media composing is the motivation. I encounter texts through new media. I respond accordingly. These albums are albums I have encountered at some point in different ways, but I do not listen to this music today. I am not responding as fan or in appreciation of an aesthetic. I am responding in general to an idea or point I have encountered.

Escape

Some Enchanted Evening

Ridin’ The Storm Out

As a series of assignments:

• Pick a record you have listened to, once owned, or have some other relationship with that does not have to be based on taste.
• Using the year of the record’s release, research other events - personal, historical, public - also from that year.
• At the point of pattern formation (where you see a reoccurring idea, image, point, concept, word), juxtapose the album with the various moments your research produces.
• Write a series of temporal liner notes that show the pattern.

Liner notes may be composed in a blog space (daily entries lend themselves to shorter compositions joined by united theme) or on paper. Project could easily be divided into three sequenced tasks/assignments:

• Identification of albums and their importance
• Gathering of research material
• Overall juxtaposition and delivery of liner notes

Assignment informed by encounter. Pattern formation (McLuhan, Ulmer). Juxtaposition (McLuhan, Ulmer). Temporality (Gilyard). A writing “along the bias” (Brodkey). Noise over settled thesis (Davis). The creative or imaginary (Walker, Corder, Bishop). Popular culture as model for writing or “to recognize the greatness in our country’s popular materials” (Ray, Sirc). “Moving through moments in the hopes of finding an understanding” (Sirc). Imaginary in place of “the fit” as response (Vatz). Critique as textual response (Harris). Image/Text/Blog (Yancey, George).

Overall outcomes (in addition to what our class readings teach me):

• Exigence (what to respond to)
• Invention (how to respond)
• Research (gathering of material for response)
• Arrangement and organization (putting material together)
• Delivery (presenting material to an audience)

Another kind of musical project with similar inspiration:

The syllabus: 1020.doc

Fit vs Imaginative

Complicity vs Resistance

Readings as instructions.

Miller: Institutional autobiography

Vatz: exigence means translating information to meaning (no perfect fit as response)

The exigence of the autobiography (at basic definition) would mean: story of one’s self. Literacy narrative is the traditional composition exercise (story of my own literacy acquisition). There is often an implied fit to the problem (by learning to write I became literate, by learning to use a computer I became computer literate, and so on). The Freire fit is:  I learned to overcome oppression.

I was lost/now I am found.

The same narrative is carried over in Miller’s usage of Rodriguez: class determined my literacy as moment of liberation (and the students’ response to that narrative).

In contrast, Miller offers a method that allows for “discursive versatility,” the “ability to speak, read, and write persuasively across a wide range of social contexts.” The genre/medium proposed is institutional autobiography, the location of autobiography in an institutional context. “What experiences have led you to teach, study, read, and write in the ways you do?” (Miller 25)

Gilyard’s essay may, in fact be responding to this exigence. His experiences: fiction (what was read in class), music (James Brown), ethnicity (Asian/African-American), disciplinarity (this was a talk at CCCC).

Four categories. Each is an institution (a place where ideas and identities are formed). At their intersection (across a wide range of social contexts) we might find an institutional biography, “the space for imaginative wanderings, for scholarly recreation” (Gilyard 262).

For example, I might “translate” this autobiography by filling in different areas for each category:

Fiction: Neuromancer

Music:Parliament/Funkadelic

Ethnicity/Nationality: American

Discipline: Rhetoric/Composition

Exigence: What is the intersection? How does the intersection inform identity? How would this intersection lead to my own institutional biography, my ability to write across a wide range of social contexts?

Research into each would reveal details. The details would form a pattern.

This intersection can also be called “pattern formation” the basis of scholarly activity.

For Gilyard, “time” seems to be the point of intersection: 1968 (MLK assassination), 1890-1903 (Wrights and Dunbar), a class time (Chang Chun Tao), James Brown (”there was a time”), and an anecdote at a Syracuse bus station “a woman was taking an inordinately long time at the window…” (269).

The result, the institutional autobiography, we can say is this essay; it weaves together the four areas via the pattern.