Disciplinary conversations (essays that talk with one another). Writing as response.

One way to look at a week’s readings (or readings in general) is to see the larger conversation played out.

Where is writing (situation)? What moment, task, incident, etc does not have a situation?

What drives the situation to be? Choosing what to respond to and how we respond. Exigence.

Perception (Vatz), thus organization is key. How do you organize response. Notice the difference b/w Gilyard and Miller regarding how each organizes a response.

How can you design a class without exigence?

What situations do you create?

Temporal. Spatial. Political. Local. Others? What brings the class together in the first place?

The “false” situation: requirement. Or another situation that you create?
Designing the rhetorical situation:

• Write about….
• Analyze…..
• Compare….
• Explain….

But….where is the situation?
What is the class without exigence? Motions. The event (Bitzer) drives the situation (class task). Or should perception (Vatz) drive given assignments (shaping contexts….see Miller/Gilyard)

You have a book/reading/textbook - Vatz - rhetor (or we can say teacher) accounts for “forms and media which transmit these translations of meaning” (158). You make the situation (the book, reading, course), not it makes you.

Is this all about “fit”? Or the imaginative? For the above, the “fit” is: THIS IS HOW I HAVE TO DO IT.

The imaginative is….? Agency.

When we speak to the fit - how will this make me a better teacher - in a representational way, what are we then saying about the imaginative?

These are also questions for research and the teaching of research. If the situation is “out there” for us to discover and respond to in a fitting way, we have the library assignment.

If it is pure perspective (how I see the world and thus shape it), we teach response as more than obligatory trek to a building across the street.

If it is both and something more….then what? Affective? Networked? Exigence (why am I writing), then, as response to something other than what is there or what I perceive to be there….

The ways, for instance,

• A number of things come together at once and create for me an issue.
• Intuition shapes response.
• Bodily response (to be more than emotional) works.
• Encounters create responses.
• Accidents lead to response.
• Wanderings (associations) function - see Gilyard.
• Conversations between ideas work (see Miller).

Do Miller and Gilyard offer concrete “fits” for their exigence? What is the point of their responses and the location of a narrative in an institutional context?

—-

Your assignment now. Exigence. Fit.

Redone as imaginative; i.e. as Miller’s (and Gilyard’s) institutional biography “locating one’s narrative in a specific institutional context” (Miller 25).

Vatz

Part of this is an argument against “objective reality” the idea of most textual analysis as assignment: THIS IS WHAT THIS MEANS as the rhetorical situation.
154 attributing traits to a situation

situations cannot be independent of the rhetoric used to describe them

Bitzer limits meaning to events themselves

156 facts are not “publicly observable” but are communicated to us

events compete with one another to be communicated

we choose what to communicate - there is no one historical situation

157 and events must be translated  - creativity (note Bitzer dismissing imaginative)

meaning is not discovered in situations but created by rhetors\

the language used to describe a situation is value laden

158 to learn how and by whom symbols create reality to which world reacts

rhetorical agency with rhetor then

159 situations are rhetorical/utterance invite exigence

often, symbols are shared so that meaning is communally agreed upon

160 rhetoric is a cause/not effect of meaning

Bitzer

1 rhetorical situation/context in which speakers or writers create discourse

adding situation

2. situations call discourse into existence

3 persuasion is not the key to situation

a work is rhetorical b/c it is a response to a situation

4 rhetoric alters reality

5 situation controls so much that it is the ground of rhetorical activity

rhetoric is a response. First there is a situation. Then, we create responses.

For pedagogy, the situation: An assignment. A task. Then responses are created (often in the form of thesis which lives in the essay….the situation dictates). Vatz will have something different to say here….the individual creates the situation (my response is the result of how I perceive/make the assignment….the teacher, of course, does the same: I have a problem - create an assignment. The response depends on me as much as the “complex” set of agents (pg 6)

This is the nature of pedagogical limitation.

Situation:  Create Writing Assignment

Program --- Teacher ---> Assignment
                        __
                         |
                    perception
courses ---- pressure ---- students -----time of day ---my own attitudes ---

background knowledge -- instructor ---connections

6 rhetorical situation is a complex of persons, events, objects, relations presenting an exigence

exigence/audience/constraints

7 an exigence can be modified

Audience

8 they can be influenced/are mediators of change

Constraints - have the power to constrain decision and action needed to modify exigence

9 situation is an INVITATION

the imaginative as unrhetorical

10 while situation invites response, not just any response - must be fitting

temporal examples ends w/call for “proper” response - situation REQUIRES proper response

11 really a call for “objective” situation that is historical - fits

13 some situations persist - note historical moments, but there are also pedagogical situations which are MADE to persist whether or not they really do (gun control, abortion, etc)

Gilyard

260-1 flights of fancy or more pressing matters (lit vs civil rights)

261 the “color line” exigence of Du Bois / Wright Brothers flight - same year

262: exigence - if we aim for radical democracy, we need pedagogies to foster development of critical mass

and we need imaginative wanderings

265 it doesn’t matter if try for a culturally diverse mix/it may not matter in the absolute, but the absolute is not where we teach and learn

James Brown/structuralism definition - finding the situation

266 the need to understand the power of discourse and privilege

267 and (bottom of page) the desired outcomes regarding teaching

268 but we still maintain a dominant discourse regardless

make an “expanded bubble”

269 students need to feel invested

270 an expanded bubble example that is complicit and not so complicit in its institutionalized biographical sketch

it’s useful to complicate identity, but identities still have to be engaged

271 imagination again a response to a problem

Miller

1o exigence: liberating students/attraction of Freire

situation - influence of Freire

11 attraction of liberatory pedagogy/banking concept

the personal investment in this idea  - having once subscribe to the movement from doxa to logos in order to enact social change

and the typical student response to this thinking  and the lack of change in writing produced

12 how might we problematize Freire

Freire: problem solving/posing is posed with nor for the oppressed

13 lifting of false consciousness via awareness

14 the “fit” response to the exigence (oppression) for Freire: critical perception /cut myth and magic

15 Scott’s public/hidden transcript concept that carries second half of essay

always something “off stage/hidden” that is not part of official response

16 there are alternatives being made/thought of that are not in the official/public response

17 there is always an imagining of something else

17 it’s not that students don’t see the Ideological State Apparatus

18 it is that they cannot change it, know they cannot change it, and know they will be punished for trying

the writing you get disgusted with shows that (lack of addressing the exigence)

but there is, Miller quotes Scott, the hidden transcript that is still responding

19 our own imagination that we can erase student/teacher power relationship

21 when boundaries are violated as in grad student example - the lack of fit response

22 Rodriquez example: “lifeless, unassailable prose” - writing w/out exigence - false consciousness

and responses to Rodriquez - school should produce “know how” (i.e. the fit)

23 discursive versatility - ability to read write speak across social contexts

24 building on discursive versatility we have already

25 the response: complicity and resistance. institutional biography

27 the point, as Miller concludes, to invite RESPONSE and listen to and learn from responses we receive (rather than just revolt or uphold an order)