Coming up with ideas.

More than just: write a paper on X.

More than just: discuss the importance of X.

More than just: compare X and Y.

More than writing off the top of one’s head, either as “I feel” or as “I think.”

Invention is key to all the writing we do.

Issues of:

• Investment (why do I want to do this? see Brodkey)
• Influence (what shows me how to do this?)
• Context (what are the issues that surround what I might be interested in?)
• Style and performance (how do I do this?)
• Complexity (ways ideas are constructed as well as make-up of ideas - what are the pitfalls of thinking in non-complex or clear ways, as Davis notes?)
• Place to do this (paper, Web, audio, other medium?)
• The writer (what is my relationship to what I am about to compose?)

The writer

• Where does she get ideas?
• Where is she located within a conversation?
• How does she draw from that conversation?
• How does she contribute to it?
• What is the writer exposed to: models, ideas, texts, people, places, thinking, and so on

Some main points:

• Lack of clarity can be useful
• World of information
• Using models (record tracks, space) or we might say, appropriation
• Learning from texts how to do something, rather than spending our time only figuring out what texts say

In class:

• Working with noise/interference - how might that work?
• What texts show you how to do something?
• Models to appropriate (other than records)
• Writing on space/place
• Encounter - see Davis
• Turning such points into assignments or overall syllabus design?

Interpretation - we are always involved in interpreation

Predictability of interpretation - Ray. Yet another reading of hegemony or problematic representation - really a conversation with one’s self (Davis) or epideictic (Walker).

Taking interpretation (a reading) in order to do something with it (production) rather than only repeat that reading. Interest in noise/details (Davis) not central to a reading (i.e., the “correct” reading). Here we get Barthes and the Eiffel Tower.

We are seeing responses to pedagogies that seem - to these writers - to be absent of invention (coming up with something to say/write/make).

To trace a “correct” musical reading of Ray’s piece (usually phrased in an “academic” paper as what the writer missed or did not pay enough attention to), for instance, might be to miss the overall point regarding rhetorical models.

Certainty as a limiting experience; exposure as a response to that limitation.

The model plays into the notion of “exposure” - being in relation/contact with various forms. Thus, Walker: “examining exemplar texts not primary to write critical essays about them, or even rhetorical analyses, but to perform them” (151).

Davis

120 myth of singular being (immanence)

121 myth of self present composing subject / as opposed to continuing practice of making student identities the subject of composition

121 i.e. writers sure of who they are and what they know

122 call for communitarian literacy - idea that writers are in this world and are exposed to others

develop rhetorics that allows students to explore what they share and what divides them

124 the demand that meaning and being come clean

sharing takes place not among similarly positioned subjecthoods/what is beyond signification (meaning) but that still has affects (rumbles…)

125 writing to expose - writing that interrupts the myth

126-7 there is a need for another in composing, but be careful the other is not the Same

as if meaning has to be always for communication - when we disregard noises/what doesn’t seem right, and internalize “other” into our own language.

128 such a method is based too much on hermeneutic guesswork (i.e. what did that mean)

129 b/c consensus and agreement (figuring out what something means) are not always the goals (paralogy)

once you think you’ve figured it out (THIS IS WHAT THIS MEANS) you are really only working with yourself (an internalist enterprise)

130 but the event of communication precedes and exceeds interpretive endeavors; otherwise, we confirm what we know

131 reduced to maieutics (questions leading to a truth - a giving birth to ideas, to meaningful discourse), writing does not show an other (what I don’t know)

a relation with the other is different - like a conversation - b/c of something extra (not understood)

Why this suspicion of agreement or of a collaboration like we read in A Guide?
132 conversation is not about what is said, but about a saying / when we see “the happy ending” to the conversation, we are turning away from the other in the conversation

communitarian literacy is attunement to that which exceeds conceptualization

* 133 sender/receiver theories push out ek-static communications (the outside)- we are talking here about what is not expected, anticipated, understood as first as still being very valuable

134 hermeneutics may miss noises that interfere with interpretation of message - third sophistic ears look for those interferences

135 thus a challenge to writers who are SURE about who they are and what they write

136 when you write - even when you are alone, you are not alone. There are always ENCOUNTERS

137 not a working together (in collaborative sense) / it is an affected work / a being exposed

139 communitarian literacy: no stable ethos/ no ambiguous message/ instead a stress on instability and vulnerability

140 writing that calls all identity into question (not just personal identity)

141 we need to adopt the rhetoric of exposition - exposing writing to various encounters, interruptions, contradicitons

Ray

Thinking about models/writing that is not critique or interpretation. Film scholar showing how to write.

772 quotation for new purposes / following Benjamin’s understanding of the collector

773 putting together a puzzle

increasing information by minimizing redundancy on which reception depends (See Davis)

unpredictability - given the predictability of SO MUCH CONTEMPORARY WRITING

774 we learn from media communicative logics even if we don’t actually use that media (writing affected culture when not everyone could write)

775 records, then, also can affect how we organize and structure

776 creating signs without referents

780 MLA call for experimental critical writing - as opposed to

781 critical writing that resembles a lecture (analysis on its own)

782 academic writing is not paying attention to technology logics

Walker

production and interpretation – in writing/rhetoric, emphasis on using interpretation in order to produce texts/ideas
144 grammatical and rhetorical approaches
what a text is as opposed to how was it done (look at Brodkey here)
146 “interpretation” is key to being intellectual (as opposed to Harris’ network)
literature the representation (what x means), rhetoric the response
147 part of this distinction is a rereading of our traditions – in this case, rhetorical. In other readings, pedagogical
148 like Aristotle example – not discovering available means of persuasion, but theorizing what counts as persuasive (it’s not that a reading or evidence is available, but we speculate why might x, y, and z be persuasive in the reading)
rhetoric though can be INVENTION and THEORY
149 the pedagogical goal is to produce a RHETOR, or a person who can engage with writing in any facet of life
150 BUT! This means both student and teacher (you can’t teach writing without writing!)
151 performance key
one part of which involves appropriation (Harris’ exchanges, opposite of Crowley’s critique)

Barthes

Example of invention at work. A space as heuristic (Ulmer, Corder).

An “object” or “Image” (remember Brodkey) that reoccurs. The Eiffel Tower (here can show also Dead Elvis assignment)

And example of “doing” rhetorical production

Making familiar space unfamiliar

Making empty space “filled in”

5 The Tower attracts meaning - it escapes reason

Topoi - fixed space as opposed to open space

7 use never does anything but shelter meaning / The Tower is nothing

9 to see things in their structure - a corpus of intelligent forms

10 to look for the point missing in the structure - to reconstitute (THIS IS INTELLIGENCE)

11 to look from above is to imagine a history

12 different histories/different contexts (No immanence - see Davis)

13 a superior order of pleasures

14 every exploration is an appropriation

16 while it may seem singular at first, the Tower is a world

it is a comfortable object

How can one object produce so many meanings, and so many meanings in one space?