Jeff Rice’s Writing About Cool uses the word “cool,” in all its polymorphous meanings and manifestations, to teach rhetoric through a traditional cultural studies lens. However, both the cultural studies tradition and the Aristotelian tradition are complicated and reconceptualized in relation to communication via hypertext.
The text begins with modern day cool, the way we use the term and the way companies use the term to target a youth market. In examining various websites, Rice illustrates, without demonizing, the rhetorical strategies that are employed by companies to sell products, which serves a twofold function: (1) the students will be more aware, thus potentially less susceptible to manipulation, and (2) the students will recognize the rhetorical potential of the strategies, for advertising is above all things rhetoric at its most effective. Despite the lack of demonization, there is a Marxist flavor to the argument, as there must be in any discussion of marketing/capitalism, which serves to universalize (socialize) the term cool. Everyone knows cool. Everyone is subject to cool.
After universalizing cool, Rice provides a history of cool, which leads to an examination the issues of race and appropriation, how the majority, when taking on the language of the minority, erases the minority’s connection to the language and thereby erases evidence of the minority’s cultural influence, cultural influence being cultural power.
Lastly, Rice takes on the big issue, academia’s chronic fear of change, and draws parallels between the shift from text to hypertext and the shift from oral to print culture. He points out how rhetoric must and did change with each new technology, for example, the pencil itself and more importantly (in my mind) the eraser. “The change from one writing medium to another, then, is easiest when the new medium exists in large numbers, the old medium fades out and isn’t abruptly replaced, and the new medium doesn’t radically alter the old,” which, of course, applies perfectly to hypertext.
Each subject/chapter comes with suggestions on further reading and/or listening, websites to explore, class discussion points, and a list of exercises. While the exercises often involve creating websites, the text is not a how-to-html handbook but does provide links to sites that are user friendly. There is also a companion website that provides further readings and suggested websites.
This is a very thin explanation of the subjects that Rice treats in the text, because, as I said, Aristotelian rhetoric and Cultural Studies and Technology (as a mode of rhetoric unique unto itself) are all present, as are a few chapters on literature and its relation to cool and cool writing.
What I find most appealing about the text is that it is extremely freshman friendly. Our field specific jargon is present but always defined. There is never that destructive assumption that freshman are willing to look up 15 different words per page in order to truly engage with a text. All the usual issues of voice, audience, and form, are addressed without privileging one over the other. Also, the subjects applied to the theories – marketing, hip-hop, scratching etc. – are all appealing to a young audience.
I also like very much that it addresses an issue I’m personally invested in: teaching students how to read the web critically, which is a different practice than reading a book critically, and which is an essential and largely neglected aspect of literacy.
To write cool is to connect ideas, and Rice has connected many. I suppose my biggest concern with the text is that since cool is intricately connected with anti-establishment, by bringing it into the establishment do we risk undermining ourselves?
Since we’re delivering these reviews via blog, I’m going to take advantage of the medium and begin my review by stepping out of the review genre. My first response to Greg Ulmer’s Internet Invention is that it’s tough, seriously. Does that mean it’s a bad text to teach with? Absolutely not, but it does most definitely mean that it’s a labor intensive text laden with theory and written by a theorist. What this translates to for the instructor is a lot of lecturing, and in my case, a lot of research. In doing research on the theory I came across a blog by Jim Brown, a PhD candidate in Rhetoric and New Media Studies at the University of Texas, who plans on teaching Ulmer’s book. The first post dedicated to Ulmer (there are several, as much for other prospective instructors, as for him) reads, “Ulmer’s text is dense and difficult, and this means that I’ll have to do a bit more “lecturing” (though, I’m not sure that will be the right word for it.) I’m going to have to guide myself and students through the text so that we know what the heck is going on. Long passages from Derrida and Althusser will no doubt have students scratching their heads, so I’m going to have to do some translation.”
I found the post heartening because, to be completely honest, the idea of teaching this text scares the hell out of me.
In a more immediate frame, Mystory is a project designed to help individuals find their image of wide scope, which is a dominant image in our lives that not only reveals who we are but also guides us through life, whether consciously or not. Know thy wide image and know thyself. (Ulmer even suggests that the process could be used by potential employers to determine if a job candidate is right for the position.) In a larger framework, Ulmer is concerned with “electracy” – one of many Ulmerisms – where the “goal is not to adapt digital technology to literacy […] but to discover and create an institution and its practices capable of supporting the full potential of the new technology”(29). The new institution is the EmerAgency, which is an interesting Ulmerism in that the immediate interpretation is a play on “emergency,” but a second look provokes ideas of “emerging (personal) agency,” which his theory certainly reflects.
Very early on Ulmer states that “Internet Invention is a textbook, but it is written in first person, without consensus”(28). Clearly, Ulmer recognizes his venture as a theory and that it’s personal. The personal element, appropriately enough, is the driving force behind mystory; when Ulmer was a young man and switched his major to English, his father and the rest of his family made it clear that the work writers and poets did wasn’t real work. Ulmer vowed to prove them wrong. Mystory is his proof. What he asks of his readers/students is not that they believe in his theory but rather that they suspend disbelief and open themselves up to discovery(8).
Chapters are broken up into the “subgenres” of Studio (website authoring exercises), Remakes (explains how to “use the methods of image reason by bootstrapping electracy out of existing classics of arts and entertainment”(xiii)), Lectures (“background, context, and rationale”(xiii)), Ulmer File (Ulmer’s own experience with each stage of the process), Office (informal comments), and Companion Website (links to student mystories, commentary, tips), though some chapters only contain some of the subgenres, which makes movement through the text less systematic. Furthermore, each subgenre often contains any number of visually segmented readings, which may be Ulmer’s attempt at simulating web navigation.
The process begins with thinking about your major or career choice. The “egent” is supposed to document an important discovery in their field. At this point, the only personal element is the researcher’s interest in the discovery. Then the “popcycle” is introduced, drawn from Frederic Jameson’s four tiered theory of allegory, which states that allegory can be read on an anagogical level, a moral level, an allegorical level, and a literal level. Ulmer equates literal with school, allegorical with entertainment, moral with family, and anagogical with career.
After the initial research on career, the rest of the process models Christopher Vogler’s “mythic structure for storytellers” which outlines the narrative arc of a heroic tale(72). Each of the subsequent exercises and assignments are designed to parallel that same adventure.
Act I of the heroic assignments is to “[m]ake a website documenting a scene that sticks out in your memory from the childhood years of your family life”(86). Act II, “[m]ake a website documenting the details of a movie or TV narrative some part of which you still remember from your childhood”(127). Act III, “add to your widesite the documentation of an exemplary story from your community, that is a story about a person or event that your community identifies with and tells about itself”(191).
The final assignment is where the wide image ideally coalesces. The students search the four pieces of research and look for a “repetition of details or signifiers across some or all of the discourses”(248). However, Ulmer is careful to point out that the wide image they discover isn’t static, that it “cannot be determined until the end of your career, as expressed in the pattern of lived events and works, whatever they may be”(248).
This is an extremely simplified version of what takes place. At moments Ulmer’s text reads like a survey of theory, at other moments like a survey of literature, at other moments like a survey of Ulmer. There is much to be admired in the text, and much to be learned. And as much I’d like to join Ulmer in his experiment, the obstacles the text presents are too daunting for me walking into my first classroom. Nonetheless, I may well appropriate the idea and apply it to my own less than impressive pedagogy.