Just another Comp.missouri.edu weblog

I’m posting this for everyone b/c I found it incredibly helpful for myself.

 A few things I noted:

1.  A “class” blog as opposed to individual blogs maintained by all the students.  This space was used not only for class discussion points but also for more informal questions like “how do you feel about the text we’re using”?  (Great way to get feedback throughout the course rather than just at the end.)

2.  She has an overarching theme, literacy, that she allows the students to apply to their own particular interests and thereby encourages them to expand both on their own interests and on their conception of literacy.  (Students could, for example, write about basketball, so long as they looked at the sport through the literacy lens.

3.  Short readings.

4.  Two conference periods, one after the first draft of the first “paper” and one after the first draft of the last “paper.”

4.  Papers posted on wiki w/ her comments in the discussion section.

5.  Syllabus is very simple but also gives students concrete criteria (grading rubrics etc)

 Cheers to Sarah!

This link is to a class exploring nonlinear hypertext composition with a feminist bent.

 And this is a very unattractive though interesting interview with Thomasula regarding Vas: an Opera in Flatland.  What’s most interesting is that when a student asks Thomasula about Vas being very much a multi-media text and its potential for being reborn via hypertext, Thomasula responds that he was deliberately working against that, that he wanted a text that couldn’t be contained within that space.  Of course, what he ended up creating is more hyptertext friendly than any paper text I’ve ever read.  Can intentional fallacy be inverted and the burden placed on the author?

Once upon a time there was a new composition instructor with a crisp diploma still warm from the presses. She walked into her classroom and made a grandiose speech about her myriad accomplishments and her expectations of her students. Syllabi were passed out, textbooks were bought, pages were read (perhaps), lectures were given, and discussions were initiated.

The students were mostly from less affluent areas where “big rock candy mountain” meant something entirely different than it did for Mother Goose’s little snobs . Not surprisingly, this was the perfect environment for the new composition instructor; her shiny new diploma looked especially shiny amid all the dark faces. The dark faces, also not surprisingly, felt the need to challenge the authority of the new composition instructor. The instructor perched primly on a cloud and called down emphatic, articulate, and unquestionable statements. The students called up expletives and slang.

One boy, however, attempted to reach the instructor on her level. He stood up and put his foot on his chair, balanced a hand on his buddy’s head, and stepped up on top of his desk. They were talking about Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” and the boy was arguing with the deep reading his instructor had instructed. He stood, perched and precarious, and he said, “For all intensive purposes, nothing happens in the story.”

It was a prime moment for the new instructor, the moment she’d been waiting for ever since she saw the dark, angst-ridden teenagers who knew more about that other rock. She smiled a brilliant smile, the kind of smile that only people who grew up knowing about the fairy tale Big Rock Candy Mountain had. “Intensive?!” she sneered, her cloud rising with her voice. “Intensive purposes?!” the ceiling flattening her perfect coif. “As in ‘intensive care’? her neck bowed and her knees bent. “Intensive?!” Her voice rose as the atmosphere thinned, her breathing sped up and her eyes bulged. “Before you stand up again, you might want to open a dictionary.” The boy tottered on the desk. “The word you want is ‘intents.” The boy put his foot back on the chair. “As in ‘intent.’” And then the other foot, his buddy’s head nowhere to be found. “As in ‘intend.’” One foot down on the linoleum. “As in ‘plan.’” And then the other. “As in, don’t speak unless you know what you’re talking about.”

With his ass firmly in his seat, the student went back to his expletives and slang, and they all lived happily ever after.

(This is based on a true story, seriously.)

We’re all going to be filling out our teaching requests this week and I’m wondering if you’re leaning towards T/TH classes or MWF classes. The lure, of course, is that T/TH means less trips to campus, in theory. (My classes in the fall are on Wed and Fri.) But it also means a longer period of time to be in the hotseat (on the hotplate?). 50 minute sections seem more manageable to me, though I wonder if the class will seem too short to get anything done.

So, what do you think?

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?

Anybody else getting hit with spam comments?  I got a flurry of them a few minutes ago.

When I first started reading about mystory, what kept going through my mind was the artistic potential of the concept. (Yes, yes, I know Ulmer’s point was inventio, but my underlife will live.) Poetry, during very rare and magical moments, can create this sensation where multiple images coalesce, where every moment in time (the time of the poem) exists simultaneously, where the reader can see everything at once but fix on no one thing. Mystory, it seemed to me, could not only potentially achieve that effect but also operate as a physical (that’s not the word I want but…) manifestation of it.

Imagine my surprise when I began reading Steve Thomasula’s Vas: an Opera in Flatland and discovered in a novel my vision for mystory. There are several threads that run parallel to each other in the text: Darwinism; Linguistics; the 1884 novella by Edwin Abbott Abbott, Flatland: a Romance of Many Dimensions. Sometimes the threads intersect, but sometimes they don’t. Sometimes the fragments (fragments, fragments everywhere) remain parallel and you’re left following several separate narrative threads simultaneously. Much of the effect is achieved through visual manipulation of the text; on a single page multiple fonts are used, fragments are offset in the left margin, fragments are offset to the right, sometimes blue, sometimes red. The cover of the book looks like flesh, the pages feature graphs that cut right through the text, pictures of nude bodies are labeled and the genetic coding for a chromosome spans 20some pages.

When I first flipped through the book and saw words scattered all over the pages, I thought, oh shit. It works though. It works amazingly well. I strongly encourage anyone interested to check it out. The bad news (good news actually, b/c you’ll have to commit): since the text is so very visual, it comes wrapped in cellophone, which means no quick peek at the bookstore.

For all of you who, like me, have a gaping chasm where knowledge of theory should be, this site out of Mount Mary College in Wilwaukee is fantastic.  The professor lists all the major movements and their respective players along with key terms and suggested reading lists.  Beautiful.

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.

This link goes into detail about Umer’s idea of mystory as “prosthetic memory.”  I’m posting it not only for informational purposes but also b/c I’ve decided all theory should be delivered through such a user friendly medium.  Every word and name of interest (or confusion) hyperlinks to a glossary.