Exciting! Secret! Thoughts!

Sirc:

“Colle’s complaint holds true for Composition’s virtual academic machines, our “compositions

for living in,” neatly inflected according to the design principles of clarity, simplicity,

harmony. Everything orderly, visible, easy to understand. And utterly uninteresting, because

the pedestrian’s need for inner drama has been actively designed against. It’s all about the

flow of information, streamlining the audience-traffic through the city-text” 15

 
What is the problem:

“jack haven logic of mainstream composition” 12

This defined: “By this I mean a textuality whose form and content fuse together in perfect synergy: stilted academic prose as the ideal medium to represent this image of university pomposity. The Jack Haven paper stands for the logic of mainstream composition, which has always been about bringing a conventional world more clearly into focus”  12

The phony language of the academy.  In killing the individual we negate elements to gather…

 
What is the solution: virtual urbanism

“This is virtual urbanity: a belief in people’s natural language patterns” 14

“I want to counterpoint this to a kind of cultural undercurrent that has also been present at

least since 1954, which I’m calling virtual urbanism: a different textuality, one in which

actual humans, with needs, fears, desires, memories, drift through the important spaces of

their lives, encountering other humans similarly engaged in the ongoing mystery of existence” 12

 
Why must be virtual, why is it urban.  Where did this name come from?

virtual urbanism, the most human moments of connection, the search of the hacienda, sifting through primoridal sands 12, can we see undertones of expressivist here?  It is also about tapping into something primordial and expressing it.  The difference being Thompson vs. the pillar of expression.

 

composition instructors as architects, rigid modernists or those who let the building express the sensations of the soul

no foot traffic, no nooks to explore 15

 

“My larger point: powerful, alternative formal possibilities are now key genres of public

discourse, and kids understand them, and Composition Studies could care less” 14

Not only pleasurable, but inviting.  The instructor being concerned with the experience of the student writer/ or writer if we will.  The writer becoming interested in the experience of the student.  This requiring room to explore. 

 

“An inviting compositional space must allow enough of these ambient unities to explore, and one way, I

think, is through infilling the space with a lot of pleasure-zone texts that readers want to poke

around in: make the curriculum a more colorful, human-scaled street-scene” 17

 

Where did process/expressivist pedagogy go wrong?  When did this become the new current tradition?

 
forgot to include what we like, the process/journey is what its about, but we have to go someplace nice.  The process of writing becomes stilted.  I don’t care how nice the scenery is, if you are going to the dentist, the drive isn’t fun.  If we allow for students to tap into the joy of writing this is impossible when they lack any passionate interest in what they are writing about.

 

What this can accomplish:

The goal is not to heighten an approximate simulation, but simply to move through moments in the hopes of finding understanding, maybe even pleasure. This textuality is bound not by formal conventions, but human passions. 12

 
How to allow for each student to create a pleasurable or understanding learning experience? 

Creation of open-ended assignments/ problems of evaluation.

Reintroducing the pleasure principle.  How does this approach tap into the pleasurable experience of writing. 

Letting them write about themselves but gathering information.  Students can be surprisingly knowledgeable about the things that interest them.  Not only is there a surprising amount of writing that takes place in the virtual urban-scape, but a good deal of enthusiastic research also. 

What is our goal if this is already taking place?  To hone this?  To allow it access to the academy?  To listen to it?  Will that make others want to listen to us if we are no longer Jack Haven?

 

Why must this focus be an undercurrent, demonstrated by subcultures, urban, avant-garde?

Why is new media so sexy?  Is this part of the pleasure in itself?  Its got nooks and crannies to explore, it is rebellious, it is individual, it is a get together.  New Media turns the composition paper into a rave in warehouse.

 

“Through his vignettes, Ghost chronicles the lives of both hustlers and the artists who rap about them, two subcultures of the same urban pulse, restlessly at home in a place where they might as well be banned for life in their search for the real” 13

 
What are we going to pile on?  Assignments as comprehensive, semester long piles of information that become more nuanced and winding?  These assignments kids want to read and write about, the freshman as their world being much more inviting than any tough love text book.

 

Not simply changing assignments.  What else we got?  Changing  instructor mentality.  Changing the rubric of evaluation: “then text might be thought of as constructed situation (situation construite)—modifiable, charged (hopefully) with the contingency of a momentary ambiance (achieved through the transitory formations of technology),rather than the permanence of “good writing.” 17

In order to get them to add on rooms to the hacienda, Sirc demands we first build it.  Give them a place to gather.