Instructor: Sarah Heston

English 1000, section —

TR —- in Strickland, room —

—-@mizzou.edu

Office  —- Hall, hours TR –

Object & Subject: Using Technology to Explore Deferred Identity & Community.

Every assignment we complete can be completed in many imaginative ways, and we will discuss a variety of ways to use the technological tools you are asked to use; however, I will be giving you specific guidelines that you will be graded on. Asking questions, giving your opinion, and creating writing around the themes and research that you think are important to note is what I hope you do in this class. I am here to guide you and ask you questions about your opinions, as well as show you new ways to think about the student essay and student writing. Ultimately, what is important for me as a teacher is to help you learn ways to say what you want to in the best way possible.

Texts and Materials: I will provide various handouts or put short works up on Blackboard to read. Please have frequent access to a computer and the internet. This is not a reading survey course, so our time will focus mostly on writing and creating.

Assignments:

Object Exploration, 3 pages min. (10 pts.): you will bring in to class an object that is of no emotional or financial value to you and will not spoil (like food). This object could be anything you find around the house or yard, in the city or around school. You will switch objects with another classmate  and then write the “story” of your object. This will involve researching the history, uses, problems, and successes of your object. This will also involve your imagination as you research. All your sources will be cited in a works cited list.

Personal Objectification Exploration, 3 pages min. (15 pts.): after you’ve written the story of your object, giving it life and intrigue, you will now write the story of you THROUGH the object. With the many histories and characteristics you’ve found in your object, you will build connections with your own life and the entire history of your object. For example, if you have a fork and one of the characteristics you identify in it is that it is small but powerful, you will describe something about yourself that might be easy to hide but is still powerful. If you have additional sources, they will be cited in a new/revised works cited list.

Revision/Integration of Narratives blog post (15 pts.): After writing the histories of joined characteristics between yourself and the object, you will get your papers back with my comments and suggestions for further exploration. You will now integrate the two Exploration assignments into a blog post that provides links to some of the connections you’ve found to be most interesting and you will integrate the story of the object and the story of you to try and create a whole new “thing” or identity with multiple connections, points of intrigue, and suggestions for further research. This post will be on the class blog.

Classmate Integration blog post with at least 10 links (20 pts.): Now that you’ve integrated your own work with itself, you will explore the class blog and check out your fellow students’ posts. What intrigues you? Can you find connections in characteristics between your own narratives and another student’s? Your job now is to create a blog post where you show how your own research and another student’s often led to similar positions, areas, places, ideas, etc. You will create a narrative explaining HOW your Explorations relate to another student’s, complete with links to that student’s work and outside links that guide readers.

Written essay (3 pages min.) and presentation (20 pts., 20 pts., 40 total): you will write an essay describing the ideas, arguments, and points of intrigue you’ve realized in the process of writing the stories of yourself and an object. You are expected to create a point of view about what you’ve found—to risk making an opinion about HOW all the information you’ve collected relates—and to provide evidence/examples/links which you will use in explaining your argument. Your presentation will simply be a new “place” for this information and you are expected to guide the class in understanding your process and your discoveries.

Classroom Policies:

*I don’t deduct points for absences. But the only way to get a grade of C or higher in this course is to show up to class, and that is entirely up to you. If there is no conceivable way a student will get a C or better due solely to missing many classes, I will drop that student.

*Assignments are due at the beginning of class. I don’t accept late work unless I have okayed an extension with a student before the work is due.

*You will share your writing and writing process in a public forum (blogs, presentations), and also read others’ work in a public setting. Be prepared to have access to the internet throughout the semester, and to also be a vocal presence in class. If you do not wish any of your work to be public, talk to me and we will set up a private blog for you. I stress that this class is set up to be public though, so if that is a big concern for you, you might want to take another section of 1000.

*If you plagiarize intentionally you will be failed from the class and reported to the Provost. If you misuse a source accidentally, I will show you the proper way—there is no desire on a teacher’s part to penalize you for learning how to quote and integrate outside sources. However, any copying of an outside source into your paper and treating it as your own idea or sentence is plagiarism, and considered intentional. if at any time you have questions about plagiarism, email me!

*There are 100 points possible for this course—no more, no less.

*If you have a disability and need classroom accommodations, please notify me as soon as possible. You should also register with Disability Services, 882-4696. Other especially useful contacts are the Learning Center (882-2493) with its Writing Lab, and the Counseling Center (882-6601) for stress management, crisis intervention, and other services.

Schedule. *Work/readings are due on the day listed*

Jan. 20 intro, discussion of syllabus

Jan. 22 discuss technology and argumentation

Jan. 27 read Roland Barthes, “The Tower,” discuss using an object to stand for identity

Jan. 29 cont. Barthes

Feb. 3 bring in addresses of 5 blogs you like to read

Feb. 5 discuss weblogs, wikis, arguments online

Feb. 10 bring in an object and exchange object, class brainstorm writing

Feb. 12 bring in draft of first assignment, meetings

Feb. 17  Object Exploration due

Feb. 19 meetings with feedback on assignment and grades

Feb. 24 read excerpts from Ann Carson’s Autobiography of Red and The Beauty of the Husband, discuss

Feb. 26 discuss personal narrative

March 3 bring in draft of second assignment, meetings

March 5 Personal Objectification Exploration due

March 10 discuss class blog, how to access, how to post

March 12 brainstorming revision/integration ideas

March 17 bring in links, print outs for group work

March 19 Revision/Integration of Narratives blog post due

March 24, 26 Spring Recess

March 31 discuss final assignment and Found Magazine

April 2 know by class what student project you will focus on

April 7 group work with our “found” students

April 9 bring 1 page typed outline for structuring final blog post

April 14 final thoughts, questions before assignment is due

April 16 Classmate Integration blog post due

April 21 presentations

April 23 presentations

April 28 presentations

April 30 presentations

May 2 presentations

May 7 presentations (if needed)

We are inundated with naively universal messages in banal, “academic” language in comp. classrooms. The texts and their assignments are void of human passion and ask students to engage in a artificial world of argumentation that won’t integrate into their lives or loves. But there has existed alongside this tradition, but outside of academia, humans using language to communicate passionately, and out students are aware of these people even if the comp. classroom won’t integrate those outside of academia as inventive and important. Comp. teachers ignore what Sirc calls “virtual urbanism,” “a belief in people’s natural language patterns.” Comp. as a field is ignoring people’s natural circular and emotional nature in favor of a robotic flow of simple information. Comp. classes should be re-imagined as a “sector” in urbanity where students can have moments or “encounters” that are much more interesting and relevant than the false world they have to exist in now. These encounters can encourage students to create new forms of representation that are linked to their desires and emotions.

The proliferation of a 19-c. reading public coincided with the proliferation of novels published in non-novel form, first. The monthly publications of novel excerpts allowed readers to have a say in what the texts they were reading would come to look like and therefore the writing of novels was interactive and a non-school activity that was chosen by individuals. Today, we have many people who are choosing to write outside of academia as well.

English departments are becoming more rare or meta. Yancey first describes this as something reductive happening in our departments. She also shows that in the 80s an individual’s education became more important and quotes theorists who believe that visual literacy is also a literacy as valid as written or spoken.

We as teachers already use electronic communication not only in the publication of our own work but as we prepare for our classrooms and interact administratively with the college. Our use of communication in multiple genres exists inside and outside of academia, so the question remains–why are we concerned with merging multiple genres of communication in our comp. classes?

Yancey suggests we re-imagine composition across majors and inside the field of Comp. and suggests that majoring in Composition be more available to students. Comp. teachers need to be more conscious of circulation of texts, models of rhetorical invention in the canon already, and a greater understanding and willingness to invent with technology.

OK, I’m possibly and unfortunately too reductive to have a conversation with this text, but I will try to summarize it without summarizing it as something it is not, although I doubt my capability to do this because I have a hard time understanding the function of this text outside of Ulmer’s wish to understand how to teach Humanities online or as a take on the mystory. Although my lack of understanding in other classes leads me to ask questions and take risks, it does not in this class. But here we go.

Ulmer seeks to understand the exotic and possible colonialism in the internet in broader conceptions than what CS might allow for. Ulmer’s path to do this seems random to me and I don’t understand why he chooses the jumping off points he does. Perhaps he is mimicking an exploratory, connection making model of internet education that departs from a traditional, linear classroom model.

” ‘chora’ names the sacred nature of specific places” in Greek times but post-Derrida might be used by Ulmer to mean “invention.” The “place” of  invention Ulmer describes are a computer lab and a home page he designs that recalls an exotic place of invention for students. What follows is Ulmer building connections in his own life and with historical figures and I don’t understand the difference between this and a mystory and I obviously just need to hear a student presentation on this essay for me to have new insight or an “uncanny” moment with this text.

I think Ulmer describes the ability of choral logic (in internet teaching, learning) to trace connections through our actual reality and therefore avoids the abstract world of ethics in which we can be moral or ethical in a private context…? I’m not sure how this avoids the trap of nativeness or creates us all as pidgin users though. I guess I’ll learn in class.

While we in composition are pushed to provide visual models in our classroom, we aren’t certain what visual studies’ theories we are using or propegating or whether or not we are asking students to be creators of the visual instead of just consumers and viewers of it. The visual tools in our classrooms are often just supports for the verbal. George does not wish to eliminate the “tension” between the visual or verbal in the classroom or wish to define a theoretical way to use the visual but instead wishes to explore what might happen when this “tension” exists. George asks us to acknowledge the complicated relationship to visuals students have and assumes that with a greater understanding of their relationship we will make more interesting assignments for them that don’t question whether visual learning is a threat to literacy.

Modern studies of primary school students in the classroom (and specifically the English classroom) had reports suggesting changing the design of teaching to include television and other visual media with the hope that teachers provide analytical tools helping students to engage with media. But the kind of assignment teachers have created as well as the writing instruction books that have come out favor the written over the visual and use visual media only to help start a written assignment, or as images to critique or comment on rather than explore as a communicative medium.

When comp. teachers began to change their focus, how text books and the composition research essay were designed was a way to think about visuals in a more complex way. What scholars might not be considering, however, when they suggest more complex use of newer technologies in the classroom is access. Some teachers don’t have access or even working equipment in the classroom. However however, teachers can still approach newer media studies in composition with the question, how does my/our understanding of print technology affect my ways of understanding visual media?

Well, I think when this book was written perhaps the television, news outlets, and media in general did implicate all of us in each other’s lives, like Chicago Riots being viewable by a white couple in Missouri or the speeches of Kennedy or King creating conversation in middle American homes. But even then, images of Vietnamese and Black American (and African descendants anywhere) were allowed to be shown grotesquely on television, dead and mutilated, while the images we saw of Whites in Vietnam were images of heroism and confusion, fear. While information might have been spread, there was still an acknowledgment that the bodies of non-white folks didn’t get the same sacred treatment as that of Whites. And not much has changed. In fact, it seems that our media outlets that do allow us to access information around the world, that can be used to be implicated in each other’s lives, are not used to do that. If all human production is a reflection of human biology and inherent truths about the way humans work, what are we to do with the fact that people can look at sprawled bodies of Rwandans with little regret–people don’t feel implicated. And if it is true that our media outlets are the product of human biology, then I have some addition to the MITM’s thesis: our eyes work by limiting information, limiting perspective, and limiting physicality of the horizon. Indeed, our eyes could take in much more, but neurologists tell us that allowing all that can be seen to be seen would be too much for our brains, and cause psychological problems, if not complete psychotic breakdowns.

So why do we limit what we limit in our media, or in our use of media? This question terrifies me. If media outlets are in fact our ways to somehow branch out to humanity because they reflect our humanity, and a way to correct the stuffy social structures of school and work that we have let our hopes for capitalism inflict on us, then why don’t we? The simple truth is that a news program focuses geocentrically and ethnocentrically because our contact with the sacred or our ability to allow our sacred concepts catch up with our new medias is not happening. This book promotes the best in us, and imagines media as a way to re-imagine and reinvigorate what is not kept in cables, and to view these cables as sacred extensions of our own veins and while I find this idea beautiful and important, the reality seems to be that we have built our media into the terrible social structures that the book hopes we are alleviated from by media, and now our use of media and our want to expand our access points is shrinking.

No one is trying to discover an island when google maps can do it for you.

I remember being in Nairobi, Kenya once. Now, if you don’t know, internet across much of Africa is terrible and slow slow slow. It is as slow as the roads, which is saying a lot. Access is limited but Kenyan writers spend hours trying to connect with other writers across the world, and use the internet as a way to expand their language, work, and implication in the world (see Kwani lit. magazine). I told a friend where I was staying and from Seattle, as he sat in his stupid job that meant little to him, he found the area on google maps and kept narrowing, narrowing, to street, to corner, to window. He looked for me to be implicated in my life there because he loved me, and what an incredible feeling to know that with one nod up to a skyrise I could possibly be looking directly into his face.

But are others desiring to be as implicated? If a woman still is advised to shout “fire” instead of “rape” if she is being raped so that people actually come to help, then I say no, we as a people don’t want to be implicated. We don’t deserve the sacred in media because our own desire to view our own bodies as sacred is gone. Perhaps the book is right and media is built out of the knowledge of humanity. Well, then our limiting now reflects our own use of our own bodies. If we as women are being told that it is normal to NOT ever, ever have vaginal orgasms, then we are truly unwanting of the beauty and immersion that comes with the “play” with our media (with our bodies).

Latour seems to be describing the “problem” as a continued mistrust of “good matters of fact” which has come out of a tradition of debunking a lot of seeming “facts.” He questions the intent behind the stripping down of seemingly factual knowledge to show the social constructs of it and thinks that the revisionism that once came after an examined time is now the immediate response to situations that implicate us in a way that is far too powerful to be quickly revised. Conspiracy theorists aren’t much different from scholars if they both quickly jump from a “first movement of disbelief” to “casual explanations” of what has occured.  Latour continually uses war metaphors, but if his point is that simple facts like the loss of human life need to be given some thoughtful consideration before a revision is made as to how these people died, his use of war metaphors can be seen as crass and inappropriate, like Sontag shows us in her discussions of AIDS and war metaphors, and Latour himself might be a proponent of the mini-criticism he is against by trying to reinvision theory without enough compassion to the people in the scenarios he discusses, especially when he compares himself to a military officer.

His wish to change the course of theory comes from a belief that theorists made a mistake in reinvisioning by directing folks to the conditions that made problemshappen; the real problem is that this reinvisioning comes from a place where a theorist first has to move away from the problem or the cause. He says:

“My argument is that a certain form of critical spirit has sent us down the
wrong path, encouraging us to fight the wrong enemies and, worst of all,
to be considered as friends by the wrong sort of allies because of a little
mistake in the definition of its main target. The question was never to get
away from facts but closer to them, not fighting empiricism but, on the contrary,
renewing empiricism…But this meant accepting
much too uncritically what matters of fact were.”

Matters of fact have been great for debunking problems but once MOF were also debunked, theorists should have turned to matters of concern and with so much debunking it is necessary for scholars now to devise theoretical tools that are to “protect and to care.” If we create a “gathering” where there are not set-up limitations in a field of theory we can involve ourselves in the world of “things” which is an occasion, indeed.

Locating student writing in the process of writing itself instead of the outcomes of the process, outside of production and delivery of goods, is problematic to Timbur because it neglects the complicated systems involved in the classroom and college. Instead of valuing the composing of writing outside of all else, we must look at how writing functions in a system of production and exchange. By reimagining “delivery” as a delivery of ideas as well as physical product, we can understand how rhetoricians have avoided making more complex what delivery consists of. The delivery that has not been discussed by rhetoricians is the one that assumes the meaning a writing student makes comes from a relationship with a teacher (acting like a parent) and the creation itself is dependent upon the delivery of information from the teacher.

Cultural Studies is flawed with the conception that the classroom is the place to prepare students for the world around them, and in this idealized “place” can imagine students and writing as separate from the world and as viewers that can be manipulated rather than decoders or participators that will have various interpretations of the world and moral exchange with the media in it as well as the human activity that produces and proliferates the social exchanges students learn. I assume the “private profit” that is ignored in this exchange is the individual student paper. Recognition of commodity can make more complex Cultural Studies’ perspective on the writer and the written paper.

The distribution of texts is not just the distribution of that, but a distribution of ideas with which to view the world and ideas that shape the world. The writers/creators of CS have ideas that are quite different from the sleazy world they want to distribute their ideas. The recognition of the “passage of forms” can be a useful exercise for teachers and student writers alike in the circulation of goods and not just focusing on the product itself, and this, Trimbur hopes, will create “socially useful knowledge.” By asking students to translate a scientific text for another audience, they are focused on a non-linear argumentative assignment where expertise is problematized to be more than teacher as specific expert or student as expert in personal knowledge in the world.

The Foucault and Derrida quotes are really a lovely way to open up an essay–they fill me with excitement and possibility. Vitanza starts the essay saying that composition should not be its own field or discipline and should instead be meta or inside of the field of rhetoric, and then rhetoric can be defined as outside of academia (?), “‘nondisciplinary’” and also containing the field of critical theory.  I think he is saying that if we metasize, re-interpret these “fields” or treat them as non-fields, then we can be more open in the engagement with these metas. Hmm. In order to have competing theories of composition, we need to create post-western pedagogical standards of Platonic and Aristotelian origins.

Vitanza is brilliant in attempting to “provoke” rather that convince or gain the support of his readers, and this seems to mimic the non-Western approach he seeks to support, as it is non-argumentative in nature and thus aims to engage rather than align, although the problematic part of this suggestion is that Vitanza aligns himself with the likes of what Jarratt calls the “third sophists,” like Derrida. But, with comedy and play, Vitanza attempts to treat an old way as a sickness that supports a sense of essence in the self (”I speak therefore I am”) and a new way as a cure that attempts to decenter validity with language and treat it more as not THE path to translate meaning, and therefore the self, but as a way to play with both. In a sub/verting of the sophists history, Vitanza suggests that the new need not be a history of the written but more a history of post-desire and a dialogue of speaking histories–we are not after desire but we are the after of desire, or we can be and engage with a paralogy of meaning and conversation, not a construction of one, and this will sound/look/heal like a fictive multiplicity of sub/jects (?) and meanings. The anti-Rhetoric is the imaginative.  But the dulality or duplicity is also not the point. There is not othering of a traditional Rhetoric, there is a meta-ing, dislocating, and freeing from. There is an ellipses that has existed throughout history and can be pushed to the battle grounds today, as a way to reinterpret the standard self-makers of the past and to find the “carnivalesque.”

Rhetoric is regarded as ideological, which means it must be put into a context when used in the classroom. The categories of rhetoric Berlin aims to discuss are cognitive psychology, expressionism, and socialepistemic (which is the term and ideological perspective that Berlin is arguing for).

Cognitive studies that arrive at outcomes are ultimately elitist to Berlin, for they assume “experts” that can study and then identify the best ways for learning without considering the bias that is present in terms of class division of “experts” vs. students; these evaluators link their studies strongly to science and therefore close the discussion of rhetoric because the human elements of study are ignored.

Expressionistic rhetoric is pretty much what is sounds like, concerning itself with the individual (ah, Elbow’s “I feel orange” as teaching) and assumes that expression happens before argumentation because an individual must somehow take himself out of the system of language and rhetoric that he has been forced into in our social systems in order to find an authentic voice. By supporting the individual and an individual’s process, power to change is located with that person. The problem with this methodology is that is pretty much is co-opted by the bourgeois system it tsk-tsks and actually having a powerful, dislocating effect on the system qas ain individual writer is pretty much non-existent and if an individual writer cannot achieve this self-empowerment, then who’s fault is it? Ta-da: welcome to capitalism reinvented as empowerment: everything comes down to individual gain and individual loss. Who’s success is at risk? Yours. Who’s fault is it that you are not empowered? Yours. “I feel orange,” indeed.

Social-Epistemic rhetoric “the real is located in a relationship that involves the dialectical interaction of the observer, the discourse community (social group) in which the observer is functioning, and the material conditions of existence. Knowledge is never found in any one of these but can only be posited as a product of the dialectic in which all three come together” and the dialectic is “grounded in language.” Berlin finds more of a holistic approach in this theory because it considers the observer, the social/folk group, and “material conditions” of existence, and to know these exchanges, one must operate with language. Self-comprehension in this system, and knowledge as a historical truth ends with personal transcendence–not a scientific one?–and can only be arrived at by use of language. Because the self is a product of unavoidable contexts, reaching a transcendence from the systems that make us is difficult, but not unavoidable, for there are times that we certainly act as individuals, but that does not mean–ever–that are arguments are not implicated by ideologies; in fact, our arguments are all implicated all the time and therefore no hierarchy of truth or essential meaning exists, so rhetoric is a democracy promoter.

Two conflicts that might arise with the text at this point: the definition of language, for that in itself is a controversial move to not define, and if that were defined, certainly there would be a hierarchy of truth created, I think. Secondly, it’s easy for a grad student to take the easy argument, “well, if there is no hierarchy, yatta yatta, then how is your methodology the most complete or complex, and aren’t you setting it in context of comparisons with other rhetorical methods to support the “better” thinking of this one, thus: an expert has been created. Elitism. But then again, this rhetorical system calls for this response in its recognition of contexts. But but but, then no argumentation against this approach can be made for it is pre-assumed, and that is a problem with the cognitive approach Berlin acknowledges.

Ack, I feel completely demoralized after trying to argue with this argument. There is something very settling and seemingly accomplishable in the assumption that there are answers and this approach can leave writing students, I think, feeling completely lost and incapable of capability.