Category: Writing

Question Authority

Jeff

I’ll be collecting the final portfolios for my first year writing class next Tuesday. I pretty much know what to expect, because I have held conferences and reviewed drafts from the 17 survivors (out of an initial class size of 24). It’s been a long time since I’ve taught first-year writing, and I did it differently this time. I think it worked out reasonably well. I taught it with an emphasis on visual rhetoric initially, but I did not allow that to constrain the student’s topic choices.

The results in most ways were predictable— no one chose to write about visual topics. Most wrote about the same old canned topics that first year students think it will be easiest to write about. However, they seemed to write about them in a much more inquisitive and rebellious fashion. Their analyses seemed deeper than usual, and I think that the structure of the class afforded that. Most wrote with an intensely critical eye toward the reliability of their sources. I’m going to try to write about the choices I made in teaching this class this time, with the hope that if I get to do it again I can improve. The class was a big divergence from ways I’ve done it before—I granted less freedom, asked for more output, and generally got it. There was less stumbling on the way to the goal of their final research papers.

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Affective Education (1)

Jeff
jump.jpgAll photographs for this post by Rex Carson, 2007

Back in 1977, I attempted attending Bakersfield College, a.k.a. “the high school on the hill” or “Panorama High,” a two-year community college with free tuition. It was the only choice I had as a poor boy. I only made it for a year, even though I had what many teenage boys might call a dream job—I was paid to photograph pornographic magazines. I was an assistant to the P.R. photographer on campus, Al Noriega, but mainly I worked with instructional materials (specifically Swedish ones). After taking the usual panorama of psychology, philosophy, and art classes I dropped out in disgust when I was not able to pass even the bonehead English course. I could read, but I couldn’t write. So I jumped ship.

Rex called me the other day to inform me about their latest P.R. campaign distributed around the city on billboards. As with many things, location is the key to success. Where this billboard was placed is especially meaningful to folks of my vintage.

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Here Lies Some Great Hamsters

Jeff

A San Francisco Graveyard discovered by SeenyaRita

In its way, San Francisco’s turn against
graves provides a nice synopsis of the twentieth century, all the
forces of modern times pushing toward a single end. So, for example,
whatever politicians may have thought they governed, American cities
were actually driven, for much of the twentieth century, by the
juggernaut of city planners and public-health officers, their eyes
gleaming with visions of Tomorrowland’s immaculate metropolis. So, too,
the great engine of modern finance put enormous pressure on real estate—skyscrapers! bank towers! the downtown office!—in narrow urban spaces such as the Golden Gate peninsula.

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Accidents of History

Jeff

If anything, I think it is reasonable to say that it has been precisely the historical and theoretical construction of the first-year course, with all of its debates about literacy, rhetoric, culture, and technology, that has laid the groundwork for a curriculum devoted to the study of writing. The achievements of the first-year course have made an advanced writing curriculum thinkable precisely to the extent that our knowledges of writing are too much for a single course to contain. Quantity turns into quality, and in many respects the work of theorizing and enacting the study of writing is to make transparent and teachable the social relations and bodies of knowledge that now silently underwrite the first-year course-to organize the study of writing as an intellectual resource for undergraduates.

tink . . . the pin drops.

Trimbur’s claim that “the work of theorizing and enacting the study of writing” is to render the social network/epistemology of writing studies “transparent and teachable” has stuck in my throat like a chicken bone. I cleared my throat once to no avail, and convulsively I feel like trying again. Quantity does not necessarily turn into quality. Sometimes it just translates into more quantity.

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Writing Studies

Jeff3 Comments

I’ve not entered into the carnival circuit before, but I would like to offer some thoughts regarding John Trimbur’s Changing the question: Should writing be studied?. Some responses (at least so far) seem to have relatively little to do with the substance of the article, but are nonetheless stimulating.

To begin, Jeff Rice conflates Trimbur’s arguments with his own argument about networks: “‘The social relations and bodies of knowledge’ are central to any ‘thing’ we name or categorize as ‘writing.’” Trimbur’s question is branded as “odd” because, (at least as I understand Jeff’s claim) writing cannot be “studied” without studying the surrounding networks/economies of production and consumption. This point is easily granted, but seems commonplace. More intriguing is his closing reflection on Barthes A Lover’s Discourse:

Each conversation brings an ordinary, insistent, or occasional relationship to the reading or writing. Those conversations, implicit and explicit, can occur in a shopping list (which is one example Trimbur provides from his textbook; a writing some students dispute and label irrelevant) or on a website or in an encounter, or in a book, and so on. This writing, however, is not, as Trimbur offers, symbolic. Its process or flow does not represent another experience or encounter. It is writing itself. The challenge is to ask: how does one generate or maintain such relations with references? How does one teach that writing within an already established network that poses references as proof or confirmation?

The conflation attempted here does not make nearly as much sense to me. The methodology deployed to explore the discourse of lovers is not even vaguely interchangeable with the context of academic writing studies. I am a huge fan of Barthes; the “process or flow” of the discourse of lovers does not represent another experience or encounter, but this is not equivalent to a lack of symbolic content. Indeed, such discourse is at its root symbolic in an iconic sense:

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I know

Jeff

I settled in to do some reading this morning, and in a strange serendipity Sandy Denny’s “Who Knows Where the Time Goes” came on my iTunes. It’s weird, but at this particular point in my life I actually do know where it has been going. I’ve been teaching in a fairly stimulating way (for me at least—as for the students, the jury is always out until the bitter end) and taking classes that for the most part are stimulating as well. There have been good lectures, meetings, etc. And at the end of the day when I come home, I really haven’t felt like writing. Or reading (outside of my research interests).

Most of my spare time has been spent staring lengthwise through a variety of fish tanks. It’s oddly peaceful. This morning, as I was trying to figure out how to squeeze in “just one more” tank (under threat of divorce), it dawned on me what the attraction was. Building and landscaping aquariums is like constructing a little world. Not a fictional world (for me, at least), but an actual one. Aquariums are small, but they are more interesting to me when they mirror the real.

I’ve drifted away from “virtual” spaces, and it becomes hard to sustain an interest in the goings-on in the online world. But I never really conceived of this blog as a “social” space—only a public one. I wish I had more time to take notes here about the things I’ve been stimulated by—I’m going to try to persevere on that front. But “social software” never really has interested me all that much. Though learning is frequently “virtual,” I really don’t think that it is exclusively “social.”

Last Words

Jeff

It’s been a rougher end-of-semester than usual. Each paper I wrote fell far short of the mark I was trying to hit. But there comes a time where you’ve just got to let them go. I have a lot of plans for re-writes; maybe it can actually happen. But the real fact is, I have things that I’ve wanted to rewrite for the last three years that have not come back around. Then there is the matter of the book review I need to get to work on, and the conference paper that may end up in a collection. For now, I’ve got to think of last words, and of course enter final grades in for my students who mostly seemed to handle this semester better than I did.

I taught using the Daily Show and the Colbert Report a lot. The feedback was really positive—several students credited me with making them laugh during every class. That’s a tough chore in tech writing; it’s not exactly the most exciting class to teach. But I think I’ve hit my stride with it. I reinvent it every semester and it gets easier each time. I thought I’d be able to recycle parts of it, but I seldom do. Each time I get different ideas.

I was thinking of trying to write some words here before I hit the road in the next few days, but it seems hard to top this snip from Ulysses S. Grant, penned just before his death:

I do not sleep though I sometimes dose a little. If up I am talked to and in my efforts to answer cause pain. The fact is I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb is anything that signifies to be; to do; or to suffer. I signify all three.

My suffering is pretty slight. I mostly be and do.

Pedablogery

Jeff

I don’t write about my teaching much. I think it’s because I have been in a kind of boring stretch—I’ve been teaching technical writing for the last couple of years. It doesn’t blow my skirt up, but I try to make it more interesting than the classes I took as an undergrad. I take a project oriented approach rather than teaching a bunch of modules on genre—I want people to put the genres like memos, proposals, and reports together in a more cohesive way (in their heads at least). I got some feedback from the student’s last term suggesting that they just didn’t understand why paraphrase and summary were such important skills. I spend at least three weeks on that; clearly I’ve failed somewhere if they don’t know how crucial it is.

I’ve started thinking that part of the problem is that they are so used to summarizing or paraphrasing from print sources that they do not see the difference between using a summary of a situation to argue for the need for a project or grant and using it to prove that they have “done their homework” to get a grade. The two activities obviously aren’t the same. In the long run, one matters and the other doesn’t. I decided to skip working from print for a while—I’m working from presentations and video clips. This will hopefully shake things up enough that they won’t confuse writing summaries with doing “book-reports” and such.

Several people on campus asked me where I found the clips I was using, so I figured I’d gather them up here in a post.

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From Documents to Monuments

Jeff

I had a long talk with my advisor yesterday, and I am sort of shocked with how well everything has been going. Although things have fallen to new levels of deadness on the blog, there has been a flurry of research and negotiations in the real world. The travels have been both “virtual” and “actual.”

I’ve become interested in doing research into the photographer Henry Hamilton Bennett—not because he is particularly outstanding or unique, but because there is a wealth of information available about the ordinary functioning of his studio between 1865-1908. Bennett was an enterprising businessman that managed to scratch out living by transforming the area that he worked into a “tourist” attraction. After his death, his studio continued after him in the hands of his second wife and his daughters— as a “brand” built upon Bennett’s self-made myth.

As near as I can figure out, there are two other researchers working with the Bennett archive materials. Both are Cultural Geography / American Studies people. Between them, they have produced at least four excellent articles and one dissertation chapter. Discussing this with my advisor, he says this is both a good and a bad thing—it confirms that the material is rich, but it also means that I couldn’t “own” Bennett. That’s fine with me, because it isn’t Bennett as a person that interests me—it is Bennett’s role as a center for imaging practices in the Wisconsin Dells. Both of the other researchers are “light” in the theory department and “heavy” in terms of historical narration. My interest is largely theoretical—Bennett’s photographic documents were instrumental in transforming the Wisconsin Dells into an odd sort of monument. I am not interested in emplotting Bennett into a cultural or technologically determined narrative; I am interested in how this transformation, intentional or unintentional, was managed and produced.

It dawned on me this week that my current research question—how are documents transformed into monuments?—is precisely the same question (appropriated from Foucault) that I spelled out in my application letter to the University of Minnesota. Travel and tourism have gradually encroached on my thinking, both because I have been traveling, and because photography has a provocative role in the promotion of traveling. The problem with restricting things primarily to “the impact of photography,” “the impact of halftone printing,” or “the impact of the railroad” is the implication that these factors have a self-important causal relation (photographic promotion created tourism) rather than an instrumental function (photographic promotion facilitated tourism).

But even as I write this I realize just how slippery the difference is between instrumentality and causality. Perhaps more reflection on Aristotle’s four causes is in order. While there has been no shortage of reading, there has been a scarcity of writing and talking in the last year or so. If I can get my level of articulation back up to par, it will be easier to work through this.

Narcissus and Medusa

Jeff1 Comment

Often, I feel weird reading yet another “history” of rhetoric, or “state of the discipline” roundup. Since Quintillian, or even before, it seems that rhetoricians love to write about what they do— which often amounts mostly to writing about what they do. I sometimes wonder if most rhetoricians really do much of anything besides access the progress (or lack of it) from previous incarnations of this reflexive pursuit. Are all rhetoricians thinly disguised historians? If rhetoric is a “subject” then perhaps the answer is yes. However, if rhetoric is a “method” then the answer might be different.

I suppose what I’m really wondering is if “rhetorical history” might be forcibly separated from the “history of rhetoric.” I’m interested in the first pursuit far more than the second. However, getting out the hose to spray down these dogs is fairly difficult. The justification for multiple his and her stories of rhetoric is compelling. In Rhetoric Retold, Cheryl Glenn compares histories to “maps” which we take out of the glove compartment and unfold to get us somewhere. But where does each new history take us?

Rhetoricians are quick to submit that each history is constructed rhetorically to fit certain disciplinary aims. Recent feminist histories call attention to the broad cracks in the mirror we have used to view the “subject” of rhetoric. But skepticism has distinct limits. The multiplication of histories places a crown of snakes on the head of rhetoric—which like Medusa, is truly a fearsome sight—injustice layered upon injustice, and opinions repeated so often that they become doctrinal facts. But it seems to me that the constant gazing in the mirror results in an unproductive paralysis. Faced with history, rather than traveling, we become frozen where we stand. Isn’t rhetoric capable of something more than simply admiring (or condemning) itself in the mirror?

It is tiresome to live in a constant state of self-reflection—it matters little if it leads to self-congratulation or self-loathing. Perhaps this is a major source of burnout among writers. It seems like something a person/discipline should grow out of at some point. Re-reading Hayden White’s Metahistory lately makes me think about the essentially ironic nature of modern historiography—historians are detectives that propose to tell you what it really means. But no person or discipline can claim to know themselves that well, although they continually study themselves in the cracked funhouse mirror of mortal existence.