As promised, I announce how we will conduct discussion next week. I'd like everyone to read Fleckenstein's “Somatic Mind in Composition Studies” and Yancey's “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key,” not only for the obvious reason that both these authors are faculty in the Rhetoric and Composition program at FSU, but also because these will serve as good discussion pieces. One of them builds a theory and the other one surveys our field at a turning point. I know neither author will mind that we unpack, consider, and question their work.
Then, I'd like to divvy the remaining readings as so:
- Boyle “Writing and Rhetoric and/as Posthuman Practice” -- Amanda & Cindy
- Dobrin and Weisser “Breaking Ground in Ecocomposition” -- Cindy & Brendan
- Bleich “Materiality, Genre, and Language Use” -- Brendan & Caitlin
- Helmers “Media, Discourse, and the Public Sphere” -- Caitlin & Angela
- Odell and McGrane “Bridging the Gap: Integrating Visual and Verbal” -- Angela & Joel
- Selfe “Lest We Think the Revolution is a Revolution” -- Joel & Liana
- Sundvall and Fredlund “The Writing on the Wall ...” -- Liana & Amanda
- Selfe “Movement of Air, Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing” -- Alas, I'm going to have to drop this from our list. We will have enough to cover, and this piece is exceptionally long. However, do keep it on your radar, perhaps for future studies. It is lovely, provocative, and as worthy of consideration and critique as anything else we read.
Please also bring back Delagrange's chapter, just so that we have her text ready in case we want to look up particular claims.
We'll begin class with our mini-case studies, and I'll ask you all to be prepared to respond to those mini cases from the critical points of view of your authors. So, as you read, you might want to prepare some informal notes/responses on the following questions:
- Do you think your authors discuss concepts, terms, or process that have more to do with being or with becoming?
- Does your author deal (implicitly or explicitly) with genre?
- Does your author deal (implicitly or explicitly) with affect?
- Who or what seem to be your authors' main influences?
- What seem to be their main departures (i.e., who or what do they seem to try to deliberately build on or away from)? Another way to think about this is, do they mention fixations of any kind that we should perhaps reconsider?
- What do you think is the article's principal significance or methodology (i.e., what's the take-away and/or how do you think it contributes to theories of materiality)?
Hopefully, this will get us on a good pathway toward understanding "materiality" through the lenses of their work, and as a concept that may or may not describe or underscore your own work (in teaching and research).
Here are our mini-case study links for next class:
- Stuxnet: Anatomy of a Computer Virus
- Still Life (Scott Garner)
- Elektrobiblioteka
- Technologies of History (Steve Anderson & Erik Loyer)
-Dr. Graban
