Our primary focus this week is on the science fiction subgenre known as cyberpunk. It’s neither quite right to say that cyberpunk “emerged” in the early 1980s or to say that it “died off” or “ended” by the mid-1990s.1 We see many of the elements of cyberpunk – the outsider as protagonist; a near-future setting in a media-saturated […]

“Science fiction is the branch of literature that deals with the effects of change on people in the real world as it can be projected into the past, the future, or to distant places. It often concerns itself with scientific or technological change, and it usually involves matters whose importance is greater than the individual […]

Textual interventions, deformance, tamperings, and algorithmic criticism share, according to Stephan Ramsay, a common approach and purpose: they alter a text in order to better understand how it works. In one sense, the radical practice of textual intervention in which you change a whole set of words or rewrite a text from the perspective of another character, […]

As I suggested in the first lecture for the week, the big difference between a textual intervention and any other form of rewriting (textual hacking and remaking) we’ve encountered this semester is one of purpose, of intent. Whereas the intent of a collage, a remix, a mashup, a cut-up, or an assemblage is to use […]

“Criticism begins with the recognition of textual power and ends in an attempt to exercise it. This attempt may take the form of an essay, but it may just as easily be textualized as parody or counter-text in the same mode as its critical object. As teachers we should encourage the full range of critical […]

In “The Low Bridge to High Benefits: Entry-Level Multimedia, Literacies, and Motivation,” Daniel Anderson makes an argument for assigning multimedia projects drawing from what we know about the connections between literacy and motivation. Anderson begins his article with a quote from The New London Group which explains that for learning to occur, there must be both […]

If Jeff Rice’s “The 1963 Composition Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Computed, or Demonstrated by Any Other Means of Technology” was a glimpse of Composition Studies through the lens of one moment, that of 1963, Kathleen Blake Yancey’s “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key,” originally delivered as the 2004 Chair’s address […]

As I suggested in the preface to the week, found both on the Week 8 schedule and week’s first lecture, all four this week’s readings offer an answer to McLuhan’s question, posed in his 1962 publication The Gutenberg Galaxy, “What will be the new configurations of mechanisms and of literacy as these older forms of perception […]

“What will be the new configurations of mechanisms and of literacy as these older forms of perception and judgment are interpenetrated by the new electric age?” – Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, 330 “Wherever they may be institutionally situated, scholars in composition today study written discourse in a wide variety […]