What I’m Looking Forward to Reading, Pt. 1
Having done a recent reading roundup, I know you’re all dying to know what’s in my immediate reading future, so, without further ado:
The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, Ed. Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr.
- Currently reading. Yes, I do actually read scholarship.
While I am afraid of getting lost in metaphor theory, as I explained, I can’t avoid it. I actually wrote that post knowing this book was in my immediate future. - So far, I’m enjoying it, although I’m being very careful to not read it from cover to cover right now. Too many fascinating essays on too many fascinating topics. Right now, I’m limiting myself to “The neural theory of metaphor” (George Lakoff), “Philosophy’s debt to metaphor” (Mark Johnson), “Rethinking metaphor” (Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner), “How metaphors create categories—quickly” (Sam Glucksberg), Metaphor as structure-mapping” (Dedre Gentner and Brian Bowdle), “Metaphor in education” (Graham Low), and “Metaphor in picture and multimodal representations” (Charles Forceville).
Stories: All-New Tales, Ed. Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio
- Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio contacted a number of authors and asked them for new stories that “used a lightning-flash of magic as a way of showing us something we have already seen a thousand times as if we have never seen it at all.” They wanted stories, as Gaiman explains in his introduction, that invoked the four words Gaiman suggested should be written on the wall of a children’s section of a library: “…and then what happened?” (A librarian asked Gaiman for his suggestion.)
- I’ve read the first few. Good stuff. I’d heard Gaiman say that the first story, Roddy Doyle’s vampire story “Blood,” was unlike no other vampire story you’ve ever read. I think something like “turns the genre on its head” or something like that was said. He’s right.
Saga of the Swamp Thing Book Three, Alan Moore et. al.
- As I’ve explained, I’m looking forward to reading the end of Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing run and see the debut of John Constantine. On June 29, everything else goes on hold.
Marshall McLuhan Unbound, Marshall McLuhan
- The Medium is the Massage, which regular readers will know I often teach, is in many ways comparable to Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy. Both are surveys that skim the surface of their subject, maps to give you a sense of the territory rather than comprehensive and definitive accounts. As a collection of McLuhan’s essays that circle around his books. As the promotional material explains, “Some were written after the book and encapsulate major themes; some set out additional discoveries or matters left out of the book; some present material discovered as a result of writing the book.”
- In reading these, I’m looking for further insight into McLuhan, for essay-length pieces I can give to students to supplement The Medium of the Massage, and, eventually, readings for a class I want to someday teach on McLuhan and Ong, which I’ll title “The Prophet and the Priest: something, something, something.”
Conceptual Blending and Metaphor
[I ought to have a category label "my cognitive turn." You might call this part of the series "My Adventures in Cognitive Linguistics, Cognitive Rhetoric, and Cognitive Poetics" that began with "My Cognitive (Re)Turn."]
I’ve read a fair amount of books and articles on blending, a topic with which I seem to have, metaphorically speaking, a “tip of the tongue” relationship. I understand it and understand how it describes the cognitive processes behind various mnemonic practices I’m interested in, but I have a hard time explaining it. Sort of. I mean, I can explain it and do so in such a way that people seem to understand what I’m talking about, but, at the same time, I feel like I don’t get it. Maybe my problem is with diagramming blends beyond something simple such as the diagram on the right, taken from Mark Turner’s “Blending and Conceptual Integration” page and used in a number of publications authored and co-authored by him.1 Any way, having read a fair amount of this stuff, I thought I’d post a good, succinct definition of conceptual blending or conceptual integration since I always find myself rereading to assure myself I’m not missing something:
Blending is a process of conceptual mapping and integration that pervades human thought. A mental space is a small conceptual packet assembled for purposes of thought and action. A mental space network connects an array of mental spaces. A conceptual integration network is a mental space network that contains one or more “blended mental spaces.” A blended mental space is an integrated space that receives input projections from other mental spaces in the network and develops emergent structure not available from the inputs. Blending operates under a set of constitutive principles and a set of governing principles. [From Mark Turner's "Blending and Conceptual Integration" page.]
Gilles Fauconnier, co-developer of conceptual blending and frequent collaborator with Turner, explains that “the essence of the operation is to construct a partial match between input mental spaces and to project selectively from those inputs into a novel ‘blended’ space” (1).2 Actually, in contemplating this, I think I struggle with identifying the generic space as well. But I’m getting a head of my self here. Let’s back up and I’ll provide a concrete example of a blend and explain it in terms of the diagram.
I think I first encountered the theory of blending in Turner’s The Literary Mind. One example was the anthropomorphic personification of Death, the scythe-carrying hooded skeleton. This representation of Death, Turner explained, is a blend that emerged out of agrarian medieval Europe. Mental spaces provide for us the inputs from which the blend emerges. In this case, Turner suggests, we have clerical class and their clothing, particularly monks, from which we get the cowl and scapular; dead and decayed bodies, from which we get the skeleton; and harvesting, from which we get the scythe. So, for this blend, we have three mental spaces providing three inputs. The generic space, if I had to guess, is death/end of life. Clergy, Turner explains, are connected to death because of funerals, funeral processions, and praying for the dead. I assume I don’t need to explain the connection dead bodies and the harvest have to death. Okay, so, the three input mental spaces (medieval clergy, dead bodies, harvest) selectively project into our new blended mental space, the concept of an anthropomorphic personification of Death (aka Grim Reaper) that functions as a harvester of souls.
If this sounds similar to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s theory of conceptual metaphor, that’s because it is.3 Both emerge out of cognitive linguistics and serve as evidence for embodied cognition. Traditionally, while rhetoric and poetic have regarded metaphor as a special use of language, these theories argue that metaphor underlies all thought to such an extent that we don’t recognize most thought as metaphorical. From the places and images mnemonic and the cognitive images of monastic rhetoric to understanding how social memory functions rhetorically—to say nothing of database rhapsody—metaphor has its tentacles throughout my scholarship. My pedagogy too.
I’m scared of metaphor.
I’m scared of metaphor because I could become lost in it. I could just dive into the study of metaphor and never return to anything else. I also ind myself flailing around until I go cross-eyed and develop a headache when I try to read some of the more complex theories of metaphor. So, metaphor scares me. For me, studying metaphor is a studying a black hole. No matter how close I might get drawn to into it, there’s an event horizon I dare not cross, only, the closer in I go, the more strongly it pulls me in and that damn event horizon isn’t clearly marked at all. So I’m scared of metaphor.
Today I decided I needed to delve in again by reading Paul Ricoeur’s “The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling” (Critical Inquiry 5.1 (1978: 143-159), an article I’ve been avoiding for a few years now.4 Good stuff. What I found most interesting about this article is that Ricoeur sets the stage for the work of Turner, Lakoff, Johnson, and Fauconnier. Ricoeur, writing in 1978, demonstrates the inadequacies of traditional theories of metaphor and concludes that “there is a structural analogy between cognitive, the imaginative, and the emotional components of the complete metaphorical act [...]” (159). The theories of blending and conceptual metaphor and other related concepts provide the cognitive model Ricoeur argues we needed.
- Truth be told, I never been able to do more than diagram a simple sentence, so maybe it’s diagramming and not blending I have a problem with. [↩]
- From his presentation “Conceptual Integration,” available online as part of the proceedings of the 2001 Workshop Emergence and Development of Embodied Cognition. [↩]
- See Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By and Lakoff’s Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things [↩]
- Avoiding, of course, because I’m scared Ricoeur might be an event horizon. [↩]
Imagination, Low-bridge multimedia, and Fabulations
A commonplacing post that brings together memoria and cognitive science (image-schema) as justification for multimodal composition. From Johnson, Mark. “The Imaginative Basis of Meaning and Cognition.” Images of Memory: On Remembering and Representation. Ed. Susanne Küchler and Walter Melion. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991. 74-86:
According to the view I am espousing, we must understand imaginative activity as including all sensory modalities, motor programs, and even abstract acts of cognition such as the drawing of inferences. In this very broad sense, imaginative activity is the means by which an organism constructs an ordering of its perceptions, motor skills, and reflective acts, as it seeks to accommodate itself to its environment. Imagination, so understood, thus includes the full range of organizing activities, from the forming of images (in different sensory modalities), to the execution of motor programs, to the manipulation of abstract representations, and even to the creation of novel orderings. 79
Right before rereading Johnson’s essay, I reread Daniel Anderson‘s “The Low Bridge to High Benefits: Entry-Level Multimedia, Literacies, and Motivation.” (Computers and Composition 25 (2008): 40-60):
The links between motivation, new media, multiliteracies, agency, and civic participation can be readily traced. Less clear, however, are the connections between these items and changes in education. The most compelling advocate for considering personal motivation in terms of transformation in composition is probably Geoffrey Sirc. Sirc doesn’t argue for either alphabetic or multimedia literacies but rather advocates that compositionists should aim for the expressive process of production. Again, we must put things into motion. Sirc (2002) explained, “defining composition, exclusively around the parameters of page or canvas, results in that conventional, academic surface” and instead suggested we think of composition “as a record of tracings, or gestures, a result of body moving through life” (p. 111). Sirc was looking for a composition that might be “anti-conventional, expressive, discursively hybrid, and technologically innovative” but instead finds i most scholarship a composition that “is all about conventions; which sees its retreat from expressionism in academicism as some sort of progress; which prefers a purified, taxonomized, monophony to hybridity’ and consigns discourse on technology to a sub-real of the discipline” (p. 173). Sirc is clear that this over-disciplining of composition bleeds the motivation from students, leading only to “alienation” and “exhaustion” (p. 209). New composing processes feature literacies like juxtaposition, parody, or pastiche and build upon student interests. These remix modes can overcome the boredom and “exhaustion in most writing assignments” (p. 212), making students “architects of their own aesthetics” (p. 132). 46
Not that we need such justification, but I find within Mark Johnson, Mark Turner, Gilles Fauconnier, and George Lakoff’s work on image schema, conceptual metaphor, embodied cognition, and conceptual blending an explanation of how monastic rhetoric, as defined by Mary Carruthers, works at the cognitive level. It is, to crib the title of one of Gilles Fauconnier and George Lakoff’s collaborations, “the way we think.” The expressive processes of production Sirc advocates and Anderson demonstrates is inherent in “remix modes” of composition shares with Johnson et. al. and monastic rhetoric an understanding of imagination as an active process of memory which draws upon all our sensory modalities/multiliteracies to make meaning. For an example of contemporary monastic composition as an expressive process of production, see my discussion of Jeffery Jerome Cohen‘s” fabulations.”
Monastic Composition: A Definition
While I regularly reference monastic composition as defined by Mary Carruthers, searching through the blog, I don’t think I’ve ever properly summarized it. Here’s my summary, taken from Ch. 2 of my dissertation:
Monastic Composition
In The Craft of Thought and elsewhere (“Late Antique Rhetoric,” “The Mystery of the Bed Chamber,” and “The Poet as Master Builder”), Carruthers argues that medieval memoria has its origins in monastic rhetoric, which, she explains, “emphasized ‘invention,’ the cognitive procedures of traditional rhetoric” (Craft of Thought 3).1 Monastic rhetoric, she argues, was “an art of composing” rather than an art of persuasion, and its practice of mediation involved the creation and use of “mental images or cognitive ‘pictures’” as the building blocks of invention. She summarizes her concept of monastic composition thusly:
The orthopraxis, or normative “way,” of monastic meditation was directed towards the vision of God by means of what amounts to a form of literary invention, using as its primary materials or res the texts of the Bible, considered not as “objects of study” in any way we would now recognize as scholarship, but as recollective “sites” for new compositions, constructed by drawing in (tractanda is a word of choice for composition) and augmenting a textual “seed” with other matters, “collected” (another favorite word) in long chains (catenae) of freely ranging associations (concatenations) on the part of the mediator. (“Late Antique Rhetoric” 241).2
While monastic in origin and originally intended for the creation of monastic art, monastic composition’s reliance upon the techniques of memoria came to be practiced outside monastic culture. For example, as Yates, Carruthers, and others have argued, poets such as Dante and Chaucer made use of these compositional practices. In “Art of Memory and the Art of Poetry in the House of Fame,” Beryl Rowland argues that medieval poets such as Chaucer took words from books, made them images in their mind, and then turned those images into new words, into new poems. Likewise, in “Bishop Bradwardine, the Artificial Memory, and the House of Fame,” Rowland argues that Chaucer’s House of Fame “may be seen as an externalization of [the] memory process” described in Bradwardine’s De Memoria Artificiali. Building upon Rowland’s arguments, Elizabeth Buckmaster argues that The House of Fame is an exploration of the practice of Prudence, the cardinal virtue intimately tied to ars memoria because it requires knowledge of the past, present, and future. Buckmaster also argues that in The House of Fame Chaucer represents this connection by presenting his knowledge of the sciences, arts, and philosophy by creating memory palaces in the poem, one for each book. The first palace represents the past, the second the present, and the third the future. She concludes that The House of Fame is an inner journey, an act of meditation such as we find in Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises.
Works Cited
Buckmaster, Elizabeth. “Chaucer and John of Garland: Memory and Style in the First Fragment.” Medieval Perspectives 1.1 (1986): 31-40.
—. “Meditation and Memory in Chaucer’s House of Fame.” Modern Language Studies 16.3 (1986): 279-287.
Carruthers, Mary. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 10. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.
—. The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400 – 1200. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 34. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.
—. “Late Antique Rhetoric, Early Monasticism, and the Revival of School Rhetoric.” Latin Grammar and Rhetoric: From Classical Theory to Medieval Practice. Ed. Carol Dana Lanham. London: Continuum, 2002. 239-257.
—. “‘The Mystery of the Bed Chamber’: Mnemotechnique and Vision in Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess.” The Rhetorical Poetics of the Middle Ages: Reconstructive Polyphony: Essays in Honor of Robert O. Payne. Ed. John M. Hill and Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2000.67-87.
—. “The Poet as Master Builder: Composition and Locational Memory in the Middle Ages.” New Literary History 24 (1993): 881-904.
Rowland, Beryl. “The Art of Memory and the Art of Poetry in the House of Fame.” Revue de l’Universite d’Ottawa 51.2 (1981): 162-171.
—. “Bishop Bradwardine, the Artificial Memory, and the House of Fame.” Chaucer at Albany. Ed. Rossel Hope Robbins. New York: Burt Franklin & Co., 1975. 41-62.
Yates, F.A. The Art of Memory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1966.
- In “Late Antique Rhetoric,” Carruthers defines monastic rhetoric as a “shorthand phrase for a small set of terms—and rather large set of practices—that evolved especially during the fourth through the sixth centuries, roughly from the time of John Cassian (ca. 365-ca. 435) through that of Gregory the Great (ca. 540-604), during the earliest efforts to institutionalize monasticism in the West” and that many of these ideas and practices have their origins in the “Greek- and Coptic-speaking desert holy men and monks in Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and other sites of the ancient eastern Mediterranean” (239). [↩]
- For a more detailed account of this method of composition, see Carruthers’ The Book of Memory, 124-29. [↩]
Paul Miller on Remix as “Database Rhapsody”
About three minutes into his segment in the To the Best of Our Knowledge program “Future Perfect: Dreamers, Schemers and Visionaries, Part One: Our Computers,” Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid), comments on remixing as a new literacy, a practice of composition I’ve taking to calling database rhapsody:
“Take a Wikipedia page entry, you know, copy it and paste it into a William S. Burrows novel and take that remix and put in The New Yorker and you’ve got new fiction or something, you know? The pun for me is that we’re looking at new kinds of literacy: digital media, cut and paste imagination, non-linear thinking, you know, kind of the whole twentieth century, McLuhan The Medium is the Massage kind of thing. It’s just come home to roost.”
Intro to “Memory and the Art of Imagery”
I’m working on the art of letting go. While taking one last pass through before sending off to the committee, I thought I’d post the introduction to my chapter “Memory and the Art of Imagery.” I’ll post more of the chapter over the next week or so. In the meantime, here’s the intro:
Memory and the Art of Imagery
The emphasis upon the need for human beings to ‘see’ their thoughts in their mind as organized schemata of images, or ‘pictures,’ and then to use them for further thinking, is a striking and continuous feature of medieval monastic rhetoric, with significant interest even for our own contemporary understanding of the role of images and thinking. (Carruthers, The Craft of Thought 3)
Memory, in short, is an imagetext. (Mitchell 192)
In his chapter on images in The Rhetoric of Cool, Jeff Rice argues that composition study’s visual turn has too much focused on the interpretation of images at the expense of focusing on their production. Referring both to Dean Rader’s review essay “Composition, Visual Cultures, and the Problem of Class” and Carolyn Handa’s reader Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World, Rice sums up what he believes is their implicit message: “True writing can only come from reading images, these positions state, not from making images (135). In shifting the focus from interpretation to production, Rice moves us towards a theory and practice of imagery. That contemporary composition studies and rhetorical theory need “discover” such an art is yet one more consequence of our forgetting the role memoria plays as a dynamic process of meaning making for ourselves and for others. Central to this chapter is the assumption that not only does our visual turn need a theory of practice of image production, but that we have the makings of one in classical and medieval practices of memoria.
My use of the phrase memory and the art of imagery is an intentional nod to “the art of memory,” the places and images mnemonic and the broader category of locational memory I discuss in chapter 2. The striking feature of this particular memory art—what for many is the art of memory itself—is its use of images, mental, verbal, and graphic.1 Just as Kristie Fleckenstein argues that we need to conceive of word and image as a “double dialectic, a double vision of literacy as image and word, as imageword” (Embodied Literacies 4), we need to recognize the art of memory as a double dialectic of image and memory.
Before entering into a theoretical and practical discussion of an art of imagery, I want to provide one more contemporary example of imagery as a process of making meaning beyond the examples of the Emerson Garden and imagery in Beowulf, both of which I discussed in chapter 2. For this third example, I turn to Jeffery Jerome Cohen’s discussion of writing Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: On Difficult Middles, offered as three blog posts titled “The book I didn’t write,” “The Book I Did Not Write, Part II,” and “Fabulations, Third and Final Installment.” In these three posts, Cohen shares a series of “fabulations,” fictional stories that he calls “product of the imagination,” which he intended to serve as explorations of the book’s themes (“The book I didn’t write”). As these fabulations were eventually cut from the book, so to was the explanation he wrote to account for their presence in the book, then provisionally titled Stories of Blood: Monsters, Jews, and Race in Medieval England. This explanation is including in the first of the three blog posts discussing these fabulations:
My previous books have attempted to work simultaneously in medieval literature and in what often gets called critical theory (a field, I would argue, more accurately and more simply described as philosophy). Stories of Blood marks a departure from this work in that much of the theorizing is conducted quietly, often below the level of direct quotation or even of footnote. This departure should not be read as a rejection. I am as committed to philosophically rigorous work as I ever have been, and would not have been able to formulate my argument without the help of theory, especially postcolonial theory. Yet I also feel that the time is right for medievalists to experiment with how they formulate their arguments, articulate their themes, convince their readers. It is time to essay rhetorical devices and generic shifts that can perhaps achieve something a predictable scholarly prose style will not. Each of my chapters therefore makes use of what I call fabulations. These brief, fictionalized, and experimental asides are meant to function like the strange moments that occur throughout twelfth-century historiography, moments when the sedate and scholarly course of the narrative is startled by an irruption of the marvelous, the monstrous, the new. As Monika Otter has made clear in her book Inventiones, such moments are not digressions from the texts that feature them but explorations in another register of the concerns animating those works. Thus Gerald of Wales “interrupts” his Journey Through Wales to narrate a story about a utopia of tiny men. This subterranean domain bears an uncanny resemblance to the lost world of Gerald’s own childhood, and permits its narrator to mourn the Welshness he has rejected in himself in order to become a cleric who writes in Latin and a courtier who speaks in French. Although I worry that my own fabulations may strike readers as self-indulgent, overwritten, or simply extraneous, it nonetheless seems to me that, even should I fail badly in the attempt, it is worthwhile to allow the sources I have worked with here to imbue my text with their own imprint. (“The book I didn’t write”)2
Significant in Cohen’s call for medievalists to “essay rhetorical devices and generic shifts that can perhaps achieve something a predictable scholarly prose style will not” is that he is not calling upon medievalists to invent new rhetorical devices and methods but to “experiment with” and “essay” modes, techniques, and strategies other than traditional scholarly prose. In fact in his abandoned explanation, he compares fabulations to the “strange moments that occur throughout twelfth-century historiography,” and in his blog post introducing this explanation that was to appear in the book he states, “I believe I had become infected by all the twelfth-century Latin I was reading, and began to compose in a contemporary mode.” In this discussion of the fabulations, I find fascinating both Cohen’s call for expanding standard academic prose and his location of the fabulations in twelfth-century Latin texts. In this discussion we find a professor medieval literature making the same kind of call for expanding academic composition that we find many compositions do, especially those engaged in computers and writing and new media. Just as striking, I believe is the fact that his fabulations are, simply put, acts of monastic rhetoric.
As I explained in chapter 2, monastic rhetoric was not so much an art of persuasion as an art of composing, and this compositional technique found its way into a wide variety of arts, including that of religious and secular poetry and prose. Keeping in mind that mental imagery—“cognitive pictures”—was the building blocks of invention and that verbal imagery—the rhetorical figures of ekphrasis and enargia—was used in medieval verbal art in much the same way mental imagery is used in the places and images mnemonic,3 that Cohen locates the origins of these fabulations in the twelfth century texts with which he was working can not be stressed enough. While they did not make their way into the final draft of his book, they helped him work through the complex theoretical and philosophical issues with which he was working.
I’ve begun this chapter with a discussion of Cohen’s fabulations because they exist as contemporary examples of monastic rhetoric, of writing through images. While Rice’s own call for the production of images focuses on graphic imagery, I believe that we will only establish a fully-realized theory and practice of imagery if we expand our notion of images to include the mental and verbal as well as the graphic as Fleckenstein argues we should. Moreover, I believe we must do so not only through a double dialectic of “literacy as image and word” but as a double dialectic of memoria as image and memory. As I illustrate how these two double dialects work to make meaning for both ourselves and for others, I will begin with a discussion of two medieval products of monastic rhetoric, the eighth-century box made of whale bone known as the Franks Casket and the Old English poem “The Dream of the Rood.” In discussing these two artifacts of Anglo-Saxon England, I will discuss monastic rhetoric as a mnemonic art of making images. From there, I will turn to the concept of conceptual blending, also known as conceptual integration, from cognitive science to discuss how image-based mnemonics and mnemonic arts such as locational memory and monastic rhetoric are rooted in “the origins of thought and language” and “the way we think.”4 Finally, I’ll return to the contemporary classroom to discuss how we can monastic rhetoric, conceptual blending, and the two double dialectics of literacy as image and word and memoria as image and memory can inform a vision of writing as composition with images.
Works Cited
Carruthers, Mary. The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400 – 1200. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 34. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.
Cohen, Jeffery Jerome. “The book I didn’t write.” In the Middle: A Medieval Studies Group Blog. 30 Aug 2006. Web. 7 Feb. 2008.
—. “The Book I Did Not Write, Part II.” In the Middle: A Medieval Studies Group Blog. 4 Dec. 2006. Web. 7 Feb. 2008.
—. “Fabulations, Third and Final Installment.” In the Middle: A Medieval Studies Group Blog. 13 Dec. 2006. Web. 7 Feb. 2008.
—. Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: On Difficult Middles. New York: Palgrave, 2006.
Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books, 2002.
Fleckenstein, Kristie S. Embodied Literacies: Imageword and a Poetics of Teaching. Studies in Writing & Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2003.
—. “Inviting Imagery in Our Classrooms.” Language and Image in the Reading-Writing Classroom: Teaching Vision. Eds. Kristie S. Fleckenstein, Linda T. Calendrillo, and Demetrice A Worley. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 2002. 3-26.
Handa, Carolyn. Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World: A Critical Sourcebook. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004.
Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. U of Chicago P, 1994.
Rader, Dean. “Composition, Visual Cultures, and the Problems of Class.” College English 67.6 (July 2005): 636-50.
Rice, Jeff. The Rhetoric of Cool: Composition Studies and New Media. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2007.
Turner, Mark. The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language. New York: Oxford UP, 1996.
- In discussing three kinds of imagery—mental, verbal, and graphic—I am following Kristie Fleckenstein’s system of imagery classification (“Inviting Imagery into Our Classrooms” (4). [↩]
- Examples of these fabulations can themselves be found in Cohen’s three blog posts. [↩]
- Likewise, we cannot ignore the use of such imagery in medieval visual art ranging from paintings, frescos, stained glass windows, and manuscript illumination. That we find this mnemonic use of imagery across mental, verbal, and graphic mediums serves to both justify Fleckenstein’s classification of imagery into these three forms and illustrates the need for rhetoric and composition to pay attention to and revive medieval conceptions of memoria. [↩]
- The respective phrases “the origins of thought and language” and “the way we think” come from the titles of books on conceptual blending by Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner respectively. [↩]
Academic Error: On the Dangers of Relying Upon Others
The perpetuation academic error fascinates me. One of my favorite discussions of academic error is Jeffrey Burton Russell’s Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians. Long-time readers, however, will know that my particular axe to grind is with misreadings of Walter J. Ong’s work. Sarah H. Leslie’s article “Emerging Towards Convergence,” published in the July/August 2009 issue of Discernment Ministries is an excellent example of the dangers of relying upon reports of scholarship rather than upon the original source. Relying upon Samuel Blumenfeld’s misreading of Ong. Not only do we get the typical “Ong wants to get back to an primitive, oral world,” we “learn,” according to Blumenfeld, that Ong is a relativist, a proponent of deconstruction, uses consciousness to refer to Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious, is an advocate of pagan spirituality, and, in the coup de grâce, is the father of a branch of heretical thought. This last charge is fascinating as Ong, as a Jesuit, had to get Church approval for everything he published. Having processed Ong’s scholarship, I have seen the official documents declaring that Ong’s work does not violate Church teaching. And, of course, because the article attacks deconstruction, it gets that wrong too. I’ve placed the misrepresentations of Ong’s work in bold:
Deconstruction
Pastor DeWaay does an excellent job of scouring the Emergent chronicles for evidences of “deconstruction.” “Deconstruction” is a philosophy that de-emphasizes the Word of God, and claims that no one can really know the Truth. It fits hand-in-glove with mysticism.
An excellent analysis of “deconstruction” was written by Samuel Blumenfeld in 1995, as part of his scholarly refutation of the “whole language” style of teaching reading that resulted in illiteracy. Blumenfeld explained how “deconstruction” obliterates the fact that words have meaning, de-emphasizes written language by claiming that there is no “truth” in it, and declares “the impossibility of determining absolute meaning” 15 in a text. He wrote:
But not only do the whole-language deconstructionists reject the concept of the absolute word—the logos—but they reject the very system of logical thinking that made Western civilization possible. They not only reject the Bible, they reject Aristotle’s A is A. Their new formula is A can be anything you want it to be, which can only be the basis of a pre-literate or non-literate culture in which subjectivism, emotion and superstition prevail as the means of knowing.
That, of course, is simply a form of insanity—the inability not only to deal with objective reality but to recognize and admit that it exists. A mind so inclined is a mind that will lead its owner to destruction.
The Emergent Church is at the vanguard of this type of deconstructionism. It discounts the Word of God, mocks exegetical preaching and teaching, and emphasizes dialogue (“conversation”), mysticism, symbology, community (“relationships”), and various “spiritual disciplines.” A recent, related fad in the evangelical mission world is “orality,” which is telling stories about the Bible instead of teaching Scripture itself. This cheats the listener out of the precious ability to hear or read God’s Word.
The foundation of this new heresy is said to originate from Walter J. Ong, who wrote a book entitled Orality & Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1982)…. The premise behind this book is that humans need to return to their earlier (evolutionary) primitive heritage of myth, fable, story, image, symbols, icons, etc. The written word is degraded. The spoken word and image are said to be more closely connected to the human “consciousness.” This author means “consciousness” in the sense of Carl Jung’s pagan pseudo-science of “collective unconscious.” Story, myth and image are therefore seen as closer to pagan spirituality. The author notes the “magic power” inherent in the written word and states that “Literacy can be restricted to special groups such as the clergy.”
Actually, I probably shouldn’t have bothered with the bolding. Everything other than the fact Ong wrote Orality and Literacy is wrong. Even the direct quote from the book, “Literacy can be restricted to special groups such as the clergy,” fails to represent the context of the quote. In this particular case, Ong was discussing the historical emergence of literacy in the West during the medieval period, when, in fact, literacy was largely restricted to special groups such as the clergy.
Obviously, Blumenfeld gets Ong wrong. Unfortunately, because Leslie relies upon Blumenfeld’s misreading of Ong rather than Ong himself—a quick read of Ong’s short section on deconstruction would have been enough to discover Blumenfeld has no idea what he’s talking about—leads Leslie to compile error upon error
The Macintosh, 1984, and Social Memory
Today is the Macintosh computer’s 25 birthday. My first computer was an Apple II Plus, and my love affair with the Mac is long running. As I got ready to head off to college, my parents gave me the choice of a car or a Mac Plus, and without blinking an eye, I chose the Mac. Apple’s “1984″ ad serves as a mnemonic image for me, representing the dynamic relationship between literature and social memory. In the first chapter of my dissertation, I define four such mnemonic images, one for each of the four issues of memory I explore in depth. (The other three are mental, verbal, and graphic imagery as a process of meaning making; database practices as compositional tools; and the intersection of rhetoric and social memory.) Here’s the section from that first chapter in which I briefly discuss the ad:
And, finally, my last memory is that of the Apple Computer television ad which broadcast during the 1984 Super Bowl. This ad, set in an Orwellian world, begins with a group of mindless human drones shuffling into an auditorium. Projected onto a large screen is the close-up of a man’s face, who begins a speech with “Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives.” Interspersed with these images is that of a woman running down a hallway chased by soldiers. She runs into the auditorium, and before the soldiers can catch up with her, she hurls a hammer into the screen, which then blows up. The commercial ends with the message, both written and spoken, “On January 24, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984’” (Macintosh).
Intentionally drawing upon George Orwell’s novel 1984, Apple’s commercial positions IBM in the role of Orwell’s Big Brother and positions themselves in the role of the resistance against Big Brother’s tyranny. This ad works because Orwell’s novel has become a commonplace in American culture. Even though the commercial was only ever broadcast once, the ad itself has become a commonplace for many in the advertising and technology industries and for Americans in general. As Kevin Manley explains in USA Today column marking the 20th anniversary of the commercial, few people remember that both Radio Shack and Atari ran commercials for their computers during that same Super Bowl. Moreover, he notes, a number of technology industry leaders identify Apple’s “1984” commercial as having had a profound influence on their choice of a career. Likewise, Ted Friedman, a Communications professor at Georgia State University, argues that for the rest of us the “1984” commercial was a “critical moment” in our “conception of the proper uses and cultural implications of personal computers.” In chapter six I explore the dynamic relationship between literature and social memory. Rather than argue that literature serves as a vehicle for social memory, I argue that literature and social memory exist within a dynamic relationship with each other. Not only does the creation and interpretation of literature involve an active engagement with social memory, social memory itself limits the interpretive space around a text even as literature itself can, as with 1984, define the interpretive space around personal experience and social and historical events.
While I return to “1984″ and 1984 in chapter six, I focus on Ivanhoe, Starship Troopers, and, most completely, Beowulf. Or, actually, I did. This chapter is almost certainly being cut. While the earlier chapters are much more rhetorical and composition studies based, I do discuss medieval literature throughout the dissertation. After all, as anyone familiar with medieval rhetoric knows, the poetic was part of medieval rhetoric. And chapter two, “Towards a New Revived Canon of Memory,” begins with two quotes, one of which is from James J. Murphy’s “Poetry without Genre”:1
The so-called “Romantic Movement” in European literature at the end of the eighteenth century produced not only an emphasis on poetic individualism […] but also produced what can only be called a theory of non-theory. The radical shifts in Western views of human thought […] produced in English writers like Samuel Taylor Coledridge [sic] and William Wordsworth a theoretical justification for a view diametrically opposed to the metapoetics of the middle ages and Renaissance. But since we are all children of our own age no matter how much we try to escape it, we sometimes forget that what we call “modern” ideas about free poetic creation are very modern indeed—perhaps less than two centuries old. Our ancestors marched to quite a different drummer, and even if we ourselves understand this, we must be sure always to make our students understand it as well. A metapoetic of a rhetoric without genre that lasted for two thousand years must surely have some value today. (7-8)2
The Beowulf discussion is detailed enough to stand on its own, but I wanted to add the discussion of Ivanhoe and Starship Troopers to demonstrate that it’s not just oral tradition/folktale/epic/mythhistory that exists within a dynamic relationship with social memory. If it’s cut, and I understand why it probably will be, it will still work out into two articles.
Any way, today the Macintosh turns 25. Wish your Mac a happy birthday. (You do have a Mac, don’t you?)
- Murphy, James J. “Poetry without Genre: The Metapoetics of the Middle Ages.” Latin Rhetoric and Education in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Burlinton, VT: Ashgate/Variorum, 2005. VIII. 1-8. [↩]
- The other is one of my all-time favorite memory quotes, take from Janet Coleman’s Ancient and Medieval Memory: “I have meant only to indicate that the modern world is, in some important ways, reformulating issues and some answers that were already at the heart of medieval discussions [of memory]. Most of us remain unaware that modern science, some modern history and modern philosophy have inherited from the Renaissance a trivialization of over 1,000 years of previous history” (xvii). [↩]
Just a thought
When I began my Ph.D. studies, I wanted to write an Ongian dissertation. As time went on, I decided I didn’t. In the end, I found myself writing one anyway.
On the Unified Nature of English Studies
On WPA-L, there’s an emerging discussion on the nature of English studies. It is, as anyone familiar with the list will know, the latest variation on a common list theme. Miles Kimball, as he has before, has suggested that English studies isn’t a unified discipline but is an administrative creation that throws together productive disciplines (such as creative writing, composition studies, and technical communication) with analytic disciplines (such as literary studies and linguistics). In his post, Miles includes fim studies and rhetoric, but never assigned them to one side or other of the dichotomy. (While arguing that English departments are administrative creations that bring together fields that have no natural relationship with each other, I should note that Miles also argues that a healthy approach to this administrative hodgepodge we call English studies should be one that seeks to use the natural tension between disciplines in a productive manner.) Kelly Ritter beat me to a response, which I reproduce here as an ever developing articulation of what was once a felt sense. It’s also a better articulation of an argument I make in a footnote in my dissertation.
Kelly’s point is an important one. Regardless of what our particular specialties are within English studies, to identify ourselves as concerned with production rather than analysis or analysis rather than production is to sell ourselves short. Simply put, to understand how to effectively produce meaning, you should have an analytical understanding of how meaning is made. Likewise, to have an effective analytical understanding of how meaning is made, you should have an understanding of how meaning can be produced.
If we recall, for instance, Andrea Lunsford’s defintion of composition studies as “the way written texts come to be and the way they are used in the home, school, workplace, and public worlds we all inhabit,” we can see how these two functions exist in a dialectical relationship, even in such fields as linguistics and literary studies. Linguistics, for instance, includes pragmatics, stylistics, discourse analysis, and cognitive linguistics. While one may engage these subfields only through the analytical lens, they tell us how meaning is made so that we can understand how to more effectively create meaning.
Likewise, while literary studies often focuses on analysis, literary studies also involves an understanding of how texts make meaning within the culture they were produced and within the cultures in which they are received. To that end, we can use literary texts, as we can use any text, as a productive force for creating new meaning. One of my favorite examples of this is Apple’s first commerical for the Macintosh, directed by Ridley Scott and titled “1984.” This commercial works, I would suggest, because Orwell’s novel 1984 has become social memory. It is a commonplace upon which we can now create new texts and new meaning. We do this any time we use or hear the terms “Orwellian” or “double-speak.”
In his unfinished book, “Language as Hermeneutic: A Primer on the Word and Digitization,” Walter Ong begins the tenth chapter with an interesting discussion of the Greek words mythos and logos. Ong explains that while we generally translate the Greek term logos as “word,” “voice,” or “speech,” it is of a specific kind that means “computation, reckoning, account of money handled, hence treatment of cognitive matters in terms of discrete units—which are the basis of digitization” (2). Logos, he tells us, comes from the Indo-European root leg-, which means that logos is based upon “a spatialized, exteriorized visual and/or tactile metaphor” (2). The Indo-European leg-, he explains, gives us our English word “lay” and the ancient Greek word legein, which means “to pick up, gather, choose, count, arrange, and thus involves manipulation of discrete units” (2).
Like logos, Ong explains, mythos also means “word” and “speech.” But it also means “tale” and “story.” Mythos’ Indo-European root, meudh or mudh, “signifies to reflect, think over, consider—activities interior to the human being” (1-2). So, while mythos and logos do seem to overlap in meaning, Ong argues that they also seem to have real differences as well, differences that both Plato and Aristotle made much of. Ong notes that both “undertook to oppose this synonymous use of mythos and logos and to draw careful distinctions between the two terms” (4). And it is this distinction, he claims, that leads to logic and dialectic on the one hand and poetry and rhetoric on the other (5). In other words, historically, conceptually, rhetoric and poetic exist on the same side of the coin.
To extend this a bit, I would suggest that logos, as logic an dialectic, involves the division of information, knowledge, and ideas into discrete units, into data, that can be stored, arranged, and manipulated. (This is, of course, as Ong points out in this discussion, tied up with the origins of digitization as represented in numeracy and the alphabet’s origins in the Sumerian use of tokens as described in Schmandt-Besserat’s Before Writing.) On the other hand, mythos, that is both rhetoric and poetic, function by linking together information, knowledge, and ideas, what we might call data.
To put all this another way, rhetoric and poetics (along with composition studies, technical communication, creative writing, linguistics, film studies), in both their productive and analytic functions, give structure and meaning to information, knowledge, and ideas. In this way, what we call English studies is far more than a set of disparate fields grouped together for administrative purposes. That which we call English studies are unified in their approach to information, knowledge, and ideas, in their shared origins in mythos.
Twitter Feed- "Never try to out stubborn a cat." -- *The Notebooks of Lazarus Long*
- My Twitter BFFs: @girlofnewmedia @sisypheantask @billiehara @digital_sextant @minute @tengrrl. Find yours @ http://twitterbffs.com
- Four separate sets of plans canceled on me this weekend. With few friends in this state, that's an epic failure.
