Category Archives: English Studies

Fall Teaching: Cyber-Rhetoric:

25 Monday Aug 2014

Posted by in Digital Studies/New Media, English Studies, Media Ecology, Teaching

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This semester, I’m teaching a course for Winthrop University: WRIT 502: Cyber-Rhetoric: Literature, Theory, Technology. It is, in short, a course in digital English studies. The catalog description of the course is as follows:

This class will examine the challenging possibilities now open for literary study and literary theory. It considers works from Blake to Borges to cyberpunk; works with online materials and literary archives; wrestles with modern rhetorical and digital theorists; and experiment with creating online texts and critiquing them.

As I put the course together, I found myself leaning towards incorporating more digital humanities and comparative media studies while addressing how digital technologies are changing our notions of texts and textual engagement, literature, pedagogy, and composition. As I put the syllabus together, I ended up with a fairly long course introduction, but decided to keep it. I thought I’d share it here.

Introduction

“Any shift in the traffic of information can create not only new thoughts, but new ways of thinking.” – Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, Rhythm Science

“It is impossible to understand social and cultural changes without a knowledge of the workings of media.” – Marshall McLuhan, The Medium Is the Massage

“It is the first step in sociological wisdom, to recognize that the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur […]. The art of free society consists first in the maintenance of the symbolic code; and secondly in fearlessness of revision, to secure that the code serves those purposes which satisfy an enlightened reason. Those societies which cannot combine reverence to their symbols with freedom of revision, must ultimately decay either from anarchy, or from the slow atrophy of a life stifled by useless shadows.” – A.N. Whitehead, Symbolisms: Its Meaning and Effect

“As the era of print is passing, it is possible once again to see print in a comparative context with other textual media, including the scroll, the manuscript codex, the early printed codex, the variations of book forms produced by changes from letterpress to offset to digital publishing, and born-digital forms such as electronic literature and computer games.” – N. Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman, Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era

“It is the business of the future to be dangerous.” – A.N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World

In the months of May and June, readers of the New Republic were treated to articles about the end of English Departments, soon to be killed off by technology in the guise of the digital humanities. In his article, New Republic Senior Editor Adam Kirsch decries the doom he believes technology is wreaking. Less alarmist, James Pulizzi also sees the end of the traditional literature department as all but inevitable, not because they must die but because they must shift and adapt to the new digital environment.

It is true, as Pulizzi suggests, that literature departments, especially English departments, are changing, even need to change. But that’s nothing new. English departments have always been changing. We might point to the 1800s where at schools like Harvard one of the most prestigious professorships was the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, or to the late 1800s when American English departments did not teach American literature – the first American professor of American literature had to jump ship from his literature department for a department of history. Or we might point to the 1940s and the rise of the then New Criticism, or to the 1960s as the start of a series of waves of post-structuralist and post-modernist theories and perspectives including but not limited to feminism, gender studies, New Historicism, postcolonialism, multiculturalism and ethnic studies, ecocriticism, trauma theory, memory studies, New Materialism, object-oriented criticism, and speculative realism. Or we might look again to the 1960s and the revival of classical rhetoric and the beginnings of contemporary composition studies, followed later by the growth of professional writing and technical communication.

Kirsch, however, is right in sensing that something is different. This is not just a change in the practice of theory or the object of study, but a change in the very way we are structuring our culture. We are no longer a culture of print. We are, instead, a transitional culture moving from the print to digital age. In arguing against the study and use of digital technology, Kirsch asks, “Was it necessary in the past 500 years for a humanist to know how to set type and publish a book?”

Kirsch believes that the answer is no, and therein lies the problem with his attempt to defend the humanities from technology. Renaissance Humanism was born within the newly established printing houses of Europe. The first Humanists did not just learn how to set type and publish books, they embraced the printing press; got their hands on as many hand-written manuscripts of Greek and Roman literature, philosophy, mathematics, and science as they could; set them to type; and published, published, published.

Kirsch is unaware of these facts because he is trapped within a catch-22. To be aware of how the printing press gave rise to Renaissance Humanism, Kirsch would have had to have studied the history of media technologies, something which he seems loathe to do because he believes it to be antithetical to humanistic concerns.

As Hayles and Pressman argue, that we are transitioning from a print to a digital culture allows us to more readily recognize that print and its modes of thought, patterns of behavior, and organizational structures were a temporary condition fostered and encouraged by a technology around which we shaped our culture. That era, the Age of Print, is ending, just as the manuscript culture of medieval scholasticism ended with the rise of print.

And that is what this course is about: In recognizing, as DJ Spooky reminds us, that shifts in the traffic of communication will alter modes of thought; in seeking to understand the workings of electronic and digital media, as Marshall McLuhan suggests we need to do, so that we might understand the social and cultural changes around us; in revising the ways we practice English studies even as we maintain our symbolic codes so that we might, as A.N. Whitehead argues, stave off cultural stagnation.

If “the business of the future is to be dangerous,” then the answer is not to hide from it but, as McLuhan suggests, “to contemplate what is happening.” Or, as Michel de Montaigne, the Renaissance writer and inventor of the essay – a genre thoroughly entwined with the rise and logics of print – once wrote, “The thing of it is, we must live with the living.” That is what this course is about: To understand how English studies might live within a digital world.

Lev Grossman on Genre Fiction vs. Literary Fiction

23 Wednesday May 2012

Posted by in English Studies, Science Fiction/Fantasy

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Lev Grossman, book critic and technology writer for TIME, defends genre fiction today in his weekly book column, which he wrote in response to Arthur Krystal’s New Yorker piece “Easy Writers.” In “Literary Revolution in the Supermarket Aisle: Genre Fiction Is Disruptive Technology,” Grossman begins by agreeing with Krystal that there is a distinction between literary and genre fiction, and then takes Krystal to task for characterizing as overly relying upon cliché while simultaneously invoking the biggest cliché of all: that genre fiction is escapism.1

The two big points I take away from Grossman’s piece, points I have commented on myself when I talk this issue with friends, is that (1) genre fiction writers have made plot their art form and that the best of them far surpass anything done in literary fiction, and (2) the borders between literary and genre fiction are increasingly blurring as literary fiction writers draw from genre fiction and genre fiction writers draw from literary fiction.2 To give you a flavor of what Grossman argues and how he does so, here’s a few passages:

On Krystal’s charge of escapism:

Being as how Krystal busts genre writers for using clichés in their prose, I think it’s only fair play to scold him a little for relying so heavily what has become a critical cliché. In my experience at least, to dismiss genre fiction as escapism is to seriously under-think what happens when someone opens a genre novel. According to the escapist theory, people read genre fiction to leave behind the cares and sorrows of reality — a genre novel is, in Krystal’s words, “a narrative cocktail that helps us temporarily forget the narratives of our own humdrum lives.” It’s like we’re sucking on a literary pacifier: genre readers ‘simply want the comfort of a familiar voice recounting a story they that they hadn’t quite heard before.”

On the subject of plot:

It’s hard to talk about what plot does, but that’s not the fault of genre fiction. If anything it’s because criticism has failed the genre novel. Most of the critical vocabulary we have for talking about books is geared to dealing with dense, difficult texts like the ones the modernists wrote. It’s designed for close-reading, for translating thick, worked prose into critical insights, sentence by sentence and quote by quote, not for the long view that plot requires. But plot is an extraordinarily powerful tool for creating emotion in readers. It can be used crudely, but it’s also capable of fine nuance and even intellectual power, even in the absence of serious, Fordian prose. The emotions and ideas plot evokes can be huge and dramatic but also complex and subtle and intimate. The things that writers like Raymond Chandler or Philip Pullman or Joe Abercrombie do with plot are utterly exquisite. I often find that the complexity of the narratives in genre fiction makes the narratives in literary novels look almost amateur by comparison. Look at George R.R. Martin: no literary novelist now writing could orchestrate a plot the way he does. Even if you grant that the standards for writing and characterization in genre fiction are lower than in literary fiction, the standards for plotting are far, far higher.

And, finally, on the blurring of boundaries between literary and genre fiction:

There’s a vast blurry middle ground in between genre fiction and literary fiction that’s notably absent from Krystal’s essay. Cormac McCarthy now writes about serial killers and post-apocalyptic worlds. Michael Chabon writes about alternate realities and hard-boiled detectives. Philip Roth writes alternate history. Kazuo Ishiguro writes about clones. Colson Whitehead writes about zombies. Kate Atkinson writes mysteries. Jennifer Egan writes science fiction, as does Haruki Murakami (and as did David Foster Wallace). And on and on. (The borrowing happens the other way, too: writers like Neil Gaiman, Kelly Link, Catherynne Valente, John Green, Susanna Clarke, Richard Price and China Miéville, to name a very few, are gleefully importing literary techniques into genre novels, to marvelous effect.) Krystal brings up Gary Shteyngart and his  love of Zardoz (not the movie, oddly, but the novelisation thereof), but what he doesn’t mention is that Shteyngart’s last novel, Super Sad True Love Story, is science fiction. These days, I find, literary novelists are much more interested in plot and much less interested in plausibility, or in realism, than literary critics are.

There’s far more to the essay that what I’ve quoted above. Go read it. It’s well worth your time whether you’re a fan of literary fiction, genre fictions, or both.

  1. Krystal relies upon a number of other commonplaces of the topic: genre fiction is poorly written, it is superficial in its presentation of society and the human condition, etc. Grossman responds, “What he’s describing sounds more like shitty genre fiction. […]. God knows there’s plenty of bad writing in literary fiction, too, but Krystal never talks about that. The badness tends to be a different kind of badness — slow, earnest, lugubrious prose, or too-clever and self-conscious prose — but bad it nonetheless is. You wouldn’t want to judge literary fiction on the basis of its mediocrities. So why judge genre fiction that way?” [↩]
  2. He also touches upon my favorite rant: “And to say that such books ‘transcend’ the genres they’re in is bollocks, of the most bollocky kind. As soon as a novel becomes moving or important or great, critics try to surgically extract it from its genre, lest our carefully constructed hierarchies collapse in the presence of such a taxonomical anomaly.” [↩]

Read Jeff Rice’s “Professional Ethos”

15 Tuesday Jun 2010

Posted by in English Studies, Rhetoric and Composition

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If it needs to be said, Jeff’s post on professional ethos in the age of the network is well worth reading. Here’s a teaser:

In this long analogy, my purpose here is to draw attention to an aspect of identity often ignored at the professorial and, consequently, disciplinary level, but that is prompted by my initial anecdote. What is the identity of academic work in the age of the network? More specifically, what is the identity of my own discipline, English Studies, in the age of the network? Like my anecdote of the Zappa poster, English, too, struggles with the frisson of its own identity. The fixed perspective the discipline has of itself is hermeneutical study. This study is fixed on the discussion and analysis of stories, poems, plays, films, cultural moments, documents, politics, and ethnicity. While I have no objection to such objects of study, the ethos of this work has greatly eroded within the profession itself even as the profession projects this self-styled image. As most of us have known for some time, there are not enough tenure track jobs in English for those who have based their professional identity on this occupation or, for the most part, these areas of study within English. I don’t want to rehash the arguments already in circulation about the awful state of English Studies and the job market. Instead, I note that what English faces is no different than what a status update on Facebook faces or a poster on an office wall faces when not treated as part of a network. Without the ability to be traced within a larger network of meaning, the identity of the object will be read in a brief and fixed manner. Those who choose to occupy that identity, too, become fixed in an identity that resists belonging within a larger set of meanings and identities. Ethos, then, suffers. [Read more.]

The Macintosh, 1984, and Social Memory

24 Saturday Jan 2009

Posted by in English Studies, Memory, Scholarship, Social Memory, Technology

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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?)

  1. 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. [↩]
  2. 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). [↩]

Inbetween the First and Second Week

18 Sunday Jan 2009

Posted by in English Studies, Meta, Teaching

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At Creighton, the semester started Wednesday, which means the first week has come and gone. This term, I’m teaching first-year composition and directing two independent studies. The Advanced Composition: Image, Sound, Text course was canceled due to low enrollment and in its place I’ve been assigned an alternative service project in which I will compose the first draft of a handbook for English majors.

I’m looking forward to that project for two reasons. First, there’s the obvious fact that in creating the handbook, I’ll be getting a crash course in the various aspects of my new academic home, including meeting and talking with each member of the department one-on-one. And then there’s the fact that it’s a new kind of project for me. I helped write sections of the Writing Program Resource Manual at Saint Louis University and co-authored a computer-assisted instruction guide for the same. And I’ve written various small technical documents from assignment guidelines to how-to guides for using a MOO and specific computing tasks. All of those projects, have had little input from others and while I was writing for a specific audience, either I was the “boss” or I had one specific person overseeing what I wrote. This project will incorporate existing material and pull in information and ideas from close to twenty people. While the chair is my immediate editor/boss, the department as a whole have a stake and say in what I write, to say nothing of the primary audience for whom this manual is being created. I’ve taught introductory techincal and professional writing classes before and I hope to do so again, so I’m looking forward to taking on this new writing situation. I like to practice what I teach.

The first-year composition course is a modified version of what I taught last semester, which is a course centered around Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Masssage. For the first time in my life, I’m not making any significant changes to a course. However, I have rearranged the major project sequence, rewrote some of the assignments and structured more assignment sequencing, added Donald Murray’s The Craft of Revision, and style and immitation exercises drawn from Crowley and Hawhee’s Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students (a textbook I really hope to organize a course around someday). The major projects involve “Your Life in Media,” a project which asks students to define themselves through five mediums important to them—we use McLuhan’s definition of media as an extention of some human faculty and last semester students included cellphones, the spoken word, color, dance, passports, and friends); a playlist assignment in which students create a playlist to represent an idea, event, mood, or theme; an annotation project in which students research and annotate sections of McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage for future students; and a rhetorical analysis of a section from McLuhan’s book. There’s also a midterm and final portfolio that include an essay reflecting upon their writing and engagement with the course, using their own work as evidence to support their claims. A couple of the FYC classes are far from full, but for whatever reason the powers that be made the decision not to cut any of them, and I’ve got one of those. Right now, the class is less than half full. I had a FYC class like this once before and it was awesome. Because the grading load was so much less than I’m used to, I was able to spend much more time tailoring the course to meet the individual needs of each student in a way that I’ve just not able to do with a full class.

Back in November, I was asked to direct an independent study in Medieval and Early Renaissance literature by a student who needs this class to graduate the spring with an emphasis in British literature rather than a generic “English” degree. After talking with my chair, I agreed and we’re off. We’re reading the following texts:

  • Alexander, Michael. A History of Old English Literature.
  • The Anglo-Saxon World: An Anthology. Trans. Kevin Crossley-Holland.
  • Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. Trans. R. M. Liuzza.
  • Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy. Trans. Richard Green.
  • Burrow, J.A. Medieval Writers and Their Work: Middle English Literature and Its Background, 1100-1500. 2nd ed.
  • Medieval English Prose for Women: Selections from the Katherine Group and Ancrene Wisse. Ed. Bella Millett and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne.
  • The Lais of Marie de France. Ed. Robert Hanning and Joan Ferrante.
  • Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo. Trans. J.R.R. Tolkien.
  • Geoffrey Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales. Ed. and Trans. By A. Kent Hieatt and Constance Hieatt.

We’re also reading a few Old English poems not in the Crossley-Holland anthology, including “Juliana,” “Elene,” “Christ II,” “Genesis A” or “Genesis B” and/or “Exodus,” and “Christ and Satan,” and we’re going to look at Tolkien’s “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son.” (The student has done an extensive project on Milton’s Satan, so I thought looking at the Old English Satan and Tolkien’s discussion of ofermod might be fun because, you know, Milton’s friend owned the Junius MS and there’s speculation it might have served as inspiration for Paradise Lost.) We’ll also be reading some poetry by Skelton, Elizabeth I, and maybe some other stuff. Said student has a decent grounding in Renaissance lit, so we’re focusing on the Medieval.

Finally, the other independent study is with a student who was enrolled in the canceled Advanced Composition: Image, Sound, Text. Said student was in the Composition in the Digital Age course last semester, so I agreed to direct this one as well. I’m scheduled to teach the Advanced Comp class in the fall, so this will let me better thrash out some ideas and assignments before it’s a full course.

On the Unified Nature of English Studies

24 Wednesday Dec 2008

Posted by in Academia, English Studies, Media Ecology, Rhetoric and Composition, Walter Ong

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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 definition 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.