Category Archives: Rhetoric and Composition

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.]

Imagination, Low-bridge multimedia, and Fabulations

15 Tuesday Jun 2010

Posted by in Cognitive Studies, Digital Resources, Medieval/Medievalism, Memory, Probes, Rhetoric and Composition

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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

15 Tuesday Jun 2010

Posted by in Medieval/Medievalism, Quotes, Rhetoric and Composition

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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). (( 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). ))  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). (( For a more detailed account of this method of composition, see Carruthers’ The Book of Memory, 124-29. ))

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.

“If these are examples of plagiarism, then we want more plagiarism”

22 Thursday Apr 2010

Posted by in Academia, Rhetoric and Composition, Teaching

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Teaching Jonathan Lethem’s “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism” tonight. My two favorite passages are:

If nostalgic cartoons had never borrowed from Fritz the Cat, there would be no Ren & Stimpy; without Rankin/Bass and Charlie Brown Christmas specials, there would be no South Park; without The Flinstones—more or less The Honeymooners in cartoon loincloths—The Simpsons would cease to exist. If those don’t strike you as essential losses, then consider the remarkable series fo “plagiarism” that links Ovid’s “Pyramus and Thisbe” with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, or Shakespeare’s description of Cleopatra, copied nearly verbatim from Plutarch’s life of Mark Antony and also later nicked by T. S. Eliot for The Waste Land. If these are examples of plagiarism, then we want more plagiarism. (61)

and

As a novelist, I’m a cork on the ocean of story, a leaf on a windy day. Pretty soon I’ll be blown away. For the moment I’m grateful to be making a living, and so must ask that for a limited time (in the Thomas Jefferson sense) you please respect my small treasured usemonopolies. Don’t pirate my editions; do plunder my visions. The name of the game is Give All. You, reader, are welcome to my stories. They were never mine in the first place, but I gave them to you. If you have the inclination to pick them up, take them with my blessing. (68)

I’m rather fond of this essay. While remix culture brings these issues to the fore, Lethem reminds us that composition, that poesis in its broadest sense, has always been about appropriation. In fact, I first came across Lethem when I read his novel Gun, with Occasional Music, a direct homage to Philip K. Dick. I just recommended the novel, along with John Scalzi’s The Android’s Dream, to a student who wants to do her senior thesis on Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Both novels are, in their own way, homages to Dick, both explore the question of what it means to be human, and both involve a genetically modified sheep. In his essay, Lethem discusses Bob Dylan as a knowing plunderer of what has come before and notes that Dylan has himself never refused a request to rework his own music. Dylan and Lethem both knowingly plunder visions and offer visions to be plundered.

Tonight, we discuss this essay before I introduce a video remix/mash-up assignment which asks students to imagine what the academic version of a remix/mash-up would be. I first used this assignment last semester and was quite pleased with the results.

On Composing “The Making of a Technorhetorician: A Technological Literacy Collage”

16 Tuesday Mar 2010

Posted by in Life, Media Ecology, Medieval/Medievalism, Mnemonic Practices, Rhetoric and Composition, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Teaching, Teaching Resources

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As my technological literacy collage is intended to serve as an example of an assignment prompt, I also wrote a short explanation of how I composed the piece. If interested, you can find the assignment guidelines and accompanying documents at the course web site. Any comments on the assignment or the collage are more than welcome.

On Composing “On the Dangers of Reading Conan Stories and Playing Computer Games; or, the Making of a Technorhetorician: A Technological Literacy Collage”

I began writing my technological literacy collage by writing stories that illustrate my practices and values involved with reading, writing, and exchanging information. In all, I wrote about 13 pages, 11 distinct passages, all written by hand, in the period of a few hours one afternoon. The passages ranged from a paragraph to a few pages. Of the 11 passages I wrote, 6 made it into my final draft in one form or another. While a few of the passages made it into the final version almost unchanged, others made it in after a lot of pairing down. Seven additional passages were composed at the computer over the period of a week as I thought about other ideas and how I might make a collage out of the passages I had initially written.

With those 12 passages typed up, I printed them out, one passage to a page, figured out which one wanted to start with, and then started piecing together the rest of the order. One passage that I’m really fond of just didn’t seem to fit anywhere, so I took it out. As I decided on the order of my passages, I came up with an idea that would work well between passage one and two, so I wrote it out by hand on my print out of my old passage two that had now become passage three. I then read the collage straight through and realized I wanted another passage at the end. I was going to end with the line that Tolkien liked Howard’s Conan stories, which tied into the title I’d come up with. I decided, however, that it didn’t seem right as the final passage, so I wrote the bit about logos and mythos, which allowed me to return to teaching, reading, and writing; preseningt those activities as acts of storytelling; get in another dig at Plato; and return to my definition of technological literacy.

The Making of a Technorhetorician: A Technological Literacy Collage

16 Tuesday Mar 2010

Posted by in Life, Media Ecology, Medieval/Medievalism, Mnemonic Practices, Rhetoric and Composition, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Teaching, Teaching Resources

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This semester, I’ve assigned a technological literacy collage as the first assignment in both the first-year composition course (Rhetoric and Composition: Media and Their Effects) and the advanced composition course (Advanced Composition: Image, Sound, Text). The assignment is a technological literacy autobiography done in the form of a collage. Call it a mash-up of assignments from Cynthia Selfe, Dickie Selfe, Gail Hawisher, and Karla Kitalong with that of Peter Elbow and Pat Belanoff because, really, that’s what it is. (The advanced composition course is an accelerated half-semester course that starts this week.)

I so much enjoyed reading the first-year students collages that I decided to write one myself. I meant to write one before the semester started but didn’t, so I’m sharing what I wrote with the advanced composition class. Since it’s going to be up on the course web site, I thought I’d post it here too. So, here you go, my technological literacy collage, the full title of which is:

On the Dangers of Reading Conan Stories and Playing Computer Games; or, The Making of a Technorhetorician: A Technological Literacy Collage

I’m the new media specialist in Creighton University’s English Department. Terms to define my academic specialty include computers and writing, technorhetoric, digital rhetoric, and new media studies. Continue reading »