DOCSLIB.ORG

Ease in Composition Studies

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Ease in Composition Studies EASE IN COMPOSITION STUDIES By C BRADLEY DILGER A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2003 Copyright 2003 by C Bradley Dilger Dedicated to the memory of my grandmothers, Elisa Vanina Dilger (1917–2000) and Mabel Fulton Boutwell (1911–2001). ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First, before all else, and for so many reasons, I thank my wife Erin Easterling. My doctoral committee—Greg Ulmer, Stephanie Smith, Blake Scott, and Joe Wilson—have guided this dissertation, helped me develop the long-term project it represents, supported other research, and allowed me to cultivate an eclectic focus. Sid Dobrin and Phil Wegner provided extremely valuable assistance throughout my graduate studies, gladly helping me whenever I requested advice, letters of reference, or a bit more time to finish an essay. Joe Martin and Lucille Schultz both helped a graduate student they had never met get a copy of a rare but very important dissertation which has helped focus this project immeasurably. Jeff Rice, Erich Nunn, and Traci Gardner read drafts of this dissertation or other related work, and provided valuable advice and suggestions. Jane Love helped develop the framework of the last chapter, which includes some of the trickiest material presented here. Bruce Leland and the faculty of Western Illinois University recently welcomed me to their campus and asked me to become their colleague. The players of the WTFL, past and present, have not contributed much which can be cited in this work, but have helped make it possible by cheerfully rumblin’ bumblin’ and stumblin’ through many Saturday mornings. Ronald L. Corbin helped me through high school and to the university. I aspire to his wisdom and sense of humor, and am proud to have been his student. In many ways, I still am. iv PREFACE Throughout this dissertation, “contemporary” is used to mean “at the time of writing being considered.” “Current” means at the time this dissertation is being written, e.g. 2002 and 2003. Many texts published during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are quoted in this work. Their distinctive orthography and typography—for example, frequently capitalizing of nouns, or typesetting single words or phrases in italics—is reproduced as faithfully as possible here. In many cases, this typography conveyed didactic emphasis, and it unquestionably has semantic content. Current rhetoric and composition handbooks make much of their use of four-color printing, extensive indexing, and tabbed binding; though Isaac Watts and his contemporaries did not have those means, they did employ the best available printing technologies to make writing easy. Standardizing or normalizing their work to meet current orthographic standards would erase valuable meanings which should be considered carefully. v TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . iv PREFACE . v LIST OF FIGURES . viii ABSTRACT . ix 1 INTRODUCTION . 1 1.1 Why Ease? . 1 1.2 Upon Further Review . 10 2 THE CONCEPT OF EASE . 14 2.1 Overwhelmed? The Answer is Easy! . 15 2.2 Historicizing and Defining Ease . 19 2.2.1 Historical and Popular Definitions . 21 2.2.2 Reforming Education in England, 1680–1740 . 25 2.2.3 Bringing Ease Home in America, 1880–1930 . 31 2.2.4 Humanizing Technology, 1939–1958 . 35 2.2.5 Computing Made Easy, 1984–present . 39 2.3 The Role of Ease Today . 45 3 EVALUATING EASE . 47 3.1 Is Ease Good or Bad? . 47 3.1.1 Technology and Ease . 48 3.1.2 The Ideology of Ease . 50 3.2 Critical Evaluation of Ease . 54 3.2.1 Benefits of Ease . 54 3.2.2 Problems Caused by Ease . 58 3.3 Conclusion . 78 3.4 Introduction . 79 3.4.1 The English Roots of Ease in Writing . 81 3.4.2 Transforming Philosophy to Pedagogy: Major Figures . 87 3.4.3 Caveat Facilitor . 94 3.4.4 Four Assumptions About Ease and Writing . 95 3.5 Students Should Find Writing Easy . 97 3.5.1 Early Exemplars . 101 vi 3.5.2 Strategies for Making Writing Easy . 105 3.5.3 Emotional Needs: Comfort and Familiarity . 111 3.5.4 It’s Just That Easy . 120 3.5.5 A Mixed Bag of Ease . 122 3.5.6 The Results . 124 3.6 Students Should Write Easy-To-Read Prose . 125 3.6.1 Clarity . 126 3.6.2 Brevity and Conciseness . 128 3.6.3 Simplicity . 131 3.7 Teaching Writing is Easy . 132 3.7.1 Textbooks and Other Tools . 135 3.7.2 The Curriculum . 137 3.7.3 Composition and the Institution . 141 3.8 Writing as Gatekeeper to a “Life of Ease” . 143 3.8.1 Ease, Vulgarity, and Gentility . 146 3.8.2 Writing and Upward Mobility . 148 3.9 Conclusion . 149 4 BEYOND EASE . 152 4.1 The Endurance of Ease . 152 4.2 The Transitional Apparatus . 161 4.2.1 The Principles of New Media . 162 4.2.2 Supplementing the essay . 171 4.2.3 The Logic of Conduction . 179 4.3 Supplementing Ease . 183 4.3.1 Translucence . 183 4.3.2 The Complex . 186 4.3.3 Repetition and Iteration . 188 WORKS CITED . 192 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH . 199 vii LIST OF FIGURES Figure page 2.1 Kodak Advertisement, 1884. 20 3.1 LG Electronics Advertisement, 2001. 67 viii Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy EASE IN COMPOSITION STUDIES By C Bradley Dilger August 2003 Chair: Gregory L. Ulmer Major Department: English For many Americans, the idea of “ease” shapes understanding of complexity and difficulty. Though many consider ease of use a twentieth-century phenomenon associated with personal computers, its origins date from the seventeenth century. “Ease in Composition Studies” investigates the role of ease in American culture, especially college-level writing. I begin by defining ease and tracing its history through four critical periods of development dating from 1700 to the present. I show that ease can be defined using a list of eight qualities opposed to other important concepts: comfort, transparency, effortlessness, simplicity, pragmatism, femininity, expediency, and pictorialism. Calling on the work of Evan Watkins, I show problems which can occur when ease is uncritically demanded or mobilized—as is frequently the case when consumer models of ease, based on simple transaction, appear in educational contexts. With ease defined, I demonstrate that current-traditional rhetoric, the simplified approach to writing developed in American nineteenth-century colleges, includes a pedagogy based on ease. Nineteenth-century composition portrays the act of writing, ix writing style, and teaching writing as easy, and position writing as the gatekeeper for the “life of ease.” By investigating textbooks, teaching methods, and strategies which writers of supposedly easy rhetorics use, and calling on the work of Lucille Schultz and Sharon Crowley, I identify specific connections between writing and ease, charting the transformation of ease in the classroom from close identification with “easy” pedagogical techniques (atomization, alliteration, and gradation) to a less clearly defined, but no less powerful concept. The connection of ease and writing established in current-traditional rhetoric was not disrupted by the pedagogical reforms of the 1960s and 1970s. Today ease shapes the development of teaching writing using computers and new media. Can composition instructors continue to mobilize ease to teach electronic “writing” technologies, given the differences in institutional practices and subject formation associated with them— what Greg Ulmer calls “electracy?” My research suggests otherwise. I conclude my dissertation by outlining an electrate supplement to ease: concepts suitable for practicing, learning, and teaching electronic discourse. x CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION True ease in writing comes from art, not chance As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance. —Alexander Pope, An Essay On Criticism 1.1 Why Ease? Robert Johnson’s outstanding book User-Centered Technology begins with a sort of apology for its ordinary focus. Johnson makes his case for working with the mundane, the common, and the everyday—common things which are so familiar that they are all but invisible. The concept of ease is often associated with this natural, comfortable character: it conjures up images of elegant simplicity, gracefulness, painless use, pleasant speed, and welcome diversion. But there is nothing simple about the way ease influences American culture and the practice of writing in American colleges and universities. Much of my research focuses on the role of ease in composition studies, the institution of English, and American culture. However, better understanding of ease is not my principal research concentration. My interest in ease is means, not end. As I see it today, my life’s work will be the development of physical and virtual writing environments, along with pedagogical practices, forms of communication and expression, and institutions which support them. I have spent a terrific amount of time studying ease because, as my first investigations suggested six years ago, ease has a huge role in the institution of composition studies, and a significant influence in the nascent electronic classroom. 1 2 Though I approach ease, electronic writing, information technology, new media, and hypermedia1 from the standpoint of composition studies, not media studies, I share many long-term research goals with Gregory Ulmer, my doctoral committee chair. In Heuretics and the recently published Internet Invention, Ulmer observes that the apparatus of literacy is in transition, being supplemented by the technology of digital computing. While print literacy remains the primary and most important communicative apparatus, its status is changing as the importance of the emerging apparatus grows. Like Ulmer, I see this ongoing shift as an opportunity for the humanities, especially the language arts.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Composition Theory for Writing Teachers
    *Relations,LocationsCOV-BCov 2/2/06 10:33 AM Page 1 R E L for beginning teachers and graduate A This anthology students in composition studies and T I other related fields begins with the premise that writing is always O social, a dialogue between self and other. This “social turn” not only N underscores the value of the writing process by encouraging students S , to prewrite, draft, and revise together, but, more important, it also focuses on postprocess by foregrounding approaches to teaching writing L O RELATIONS that highlight the importance of context. Thus, this anthology seeks C RELATIONS to move “beyond process” by building on the valuable lessons from A process pedagogy and by promoting the idea that writing stands for T a radically complex network of phenomena. I O The essays collected here are organized in three overlapping N sections: Relations, which assumes that writing occurs through S LOCATIONS , LOCATIONS conversations and negotiations with others, highlights the concepts of literacy, discourse, discourse community, and genre; Locations, which P explores how writing is shaped by material places and intellectual O spaces, emphasizes the importance of contact zones, ecocomposition, S I materiality, and place; and Positions, which identifies how writing T reflects the contingency of our beliefs and values, considers markers of I O POSITIONSPOSITIONS identity such as sex, gender, race, class, ableness, and sexual orientation. N To show how some of these ideas are demonstrated or experienced in S actual classrooms, each section ends with brief “pedagogical insights” written expressly for this collection. Composition V a n Theory for d e n b Writing e r g Teachers • H u m • C l a r National Council of y Teachers of English - 1111 W.
    [Show full text]
  • Applying Theories of Digital Rhetoric, Procedural Rhetoric, and Electracy To
    University of Texas at El Paso DigitalCommons@UTEP Open Access Theses & Dissertations 2018-01-01 Rethinking Multimodality In First-Year Composition: Applying Theories Of Digital Rhetoric, Procedural Rhetoric, And Electracy To Multimodal Assignments Jennifer Falcon University of Texas at El Paso, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.utep.edu/open_etd Part of the Rhetoric Commons Recommended Citation Falcon, Jennifer, "Rethinking Multimodality In First-Year Composition: Applying Theories Of Digital Rhetoric, Procedural Rhetoric, And Electracy To Multimodal Assignments" (2018). Open Access Theses & Dissertations. 1426. https://digitalcommons.utep.edu/open_etd/1426 This is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@UTEP. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Access Theses & Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@UTEP. For more information, please contact [email protected]. RETHINKING MULTIMODALITY IN FIRST-YEAR COMPOSITION: APPLYING THEORIES OF DIGITAL RHETORIC, PROCEDURAL RHETORIC, AND ELECTRACY TO MULTIMODAL ASSIGNMENTS JENNIFER ANDREA FALCON Doctoral Program in Rhetoric and Composition APPROVED: Beth Brunk-Chavez, Ph.D., Chair Laura Gonzales, Ph.D. William Robertson, Ph.D. Charles Ambler, Ph.D. Dean of the Graduate School Copyright © by Jennifer Andrea Falcon 2018 Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to my grandfather, José Franco Sandoval. Grandpa, your devotion to hard work and education will always guide me. RETHINKING MULTIMODALITY IN FIRST-YEAR
    [Show full text]
  • Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics
    To access digital resources including: blog posts videos online appendices and to purchase copies of this book in: hardback paperback ebook editions Go to: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/161 Open Book Publishers is a non-profit independent initiative. We rely on sales and donations to continue publishing high-quality academic works. Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics Edited by Brett D. Hirsch http://www.openbookpublishers.com © 2012 Brett D. Hirsch et al. (contributors retain copyright of their work). Some rights are reserved. The articles of this book are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported Licence. This license allows for copying any part of the work for personal and non-commercial use, providing author attribution is clearly stated. Details of allowances and restrictions are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ As with all Open Book Publishers titles, digital material and resources associated with this volume are available from our website at: http://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/161 ISBN Hardback: 978-1-909254-26-8 ISBN Paperback: 978-1-909254-25-1 ISBN Digital (pdf): 978-1-909254-27-5 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-909254-28-2 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-909254-29-9 Typesetting by www.bookgenie.in Cover image: © Daniel Rohr, ‘Brain and Microchip’, product designs first exhibited as prototypes in January 2009. Image used with kind permission of the designer. For more information about Daniel and his work, see http://www.danielrohr.com/ All paper used by Open Book Publishers is SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative), and PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes) Certified.
    [Show full text]
  • Collin College in May 20162—
    Appellate Case: 18-6102 Document: 010110085921 Date Filed: 11/19/2018 Page: 1 Case No. 18-6102/ 18-6165 In the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit ___________________ DR. RACHEL TUDOR, Plaintiff-Appellant/Cross-Appellee v. SOUTHEASTERN OKLAHOMA STATE UNIVERSITY AND REGIONAL UNIVERSITY SYSTEM OF OKLAHOMA, Defendants-Appellees/Cross-Appellants ___________________ On Appeal from the United States District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma, Case No. 5:15-cv-324-C, Hon. Robin Cauthron ___________________ PLAINTIFF-APPELLANT/CROSS-APPELLEE DR. RACHEL TUDOR’S APPENDIX VOLUME 3 OF 9 ___________________ EZRA ISHMAEL YOUNG BRITTANY M. NOVOTNY LAW OFFICE OF EZRA YOUNG NATIONAL LITIGATION LAW GROUP 30 Devoe Street, #1A PLLC Brooklyn, NY 11211 2401 NW 23rd St., Ste. 42 (949) 291-3185 Oklahoma City, OK 73107 [email protected] (405) 896-7805 [email protected] MARIE EISELA GALINDO LAW OFFICE OF MARIE E. GALINDO Wells Fargo Bldg. 1500 Broadway, Ste. 1120 Lubbock, TX 79401 (806) 549-4507 [email protected] Attorneys for Plaintiff-Appellant/Cross-Appellee Case No. 18-6102/ 18-6165 Appellate Case: 18-6102 Document: 010110085921 Date Filed: 11/19/2018 Page: 2 VOLUME 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS 15-CV-324-C – Relevant Docket Entries Appendix Filer Date of Doc Title of Pleading Pg. # Filing # 001-010 Plaintiff 12/29/2017 271 Reply to Defendants’ Opposition to Reinstatement 011-026 Plaintiff 12/29/2017 271- Reply to Response to 1 Motion for Order for Reinstatement Exhibit 1 Tudor Declaration 027-116 Plaintiff 12/29/2017 271- Reply
    [Show full text]
  • The Place of Creative Writing in Composition Studies
    H E S S E / T H E P L A C E O F C R EA T I V E W R I T I NG Douglas Hesse The Place of Creative Writing in Composition Studies For different reasons, composition studies and creative writing have resisted one another. Despite a historically thin discourse about creative writing within College Composition and Communication, the relationship now merits attention. The two fields’ common interest should link them in a richer, more coherent view of writing for each other, for students, and for policymakers. As digital tools and media expand the nature and circula- tion of texts, composition studies should pay more attention to craft and to composing texts not created in response to rhetorical situations or for scholars. In recent springs I’ve attended two professional conferences that view writ- ing through lenses so different it’s hard to perceive a common object at their focal points. The sessions at the Associated Writing Programs (AWP) consist overwhelmingly of talks on craft and technique and readings by authors, with occasional panels on teaching or on matters of administration, genre, and the status of creative writing in the academy or publishing. The sessions at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) reverse this ratio, foregrounding teaching, curricular, and administrative concerns, featur- ing historical, interpretive, and empirical research, every spectral band from qualitative to quantitative. CCCC sponsors relatively few presentations on craft or technique, in the sense of telling session goers “how to write.” Readings by authors as performers, in the AWP sense, are scant to absent.
    [Show full text]
  • Composition Studies 42.1 (2014) from the Editor Hat’S the Best Part of Your Job?” a Student in Advanced Composition “Wasked Me This Question Last Week
    Volume 42, Number 1 Spring 2014 composition STUDIES composition studies volume 42 number 1 Composition Studies C/O Parlor Press 3015 Brackenberry Drive Anderson, SC 29621 New Releases First-Year Composition: From Theory to Practice Edited by Deborah Coxwell-Teague & Ronald F. Lunsford. 420 pages. Twelve of the leading theorists in composition stud- ies answer, in their own voices, the key question about what they hope to accomplish in a first-year composition course. Each chapter, and the accompanying syllabi, pro- vides rich insights into the classroom practices of these theorists. A Rhetoric for Writing Program Administrators Edited by Rita Malenczyk. 471 pages. Thirty-two contributors delineate the major issues and questions in the field of writing program administration and provide readers new to the field with theoretical lenses through which to view major issues and questions. Recently Released . Writing Program Administration and the Community College Heather Ostman. The WPA Outcomes Statement—A Decade Later Edited by Nicholas N. Behm, Gregory R. Glau, Deborah H. Holdstein, Duane Roen, & Edward M. White. Writing Program Administration at Small Liberal Arts Colleges Jill M. Gladstein and Dara Rossman Regaignon. GenAdmin: Theorizing WPA Identities in the Twenty-First Century Colin Charlton, Jonikka Charlton, Tarez Samra Graban, Kathleen J. Ryan, & Amy Ferdinandt Stolley and with the WAC Clearinghouse . Writing Programs Worldwide: Profiles of Academic Writing in Many Places Edited by Chris Thaiss, Gerd Bräuer, Paula Carlino, Lisa Ganobcsik-Williams, & Aparna Sinha International Advances in Writing Research: Cultures, Places, Measures Edited by Charles Bazerman, Chris Dean, Jessica Early, Karen Lunsford, Suzie Null, Paul Rogers, & Amanda Stansell www.parlorpress.com 2013–2014 Reviewers A journal is only as good as its reviewers.
    [Show full text]
  • ENC 1136: Multimodal Writing & Digital Literacy ENC1136
    ENC 1136: Multimodal Writing & Digital Literacy ENC1136 (Section 9122, Class 23684, SP20) Brandon Murakami MWF:3 (9:35-10:25a) [email protected] Room: M: WEIL 408D / WF: WEIL 408E OH: TBA COURSE DESCRIPTION Multimodal Composition teaches digital literacy and digital creativity. This course teaches students to compose and circulate multimodal documents in order to convey creative, well- researched, carefully crafted, and attentively written information through digital platforms and multimodal documents. This course promotes digital writing and research as central to academic, civic, and personal expression. COURSE OBJECTIVES Multimodal writing objectives are designed to teach students how to compose, revise, and circulate information in digital forms. The course emphasizes: • Applying composing processes in digital forms • Demonstrating invention/creativity approaches when working with digital resources and tools • Choosing which digital tools best serve contextual needs • Creating documents in six different forms that contribute to multimodal production (see below) • Using problem-solving methods to navigate digital tools • Appraising methods for self-guided learning about emerging digital tools (i.e. learning how to learn) REQUIRED MATERIALS Note: Many of the “readings” assigned in this class will be online tutorials for using the digital tools needed to compose, produce, and circulate the assigned documents. Because the course focuses on hands-on, active production, the focus of readings often will be tutorials and student work for critique. All texts will be provided on our course website on Canvas. GENERAL EDUCATION OBJECTIVES: COMPOSITION (C) Composition courses provide instruction in the methods and conventions of standard written English (i.e. grammar, punctuation, usage) and the techniques that produce effective texts.
    [Show full text]
  • First-Year Composition and Transfer: a Quantitative Study James D
    First-Year Composition and Transfer: A Quantitative Study James D. Williams, Rhetoric & Linguistics, Soka University Minami Hattori, Psychology, University of Notre Dame Contact: [email protected] Abstract The present study investigated the effect of writing pedagogy on transfer by examining the effect of pedagogical orientation (WAC/WID or ‘traditional’) on content-area grades. Participants were 1,052 undergraduates from 17 schools throughout the United States. Hypothesis was that the WAC/WID orientation would lead to higher transfer levels as measured by participants’ higher content-area performance. Composition grades were collected in year one; content-area grades where collected in year two. Propensity scores were calculated to stratify the groups and minimize selection bias of writing- class assignment, thereby allowing quasi-causal inference. An ANOVA was performed on the resulting 2- by-5 stratified data. Results indicated that students who completed the WAC/WID composition classes received significantly higher content grades than those in the ‘traditional’ writing classes. The results confirmed the hypothesis. Keywords: transfer, academic performance, composition, pedagogy First-Year Composition and Transfer: A Quantitative Study Concerns about the value and intellectual rigor of first-year composition (FYC) are long standing (e.g., Bamberg, 1997; Connors, 1995; Skeffington, 2012), and various studies have reported that FYC does not help students become better writers (e.g., Arum & Roksa, 2011; Fleming, 2002; Zorn, 2013). Although conceptions of ‘better writer’ vary considerably, a consensus nevertheless has formed that FYC should, at a minimum, provide students with transferable writing skills that help them succeed in content-area courses. As Wardle (2007) noted, the FYC requirement throughout US colleges and universities ‘suggests that administrators, policy makers, parents, and students expect the course to prepare students for the writing they will do later—in the university and even beyond it.
    [Show full text]
  • Composition Studies/English Education Connections
    Published on The Writing Instructor (http://writinginstructor.com) English Education Mentoring Composition Studies/English Education Connections Author(s): W. Douglas Baker, Elizabeth Brockman, Jonathan Bush, and Kia Jane Richmond Publication History: The Writing Instructor, September 2007 At the 2001 CCCC, a special interest group met for the first time. Jonathan Bush and Janet Alsup were the co-founders of this SIG, and members were primarily English educators who had completed graduate studies in rhetoric and composition; why else would they be attending the C’s? Five years later, the group—currently known as Composition/English Education Connections—has plans to meet at both CCCC and NCTE, and it is still evolving; however, “professional profile” patterns of participants have begun to emerge. SIG members tend to teach writing or literacy-related methods classes for pre-service English teachers, and they often supervise field experiences and/or student teaching for English majors. In addition, they often work with in-service teachers in National Writing Project sites or graduate composition courses. However, SIG members usually combine these English education responsibilities with so-called “straight” composition roles; more specifically, they are often (or in the past have been) affiliated with first-year composition programs, WAC/WID initiatives, or writing centers. Not surprisingly, then, some SIG members teach in English departments, others teach in education departments, and still others have dual placements in both professional settings. Everyone is welcome. The SIG’s formation coincides with the publication of two significant and closely related texts: Robert Tremmel and William Broz’s Teaching Writing Teachers of High School English and First-Year Composition and a special issue of English Education (volume 31.4 to be precise).
    [Show full text]
  • ULMER - Introduction: Electracy 1 to Comment on SPECIFIC PARAGRAPHS, Click on the Speech Bubble Next to That Paragraph
    ULMER - Introduction: Electracy 1 To comment on SPECIFIC PARAGRAPHS, click on the speech bubble next to that paragraph. There is an analogy for what we are doing when we collaboratively explore the possibilities of new media. We are to the Internet what students of Plato and Aristotle were to the Academy and Lyceum. When the Greeks invented alphabetic writing they were engaged in a civilizational shift from one apparatus to another (from orality to literacy). They invented not only alphabetic writing but also a new institution (School) within which the practices of writing were devised. Here is the salient point: all the operators of “science” as a worldview had to be invented, by distinguishing from religion a new possibility of reason. Electracy similarly is being invented, not to replace religion and science (orality and literacy), but to supplement them with a third dimension of thought, practice, and identity. “Electracy” is to digital media what literacy is to alphabetic writing: an apparatus, or social machine, partly technological, partly institutional. We take for granted now the skill set that orients literate people to the collective mnemonics that confront anyone entering a library or classroom today. Grammatology (the history and theory of writing) shows that the invention of literacy included also a new experience of thought that led to inventions of identity as well: individual selfhood and the democratic state. Thus there are three interrelated invention streams forming a matrix of possibilities for electracy, only one of which is technological. There is no technological determinism, other than the fundamental law of change: that everything is mutating together into something other, different, with major losses and gains.
    [Show full text]
  • View Bad Ideas About Writing
    BAD IDEAS ABOUT WRITING Edited by Cheryl E. Ball & Drew M. Loewe BAD IDEAS ABOUT WRITING OPEN ACCESS TEXTBOOKS Open Access Textbooks is a project created through West Virginia University with the goal of produc- ing cost-effective and high quality products that engage authors, faculty, and students. This project is supported by the Digital Publishing Institute and West Virginia University Libraries. For more free books or to inquire about publishing your own open-access book, visit our Open Access Textbooks website at http://textbooks.lib.wvu.edu. BAD IDEAS ABOUT WRITING Edited by Cheryl E. Ball and Drew M. Loewe West Virginia University Libraries Digital Publishing Institute Morgantown, WV The Digital Publishing Institute believes in making work as openly accessible as possible. Therefore, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. This license means you can re-use portions or all of this book in any way, as long as you cite the original in your re-use. You do not need to ask for permission to do so, although it is always kind to let the authors know of your re-use. To view a copy of this CC license, visit http://creative- commons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA. This book was set in Helvetica Neue and Iowan Old Style and was first published in 2017 in the United States of America by WVU Libraries. The original cover image, “No Pressure Then,” is in the public domain, thanks to Pete, a Flickr Pro user.
    [Show full text]
  • 08075Chap01 X.Pdf
    Foreword CONTENTS FOREWORD: A REFLECTION ON LITERATURE AND COMPOSITION, TWENTY YEARS LATER Winifred Bryan Horner. ix PREFACE . xiii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . xv 1 Introduction: “What Do You Folks Teach over There, Anyway?” Linda S. Bergmann . 1 I Institutional Contexts 2 Composition, Literary Studies, and the End(s) of Civic Education Dominic DelliCarpini . 17 3 Restructuring in Higher Education and the Relationship between Literature and Composition Timothy J. Doherty . 36 4 Causes and Cures for Our Professional Schizophrenia Edward A. Kearns . 54 5 Rhetoric, Literature, and the Ruined University Eve Wiederhold . 73 II Departmental Cultures 6 In this Corner . Barry M. Maid . 93 7 Along the DMZ between Composition and Literature John Heyda . 109 vii a08075_fm 7 1/18/06, 11:59 PM Foreword 8 Whole English, Whole Teachers: Maintaining the Balance between Rhetorical and Literary Expertise Dennis Ciesielski. 124 III Applications in the Classroom 9 Computer-Mediated Communication and the Confluence of Composition and Literature Katherine Fischer, Donna Reiss, and Art Young . 143 10 Composing English 102: Reframing Students’ Lives through Literature Edith M. Baker . 171 11 The Missing Voice in the Debate: What Students Say about Literature in Composition Mary T. Segall . 191 AFTERWORD: A COMPLEX AFFIRMATION OF READING AND WRITING Patricia Harkin . 205 WORKS FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION Linda S. Bergmann . 221 INDEX . 231 EDITORS . 243 CONTRIBUTORS . 245 viii a08075_fm 8 1/18/06, 11:59 PM Introduction: “What DoC YouHAPTER Folks OTeachNE over There, Anyway?” Introduction: “What Do You Folks Teach over There, Anyway?” LINDA S. BERGMANN Purdue University he title of this introduction reiterates a question I’ve spent T nearly an entire career trying to answer, a question asked (not unkindly) by colleagues across the disciplines as I worked with various Writing Across the Curriculum projects and pro- grams.
    [Show full text]