Author: Brett

A former Journalism and Mass Communication major at St. Bonaventure, Brett changed his major to philosophy sophomore year. Now, a recent graduate he's looking to continue his twin passions in writing and philosophy in whatever ways he can.

CCR 611: Citizenship, Affect, and Literacy

On By BrettIn affect, composition, identity, teachingLeave a comment

As Amy Wan highlights, citizenship is a messy word, a word that comes up in many discussions about writing but rarely gets interrogated or defined. It exists as a “ambient” term.

At its most reductive, it’s a legal status, as Wan points out. But it also has a cultural element infused with literacy. As Wan notes, “it [citizenship] is not simply a conferred legal status, but cultivated through a number of civil political, and social rights and obligations” (27).  Literacy training allows one to “cultivate” these abilities, letting people who lack literacy–like the immigrants whom Wan discusses–enter as “productive” members of society.

Here, once again, literacy instruction is tied up with gate keeping. Instructors of writing, as part of the ambient cohort of literacy training, do citizen training. And the roles of this citizen, while having many contradictory forms, closely align with economics in Wan’s view: “Through an emphasis on productivity and economic survival in literacy training, immigrants were taught the importance of literacy as a habit of citizenship and as a marker of productivity” (41). And this productivity was further aligned with the habit-training of literacy. “Good” citizens are not only literate and productive, but honest and clean.

And above all, this citizenship bore the odd paradox of becoming part of something–the state, the market, the culture, etc.–but had whil being individual. One chose to be productive, good-natured, and American, says the narrative, by pursuing literacy.

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IST 700: Sentiment, Affect, and Twitter

On By BrettIn digital humanities, research, social media researchLeave a comment

This week’s readings brought me back to my time teaching in Egypt, during the election of Morsi and the coup the following summer that put him out of power. Though my Internet access was limited both summers–largely relegated to communal computers and one dodgy PC in the prep room–I often tried to check in with Twitter.

My second summer, the day of the military takeover, a few tweets entered the stream about tanks in Cairo and the Presidential Palace. I saw journalists and activists positing frantically, while others were trying to get confirmation. No one knew what was happening. For a few days, protestors for Tamarod had taken to the streets against Morsi. Meetings both with and without Morsi went on amid these protests. For my part, the seminary where I was teaching was on lock down, preventing anyone from coming or going without approval. So beyond the nightly sounds of protestors gathering for nearby hot spots, Twitter was my only window–or “stream”–on the action.

I felt surreal during the take sightings. Seeing the news pour in on “real time.” None of the networks had anything, but across Twitter, people were mobilized and locked in.

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CCR 711: Bodies, Subjectivities, and Being

On By BrettIn disability rhetoric, disability studiesLeave a comment

As Nirmala Erevelles writes in her article, “it is the ‘ideology of disability’ which has been used to justify the sexual division of labor that constructed gender as a political and economic concept, the production of class/caste differences. . . the production of racial categories. . . and the upholding of compulsory heterosexuality” (104).

In other words, at different historical times and spaces, different bodies have been disabled. During colonialism, slavery disabled African bodies, for example And more broadly, disability connects to the surplus of labor inherent to the system, as such subjects lack the ability to “produce” or labor in the capitalist economy. This excludes them from the role of producer and consumer, erased into surplus and further marked as disabled.

This sort of historical materialist grounding helped guide more post-structuralist and post-human theories in Erevelles’ account, I thought, the section on cyborgs being particularly clear. Initially, the promises of hybrid and human, technological and flesh, and the different assemblage-based bodies afforded in this paradigm seems ideal for people with disability. But such a paradigm still has divisions among social classes, with many of these bodies out of reach for most. Moreover, the production and technology needed for these cyborg bodies often arises from capitalist labor and the hierarchies that follow with that, a material reality often missed by theorists.

Thus. as Erevelles writes, “By locating their emancipatory practices within the space of the social imaginary, as opposed to the actual materiality of of economic conditions, poststructuralists continue to uphold a utopic vision of emancipation” (98-99).

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CCR 611: Discussing Remedial Writing

On By BrettIn compositionLeave a comment

I’m not sure what to take away from the readings. Perhaps that’s the byproduct of my own frazzled ontology as of late, but I also think part of the difficulty arises from the complex, fraught nature of the debate.

Kynard, I think, presents the most dynamic critique. By redrawing the history, she presents a completely new insight, approach, perspective, tear in the curtain. As she says:

“When I stopped looking for black folk in basic writing scholarship and in the history of open admissions and instead placed basic writing scholarship and open admissions into the already existing history of African American education and literacy, lo and behold, I got a whole different kind of story” (189).

And indeed, that story was different. Protest, tension, ransacked offices, Jim Crow and bodily danger at the heart of literacy. The voice of student. The bodies of student. The structures–both physical and conceptual–making walls and red lines. The pilling up of de jure and de facto discrimination. The hard-fought challenges. And Kynard goes on to vocalize an approach:

“The issue here then is not to insert black teachers into the basic writing paradigm, but to deliberately see black compositionists’ practices, research, politics, and discourses inside of the much longer standing protest tradition of black teaching” (189).

In other words, this “whole different kind of story” needs to keep going, not just in the way composition constructs or tells history, but in how it in enacts it. In how it makes history. How it orients itself.

In other words, composition has a lot to think about.

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IST 700: Content Analysis and Learning Methods

On By BrettIn researchLeave a comment

I first ran into coding last semester in the methods class for our CCR major, a somewhat intuitive and exploratory method from Foss and Waters’ Destination Dissertation. 

In this method, basically, one works through the sample, looks for examples that connect to the research project’s focus and label them. Gradually, one refines the codes looking for higher-order conceptual connections.

From there, I got more into discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis. I also read through parts of Saldaña’s coding manual and tried practicing some of it in my own research–though I am still not very good.

I found myself exhausted by the time it takes and the slipperiness of interpretation involved with coding and content analysis, particularly the qualitative variety. As Herring (2004) notes, interpretation is both “art” and “craft,” but I often found this art and craft pervade the work more generally.

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CCR 711: Junius Wilson and “Being” on Trial

On By BrettIn disability studies, researchLeave a comment

“Where was the judge he had never seen? Where was the High Court he had never reached? He raised his hands and spread out all his fingers. But the hands of one of the men closed round his throat, just as the other drove the knife deep into his heart and turned it twice.” -Kafka, The Trial

“Unable to elicit responses that suggested the contrary, staff and doctors concluded from the available court documents that Wilson’s alleged criminal behavior was the result of deviant biology— of a bad nature. ” -Susan Burch and Hannah Joyner, Unspeakable

Kafka’s writing displays a tension between an individual trying to  make his way in the world who gets marked or entrapped simply for being alive. In the Metamorphosis, Gregor Samson wakes up into the nightmare of being transformed into a “gigantic vermin,” often depicted as a beetle. In The Trial, Josef K wakes up to find himself on trial for no reason–though the narrator insinuates that “someone must have been telling lies.” In The Castle, K finds summoned by The Castle to work in a town, when the same castle, through a near-comical network of bureaucratic dysfunction, executes him. From “The Country Doctor” to “The Penal Colony” and “Poseidon,” Kafka’s characters face alienation, guilt, and bureaucratic bulwarks against basic freedoms. Their being gets sentenced, suspect and shamed.

Moreover, his characters try to fight these existential sentences as best they can. But this is to no avail. As “The Messenger” makes clear:

“he is still forcing his way through the chambers of the innermost palace; never will he overcome them; and were he to succeed at this, nothing would be gained: he would have to fight his way down the steps; and were he to succeed at this, nothing would be gained: he would have to cross the courtyard. . . and if he were to burst out at last through the outermost gate—but it can never, never happen—before him still lies the royal capital, the middle of the world, piled high in its sediment.”

Reading Unspeakable, like many of the readings thus far in 711, Kafka has been close by. Here, Junius Wilson is “guilty,” much like Kafka’s characters, for his own mode of being. He is guilty by being black in the Jim Crow South. He is guilty by being deaf, muted and uncomprehensible to many–a break further exacerbated by the limitations his Raleigh signs later play compared with ASL. Later, he is made guilty of a crime he never commits, it seems, by Arthur Smith. And still later, under the sterilization law, his misdiagnosis of being “a danger to himself and others” leads to his castration.

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CCR 611: Professionalism, Boundaries, and Theory

On By BrettIn composition, teachingLeave a comment

As an undergraduate, my first taste of “composition” was through a sort of disciplinary tension between three schools of thought. In a creative writing club on campus, I worked heavily with one set of professors: communication instructors with a penchant for creative writing and literary journalism. Most of the club was also journalism majors. But we were also poets, fiction writers, and and creative nonfiction writers.

In this camp, I found a practical outlook: write often, read often, experience widely. While one of the profs had an MFA–and later a PhD–in creative writing, he was skeptical of the MFA rout, thinking it to be little more than an expensive qualification badge. “Real” writing could still take place without this training.

Camp two was a literature professor who edited a poetry journal and was well-steeped in Literature and contemporary work. Without much taste for theory, he celebrated the passion of writing and reading. Reading my short stories, he encouraged me to pursue the MFA and didn’t have much feeling about composition beyond, “The job market seems better than literature.”

Finally, the rhet-comp faculty encouraged me to go the rhet-comp rout. I heard the job market argument, but they also asserted how it connected to my philosophy interest. And like the communications professors, discussed the difficulties of the MFA–although one of the profs was a published creative writer with an MFA.

Each of these camps intersected and fractured in odd ways. The communications side considered rhet-comp boring. “They can’t persuade the school to pass a writing major, even with rhetoric in their name,” one said. But the communications faculty also critiqued the Ivory-Towered literature profs talking themselves into circles over Derrida and Keats. For their part, the English profs disparaged the dirty hands of those engaged in the “dark arts” of PR or the slipshod quality of fast-paced journalism.

And most other departments had never heard of composition as a field, and those that did thought it dealt with things like comma splices and thesis statements. Even more bizarrely, our philosophy department taught the second required writing course, with many making it a class in symbolic logic and syllogisms.

All I knew was that I liked writing. But everyone talked about writing in different ways, caught in disciplinary worldviews.

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IST 700: Ecologies, Spheres, and Messy Research

On By BrettIn digital humanities, networks, research, social media researchLeave a comment

“We conceptualize a web sphere as not simply a collection of web sites, but as a site of dynamically defined digital resources spanning multiple web sites deemed relevant or related to a central event event, concept or theme, and often connected by hyperlinks.” -Steven M. Schneider and Kirsten A. Foot

“That the web arrived as infrastructure awaiting content, as opposed to content awaiting infrastructure, is often not appreciated.” -Richard Rogers

I was feeling a lot of synthesis with this week’s readings. Not just among texts but also with past reading–especially the readings on bounding–and readings from my other classes, like this piece by Jody Shipka on lower-case “a” archiving. These notions of archive and “websphere” also connect to my larger interests in networks, authorship, ambience, and intertextuality.

Rogers’ distinction between “infrastructure” and “content” captures one of the elements of Internet research that fascinates me: the role in the the ever-changing infrastructures in this ever-changing content. For example, Rogers as well as Schneider and Foot point out the role that linking has or advertisements in composing a website, and archiving a page as pure content–basic texts, images, sounds, etc.–does not capture this infrastructure.

Early on in my interest in composition and rhetorical studies, the “ecological” thinking of Marylin Cooper, Sidney Dobrin, Thomas Rickert, Nathaniel Rivers, Jody Shipka, Jenny Rice, etc., proved particularly illuminating. Especially Rice’s piece on rhetorical ecologies. The way texts circulate, get re-purposed, get buried or dug up, acted on by different authors in different genres with different exingencies and audiences–all of this ecological richness spoke to my outlook on the complex ontologies of textuality, digital or otherwise.

More concretely, I think that fanfiction has a dynamic websphere surrounding a given fandom, ranging from site-archived pieces, fanwiki pages, author pages and social media outlets, the texts themselves, the comment section. Both context (text, artwork, and Podcasts) and infrastructure (links, searches, folksonomies) inform practice and community, which is likely why many studies take an ethnographic approach. One can study texts and artifacts (through content, rhetorical, or discourse analysis), but these are entwined with fan practice. The artifacts have hand prints and metadata, and the users with these hands and metadata are part of this ecology, along with the nonhuman structures.

These fascinating linkages and the social practices they bolster and bound, like the 9/11 Memorializing, challenge the potential boundary between users, content, artifacts, offline, online, time, space, etc. I think this is why a clear question–and a well-steered method–are worth thinking over as much as the potential results. Phrased another way, the hows, the whats, the whos, and the whys of research need to be in close communion.

This complexity, as Jason might say, is messy.

CCR 611: “In order to have a language remain fixed”

On By BrettIn composition, teachingLeave a comment

“[I]n order to have a language remain fixed, it is first necessary that those who speak it become dead.” –Thomas Lounsbury (qtd. in Harker 18)

“Reality is infinitely diverse, compared with even the subtlest conclusions of abstract thought, and does not allow of clear-cut and sweeping distinctions. Reality resists classification.” –Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead

Both Crowley and Harker pick up the “gate-keeping” function of composition and its role in erecting a “great divide” between the educationally privileged and others left outside the gate, sifted into basic writing classes through exams or excluded altogether.

Harker takes a more historical approach centered around the assumptions of literacy, particularly the literacy myth. Crowley takes a more contemporary, labor-focused approach, examining the problems associated with the universal composition requirement and making the “modest proposal” to make it optional for students, though she  grounds this in historical issues.

Crowley’s modest proposal to end the requirement did not seem as far fetched as I initially thought it would. Combined with Harker’s historical look at literacy and role it played in similar proposals, I found myself more responsive to the proposal. I’m not sure it would do all of the things that Crowley lists–like the erasure of intake exams or the creation of more equitable curricula and labor–and as she notes, “if you work in a corrupt system, you have to face the fact that making things better for people working
in one part of the system may make things worse for people who work in another part of it.”

But I think the “universal” nature of this requirement is worth considering, but to do so, I want to step back from the readings, focusing on the notion of “death” evoked by Lounsbury and Dostoevsky’s title, a reference to the Czarist prison he served time in. For Dostoevsky, the people “die” through their exile from society. Although many of his characters will face literal death via execution, their exclusion results in a sort of death-in-life.

In Lounsbury’s quote, I see a potential link with “dead” languages. Latin and Greek may seem more fixed than contemporary English because the speakers are all “dead”–though I think this stability is somewhat simplistic and wrong. But also, the “death” here is a similar exclusion from the influence of language. The language is both “fixed” (repaired) and “fixed” (made stable) as one “fixes” (sterilizes) the speaking public in a given context. Heteroglossia and utterance give way to print’s perceived permanence and longevity.

Thus the question of who and what get excluded from composition becomes the more salient question. Phrased another way, perhaps the difficulties of this “universal requirement” aren’t in the required part, but the universal. Needing to fit a unified goal across an institution or a set of institutions feels both impossible and oppressive. And in particularly top-down universalizing curricula goals–like in states like Colorado–I wonder how assumptions get made about students, institutional goals, and literacy.

I argue that these assumptions lead to the exclusions that “fix” language student voice, creating the gate-keeping that Harker and Crowley critique. In an ideal world, composition could be about opening gates or complicating gates, drawing from the embodied, enworlded, and contextualized “reality” of students and instructors, which remain frustratingly unfixed and non-universal.

But ever resilient and reified, myths of literacy persist and perpetuate power structures. Thus, I think the step may begin more basically by challenging these myths. Perhaps this may involve repealing the requirement, but it may also involve something more basic: checked assumptions, nomadic sensitivities, and a careful assumption to listen closely to both labor and student–not just as abstracts, but as ever-changing bodies.

CCR 611: Multimodality, Tinkering, and the Craft/Comp Border

On By BrettIn composition, digital humanities, teachingLeave a comment

When I was younger, I built things. Rolling out an industrial-sized roll of thick, white paper onto the cold floor of my parent’s glassed-in back porch, I drew grassy fields, rivers, mountains, and beaches that gave way to scribbled-on seas. But that was just the first step. Soon I took out slender wooden train tracks and blocks, building a set of towns and rail networks across my paper countryside.

In the summer, my neighbor and I made paper planes, folding for hours on my grandfathers weather-grayed table in the backyard. We also drew designs in notebooks: go carts, forts, a zip line to deliver notes between houses. My basement table was covered with LEGO models, K’Nex, Tinker-Tots–whatever sets I could find.

As we got older, we built robots, using a kit to construct and program them.  Inspired by the show Robot Wars, we mostly had them fight, filming them on my parent’s VHS camera. But they had other uses, like taking care of my rabbit or trying to go up and down a particularly difficult hill.

These days, I don’t build much. Except with my nephews. But even they often prefer videogames, kickball, and playing with their instruments.

So, considering multimodal composition–through both digital architecture and tactile 3-D printing–brought back a spirit of play and tinkering. The pieces also brought some helpful elements to draw from for concrete teaching moments and larger teaching philosophies.

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