Preliminaries

I suppose I should say a bit more about my proposed method for this blog, and then maybe give it a whirl.  Ideally, my intention is to use it to recap what I've done recently (i.e. yesterday), to look forward to the day's research and writing, and finally to recap the day's writing and look forward to the next.  But at minimum, I'll use it as scratch paper, to warm up my brain in the morning as I drink my coffee.  Hence the blog's current subtitle, "A Rhetor's Sandbox."

So, here's a go at warming up my mind to think about this project, and, as a mind exercise, I'm going to do it without actually looking at my prospectus:

My dissertation looks at students' encounters with images outside composition.  Put differently, I want to understand how students go about analyzing and producing visuals in courses that may work with those kinds of texts differently than composition.  Composition, of course, has developed a lot of really interesting theories about visual rhetoric, design, multimodality, and the like, ultimately in the service of helping students become better rhetors and better readers, whether they're reading/producing words, images, sounds, or whatever.  As a corollary to this, others have begin studying images in the public sphere, so that Composition doesn't have to be limited to classroom.  I'm totally on board with both the former and the latter missions for the field, but personally I'm more interested in what the people we encounter most often--students--do with images, especially in tandem with writing. 

So, a fundamental assumption of my dissertation is that I can continue to expand Composition's purview by looking at what students do outside of our own doorsteps.  One piece that has been somewhat problematic is what I will do with this knowledge once I've developed it.  As I plan right now, I will develop an advanced composition course that capitalizes on the work I've done so far, but part of me wonders if that's all that necessary, especially because people seem to take offense to it, as if I'm saying that I have the better way to conduct an advanced composition course.  I'm not sure I'm saying that yet.  I'm hoping to be more descriptive than anything, perhaps just saying, for anyone interested in incorporating this kind of work into the classroom, here's one example of what that might look like.  I don't know.  But this chapter is still pretty far away.

For now, I need to be worried about chapter 1, which is basically my theory chapter, and this is the one I'll be working on a lot for the time being.  Here, I'm taking rhetorical genre theory and basically arguing that that is a better way to look at student rhetorics in localized situations than any of the theories of the visual that Composition has developed so far.  Now, this might be a comparative evaluation, or it might be a synthesis--I'm not sure.  My thought is that there are a few main categories that I could use to synthesize the two fields of scholarship, rather than simply elevating one over the other: ideology, form, context, and, perhaps, process, although right now I'm having trouble remembering what the final key term was--an example, actually, of why this is a good exercise, think.  Regardless, though, I think I can effectively say that these different concerns of visual rhetorics can be reorganized under the rubric of genre effectively.  I'll need a slightly stronger argument than that, but I think it will come.  One idea that might be a side point that I've been thinking of is the possibility that genre (especially if it is informed by activity theory at least a little bit) might be a way to get out of the analysis versus production binary that a lot of the field seems mired in; instead, it might be interesting to think in terms of use, since these are going to be tools for getting things done in the world.  Although I'm certainly interested in having students create new, interesting rhetorics, so much of what they encounter on an everyday basis is already prefabricated, and they have to work within it or jump off from it (Freedman's idea of uptake), which is much more complex than just analysis and/or production might allow.  The more I think about it, the more I like this idea--it's something worth following up on.

So, I've been thinking that my first main step is going to be to go back through the major genre theorists that I hope to draw from, take notes on them, and basically to start making a grid of the major concepts in genre theory as I understand them.  I can start putting those parts together here, but the main thing will be using that to create my own understanding of genre theory for the chapter.  After that, I'll do some similar work with visual rhetorics, ultimately using those two grids to write up my synthesis.  That's the plan for now!