Disorganized Musings

The last couple of days, when I’ve done any work at all, I’ve mostly just worked on the Computers and Composition article that I’m supposed to be revising.  I’ve gotten through most of the articles that the reviewers suggested I read, and I do think that I have a much better sense of the conversations out there surrounding authorship and genre.  The next step, I think, will be to figure out exactly how to work those conversations into the mix.  My thinking is that it might work best to spend something like a paragraph glossing each conversation, and perhaps the places where they intersect (i.e. in Carpenter’s most recent piece on interface and genre).  I will need to read some of the older work by Landow, Lanham, and Joyce, too.  I’m imagining that those guys mostly talk about authorship and media, but I really don’t know enough about them at the moment to speak to it.

If I had to gloss the conversation about authorship, I would first and foremost say that it often draws on Foucault, and therefore it’s often concerned with issues of textual ownership, intellectual property, and the like.  After all, for Foucault, the author-function is more about property and power than it is about writing.  I’ll have to look back at my article, but several of these (the inciters, Hess) talk about citation as a major concern and as a rhetorical move.  I’m pretty sure I talk about citation and naming and the like in my article, so those might be good places to work in some of these sources. 

In terms of genre, I’m a bit less sure.  I understand and am in total agreement with Carpenter’s argument about using genre theory to understand interface as the boundary between genre systems or activity systems.  But that’s not exactly my project.  He’s basically asking about the affinities and overlaps between academic literacy and pop culture literacy.  I suppose I’m asking something similar, but really I’m concerned with a single genre that is at least trying to situate it squarely within an academic activity system, although as the work of Cheryl Ball and others shows, it’s not exactly been a smooth transition.  There’s still a lot of resistance.  Regardless, though, I think I can use his ideas as a jumping off point, to say, now that there is a “born-digital” academic genre that has started to become relatively stabilized, how can we use genre to understand it?  Another way I might use him is to discuss the “relations” idea from Bawarshi’s genre function.  If, as Carpenter says, students—or, by extension, authors more generally—are points of articulation for multiple genre systems, then that certainly constitutes another kind of relation, one I hadn’t quite thought of but that makes a lot of sense. 

I seem to be moving more toward the possibility of lacing these writers into the discussion rather than just blocking them into a single paragraph/section.  I suppose either way it could work, but it might feel more natural to have them laced in throughout.  As I go, I might also need to think about what I want to do with this conclusion, since it seems not to work.  I haven’t looked at it in a bit, but apparently the move to pedagogy at the end doesn’t quite work since I don’t really talk about pedagogy during the entire piece.  Moreover, I settle pretty easily on genre as the better explanatory concept.  I’ll need to review that, though, because it may be that different concepts are going to be better for explaining different ideas.  Authorship may in fact be better in the long run for discussing issues of intellectual property and the like.  However, you may still be able to subsume that under genre, as part of the social action that genre performs in some cases—after all, there are plenty of genres that aren’t inherently endowed with an author-function.  Take, for example, Bawarshi’s discussion of the Patient Medical History Form (PMHF), which has a writer (actually, multiple writers, since one composes the form and another fills it out), but not necessarily an author, or not an author-function.  There is no issue of ownership with that text, or, rather, the issue of ownership functions very differently there than in, say, an academic article or a novel.  No one expects monetary reward for the PMHF.  There are no copyrights or contracts associated with its production.  In terms of distribution, it’s instead governed by HIPAA, I believe, and it is used and appropriated in a number of different ways.

Regardless, the point is that maybe in the conclusion I don’t necessarily want to dismiss the author-function, although I don’t think I do that anyway.  We’ll see how it turns out.

Storms

Today was supposed to be an off day: I was supposed to go for a long run, show the house to a potential renter, and go to the lake--no time to write.  But now it's storming outside, which puts a wrench in all those plans except for showing the house.  I might run in a little bit, too, but I need to let the storm pass over a little bit, so I thought I would write.

I had a fairly productive day yesterday writing and working through some genre theory.  A lot of what I read and took notes on deals with issues of ideology and critical genre studies.  I think this probably be a good line to follow because so much of the visual rhetoric deals with various ideological manifestations of images in the public sphere.  I'm thinking of Diana George and Diane Shoos' article on lynching and execution photos.  If I remember correctly, in that article they talk about the ways those images position viewers as witnesses and (I think more often) voyeurs, with all the implications of those terms.  That actually ties in to another concern of a lot of these genre pieces, which is identity, or the way genres designate certain subject positions for their users.  Because there seems to be a fair amount of overlap here, I'm tempted to start going more for the synthesis and less for the overturning model for this chapter.  After all, ultimately George and Shoos are comparing two related genres of photograph, no?  Even thought they aren't using that term, I think you can pretty easily make the argument that that's what they're doing.  And so my point (sorry about the odd switching between second and first person here) might be that although these various approaches to the visual resonate with genre theory, they can more productively be brought together by recourse to genre as an organizing principle.

Container and Contained

Just to follow up on the end of my last post: Part of the way that Russell gets past the container/contained metaphor isn't just to look at a single activity system but rather to look at the ways writing circulates around multiple activity systems, and he argues that we should look at the changes and boundaries of these systems.  Janet Giltrow argues that one way to do so, one way to seek out the boundaries (although one way that is probably insufficient alone) might be to look for meta-genre.  To paraphrase Burke, we can look at the ways people talk about their talk-about in order to reveal the boundaries of their practice, the prescriptions, proscriptions, prohibitions, advice, differentiations, activities, generalizations, rationalizations, and the like that help participants delimit the situations in which they work and move.  If nothing else, this seems like a pretty good methodological move that you can keep in mind as you go about articulating and asking questions in the various sites you're moving in.

New Genre Concepts

Yesterday I spent a lot of time reading articles about genre, which was basically in my plan, although I didn't manage to take notes on those articles--that's today's job.  A lot of what I read was pretty interesting, though.  Although I think I'm pretty well versed in the fundamentals of genre theory, these one-shot articles do some interesting work fleshing out the more intricate parts of the body of knowledge.  I was especially interested in Peter Medway's discussion of fuzzy genres.  He writes about architecture students' sketchbooks, which are a very loose, baggy genre.  In fact, they're so loose that he wonders whether they constitute a genre at all.  Of course, he decides that they are, but only after arguing that ossified formal/textual characteristics should not be the main criteria by which we define a genre--rather, if I have this right, it's recognized by its use in particular contexts to meet a perceived exigence.  That piece was also useful because it gives a series of citations about multimodality and genre that I can probably draw from as I go about doing my work (I wonder if they're the same citations in Prior?). 

Also useful was Catherine Schryer's use of Bakhtin's chronotope to work toward a more critical understanding of genre and context.  Although she still seems to use the synecdoche where the genre is "contained" by its context (see my thought on this below), I do think that the chronotope might be a good way to approach context in a more rigorous way--a way that might satisfy some on my committee.  In part, I'm arguing that context is constituted by the written and visual (and other) genres that circulate in any given situation.  But her idea gives the possibility that I can define context by configurations of space, time, and human values--if I get the chronotope correctly.  I find this attractive because it might add a more material understanding of context into the mix.  I'll have to think about this some more.

To return to this idea of the container metaphor of genre: does structuration get us out of this or does it perpetuate it?  The synecdochic view would hold that context influences text, or that text is a local manifestation of a larger context.  Structuration also poses the opposite here, that not only does situation/context/society/form structure genre, but genre also participates in structuring context.  This seems to substitute a part/whole metaphor for a container/contained metaphor.  Is that any better?  I think maybe it is, since it recognizes a more dynamic, complex view of things.  But one thing that I would take from Russell is that it's the idea of use that really matters here.  I think it's Pare that talks about this idea or maybe Medway, but if different people were to produce the same text in vastly different situations--i.e. a business person producing a memo for a company and a student producing a memo in a professional writing class--they wouldn't constitute the same genre.  This seems useful to me, too, because of the idea that the images that will be used in these different classes that I'm looking at won't necessarily be the same genre since they're being used in different ways. 

Regardless, my plan for the day is to take notes on these articles from The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre, and then maybe to go on and read some of Devitt or Bawarshi, or else some more one-shot articles.  I'm not sure if I need to go back to those more foundational texts or not as I go about developing my definitions.  I'm thinking that it might not hurt to go through and think about how they define concepts without necessarily reading the whole thing.

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!

A Bit More Precise

So, as I alluded to in my last post, part of my method for this blog for the time being will be to peruse academic blogs and think about them rhetorically. This will be in the service of developing an archive and, if I'm lucky, a methodology for my dissertation, which at the moment, at least, is going to be about the changing face of academic discourse. Or, since plenty of people have critiqued the idea of a stable, unified academic discourse, it may be more accurate to say that I'm looking at the ways in which new genres are changing the writing practices that many academics use. This means that we need to attend to the ways blogs and other forms of writing mediate academic practice. Or, to put it one more way, an ecology of academic writing needs to take into account the new genres in which scholars compose.

Political/Narrative Experience for a Digital Culture

Through all the hoopla about President Obama's first 100 days, that much-lamented, over-analyzed, arbitrary marker of a president's success, one that most people will forget, Slate.com has given us the brilliance of 100 Days of Barak Obama's Facebook News Feed. Except for the fact that they get the formatting wrong (Facebook news feeds appear in reverse chronological order, like blogs), Christopher Beam and Chris Wilson use a dead-on parody of Facebook's features, starting with Obama's joining the Washington, D.C. network and ending with Arlen Spector joining the group Democrats. The piece is reminiscent of what seems to be an emerging genre--the Facebook narrative. See, for example, this version of Hamlet.

Two thoughts about this interest me. First, it seems that Facebook especially, but also perhaps MySpace and even blogs, are becoming stable enough genres that they are able to help us organize experience. That is, the "tropes" of joining networks, commenting on statuses, sending gifts, and the like are recognizable enough that they can constitute a meaningful narrative experience. Second, and in relation to the first, is the idea that this specific "facebook narrative" points up the possibility that Facebook feeds are now even able to organize political experience. Beam and Wilson implicitly evoke Obama's masterful use of Facebook for fundraising and campaiging and ask us to consider how that political experience might be informing the present. This seems to have two effects: it reveals the extent to which Obama used Facebook to push the boundaries of the "genre" of political campaigning, but perhaps more importantly, it also show the ways in which political experience is typified, or genred, and the ways that it can be reduced to a set of typical "moves" in the vein of a Facebook page. Political intrigue can be reduced to pithy posts: " Barack Obama sent Somali Pirates a Trio of Snipers."

So it goes both ways: Facebook narratives (especially parodies) are becoming a way to organize political experience, but they also reveal the ways in which poltical experience has always been typical--Facebook feeds just do it in a more compressed, systematic, and therefore recognizable way.

I guess more remains to be seen in this vein, but I would like to continue thinking about genred experience in digital environments. If you come across anything interesting, send it my way!