#9.

Wysocki, Anne Frances. "Introduction: Into Between--On Composition in Mediation." Composing(Media)=Composing(Embodiment). Eds. Kristin L. Arola and Anne Frances Wysocki. Utah State UP. 2012. 1-22.

Banks, Adam. "Oakland, The Word, and The Divide: How We All Missed the Moment." from Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground. NCTE Press. 2006. 11-46.

I feel like the heart of Wysocki’s argument is that writing should be thought of “as a technology that enables us to experience our bodies as our bodies,” even as it “mediates those bodies in line with existing institutions” (22). So, in my understanding of her argument, writing makes us aware of our own experiences as a consciousness inside of a body—we understand our own physicality as we write—but our bodies are simultaneously negotiated and remediated by other ideologies. I definitely understand why we read Wysocki’s article with Banks negotiation of African American rhetoric. I see Banks’ argument fitting very much with the second part of Wysocki’s argument regarding the ideologies thrust upon/remediating bodies. Banks writes, “African Ameican rhetoric has always been multimedia, has always been about body and voice and image, even when they only set the stage for language” (25).  Banks writes about the dumbing down of course material for African Americans, about the assumptions regarding ebonics, and how the internet provides an interesting and unique space for a “dropping out of marked race” (30).

I agree with Wysocki that writing encourages an awareness of our bodies. When I sit down to write a paper, I have a very specific process, space, and method. If I skip a step, I’m distracted and my writing seems off. To be sure, this could simply be a reflection of my own neuroses, but my process makes me think about every decision I make before, during, and after I write, down to the gum that I must chew to deal with my own nervous energy. I wonder how Wysocki’s argument might be translated in terms of multimodal projects—I’d think that these multimodal projects would make us even more aware of our bodies and our processes of making. 

#8.

Chapter 3 of O'Gorman, Marcel. E-Crit: Digital Media, Critical Theory, and the Humanities. Toronto, Ontario: Toronto UP, 2007. Print.

O’Gorman asks, “Just as Ramus’s scholarly method had a great influence in shaping a print apparatus that has persisted for five centuries, might it not be possible to invent scholarly methods to shape the digital apparatus?” (50). He continues by arguing that this trend of “transferring the practices of conventional scholarship… from one medium into a newer more efficient medium” is nothing new, and that the reluctance to accept new forms of scholarship isn’t new either. In my understanding, O’Gorman uses Blake’s works of composite art as a means to explore digitization. He argues that “Blake’s works of composite art might not arouse our senses of smell, taste, and touch, but he invites us to engage with his prints on something other than a visual level; his work compels us to react in ways that might altogether change the way in which we see and experience the world” (57). O’Gorman also brings us back to the image-text, asserting that it is an “enigmatic space in which word and picture meet but never reconcile, for they are bound in a dialectical relationship  in which ‘neither can be reduced to the other’s terms’” (62). He then discusses how he applied these notions in his classroom through a multimodal project, though he never really calls it that. He asks his students to “write with” Blake by giving them the freedom to interact with his text without context.

A main thing that I wondered regarding this “writing with Blake” project was that if his interpretation of what occurred—the different interpretations of Blake’s text—is fair/accurate. To be sure, students have very different educational and personal backgrounds. O’Gorman asserts “by creating exercises such as “Re-writing Blake,’ instructors are not asking students to write about the poet/painter; they are asking students to write with him” (66). My question is this: can the same goals be achieved if a handful of students have already read/are familiar with Blake’s work? How might that change the classroom dynamic?

I feel there are TONS of connections between O’Gorman’s work and the other course readings. This chapter is very much concerned with the construction and the interpretation of texts, which I see connecting to Lanham’s “at” versus “through” method as well as Slatin, who argued that it is up to the author to predict how a reader will look at a text and to guide them through it without being too predictable. I see Faigley and Kirschenbaum reflected when O’Gorman discusses how the Ramist spatilization “haunts our educational apparatus to this day; the same technological drive toward efficiency that spawned text-books on logic is now producing distance education and the ambitious electronic archiving projects that characterize much of humanities scholarship in the digital age” (50). I see a link between O’Gorman’s “Re-writing Blake” project and Shipka’s discussion of multimodality, and a link between his discussion of how Blake “teaches us not to trust our visual sense alone—an invaluable lesson for students bombarded daily by the words and images of a postmodern mediascape in which the imagetext is the dominant mode of communication” to George’s discussion of the value of visual arguments and Selfe/Hesse/Selfe’s discussion of aurality (66). O’Gorman’s interpretation of the “writing-with” strategy made me think of co-authorship issues and the authors that we’ve read that are concerned about them—Lanham, Slatin, and Bolter&Grusin.

#7.

Yancey, Kathleen Blake. "Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key." College Composition and Communication. 56.2 (2004): 297-328. Print.

George, Diana. "From Analysis to Design: Visual Communication in the Teaching of Writing." College Composition and Communication 54.1 (Sept. 2002): 11-39

Selfe, Cynthia L. "The Movement of Air, The Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing." College Composition and Communication. 60.4 (2009): 616-663. Print.

Hesse, Doug. "Response to Cynthia L. Selfe's 'The Movement of Air, The Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing.'" College Composition and Communication. 61.3 (2010): 602-605. Print.

Selfe, Cynthia L. "Response to Doug Hesse" College Composition and Communication. 61.3 (2010): 606-611. Print.

To begin, while I thought the content of Yancey’s article, “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key”, was interesting, I had a hard time reading it due to her the choices she made while making. The text looked jumbled to me, with bold quotes and questions and footnotes along the right side of the text rather than the bottom. I wasn’t sure, at first, if she was following the tradition of pulling out key quotes from her text for more attention—I quickly realized that she was remediating the footnote. A key thing that I took away from Yancey (other than that I, as a reader, have trouble negotiating texts when too many things are happening because I’m not sure what I should be reading and in which order—thank you, #Slatin) was her notion of composition. She writes, “we already inhabit a model of communication practices incorporating multiple genres related to each other, those multiple genres remediated across time and space, linked one to the next circulating across and around rhetorical situations both inside and outside school. This is composition—and this is the content of composition” (308). Since starting this class in August, I’ve had the question of where our classrooms end, and, in Yancey’s view, it seems as though they don’t. Our students are always learning new writing genres on their own, outside of school—it is only our direct consciousness over their process that ends when they leave our physical (or online) classrooms.

George’s article followed the tradition I previously mentioned of pulling out key quotes/crucial information for more attention. I actually read George before Yancey because the link on our course schedule isn’t working and I googled to find Yancey’s article—this order of reading probably has affected my interpretation. Anyway, George’s overall argument was that “the terms of debate typical in discussions of visual literacy and the teaching of writing have limited the kinds of assignments we might imagine for composition” (11). I agree with this, especially after thinking about the traditional alphabetic forms of assessment (mentioned in Yancey’s article) that we grow up with. Being a student that tests poorly, I violently agree with the notion that being assessed in a strictly alphabetic way in both classrooms and standardized tests is both limiting and stunting. George argues, “our students have a much richer imagination for what we might accomplish with the visual than our journals have yet to address” (12). She also delves into Lauer’s question of “what do we call it?” and Kirschenbaum’s question of defining our field.

The Selfe-Hesse-Selfe discussion was also pretty interesting in the sense that George discussed visual arguments—that is, arguments that “make a claim or assertion and attempt to sway an audience by offering reasons to accept that claim… primarily through the visual” (30)—Selfe delves into aural composition, arguing that “the relationship between aurality and writing has limited our understanding of composing as a multimodal rhetorical activity and has therefore deprived our students of a way to make meaning” (616). I agree with Selfe—students are not only in a culture obsessed with the visual, but also with the aural. She explains her goal in looking at aural scholarship, writing, “I hope to encourage teachers to develop an increasingly thoughtful understanding of a whole range of modalities and semiotic resources in their assignments and then to provide students the opportunities of developing expertise with all available means of persuasion and expression, so that they can function as literate citizens in a world where communications cross geopolitical, cultural, and linguistic borders and are enriched rather than diminished by semiotic dimensionality” (618). I see this notion of molding citizens in certain ways to be very Foucaultian. I feel the main thing that I learned from reading the Selfe-Hesse-Selfe discussion was a better sense of how to define what we do, which is a question Hesse posed. He asked, “Is our field “rhetoric/composing” or is it “writing/composing?” Selfe answered in her 2010 article, writing, “[rhetoric/composing] suggests an openness to multiple modalities of rhetorical expression…a literacy education focused solely on writing will produce citizens with an overly narrow and exclusionary understanding of the world and the variety of audiences who will read and respond to their work” (606).

After synthesizing and negotiating the readings, I guess I can say that my biggest take away is this: multimodality is an equalizer and a way to prepare students for the culture they participate within. As intimidating as I sometimes find multimodal projects, I can’t disagree with this. Multimodal projects and scholarship ask students to synthesize information in a way that plays to their strengths.