Graduate Texts

Here's what I'm thinking of teaching for my first graduate seminar, "Rhetoric, Writing, & Teaching." It is designed for newbies to rhetoric, especially teachers who need continuing education credits or who are in our Teaching Secondary English master's program. However, TAs, creative writers, and literary students will no doubt also find something of interest.

"The Written Word is a Lie"

Tom Snyder's interview with John Lydon has to be one of the most sublime moments in all of television. The only was to save rock 'n roll was to kill it.



Snyder's insistence that Lydon defines himself and PIL simply demonstrates his inability to grasp what punk was all about and that Lydon and Levine intuited the postmodern condition. "There should be no difference between who's onstage and who's in the audience" (4:40).

This is an aesthetics consonant with much of deleuze's thinking. PIL, in Lydon's description is pure difference.



Snyder's query about "What do you like?" could easily be "what are you for?" as opposed to what are you against; be positive Snyder demands, but Lydon doesn't give up. He only against, only a rebel without a cause and endlessly at that. With so many having gotten the Sex Pistols wrong, there is more to the end of rock 'n roll. and PIL's endeavor is to expose that pure difference by melding with it. It is anti-stardom and Lydon is a consummate writer of anti-stardom.

Lydon's writing, of course, is preceded by Artaud and followed by Cobain. And Sirc has traced out how Cobain's writing is important as a heuristic. We might go so far as to follow Cobain back to Artaud through Lydon and apply the same description to them as Sirc does to Cobain: Orpheus, all of them, gazing from below and exposing the world of the dead.

Anger is an energy
May the road rise with you
Anger is an energy
May the road rise with you

Undergraduate Composition Theory

I finally get to teach the course for which I was ostensibly hired: Theory and Practice of Writing. This is a required course in the Professional Writing Program but serves other students in the Major and in the Graduate Programs. I have already been tinkering with the syllabus based upon my interactions with students and faculty. As the course description indicates, it has largely been a survey through the accepted modes of composition. I want to change that. I want students to get less coherence in each major approach and more of the push and pull that often generates the interesting debates in composition.

So, I have a couple histories (Nystrand, Greene, Weimelt; Reynolds, Bizzell, Herzberg), Berlin's taxonomy, and outlines of composition's purpose (Emig, Bruffee, Ackerman, Dobrin) as opening moves and the rest mostly complicates the accepted storylines. Of course the real trick in all this is to get them to understand the reception of poststructuralism in composition -- certainly "Winds of Change" is key, but I'm wondering how much original material is needed. Do I assign "Signature Event Context"? Plus I need a full-length text and despite my own education, not to mention partiality to the text, I cannot in all good conscience assign Fragments of Rationality.

So, I'm looking for good texts that can speak to where composition is post-millenium. I'm toying with the idea of Sanchez's Function of Theory, but I'm wondering if that might be too much for undergraduates. For whatever graduate enrolls, it has a lot to offer, especially if they are thinking of becoming a TA in our program. Related to this though, from what I can find, is the overall lack of undergraduate composition theory courses. I have consulted several comp theory courses from all around, but most of them are directed toward graduate students in a comp-rhet program. I need to make this accessible to undergads as well.

Added Postscript: There are articles about developing coursework at the undergraduate level, however, and they are helpful. But, maybe part of what I am running up against are some audience constraints. Many comp theory courses I have reviewed look similar to our teaching methods course "The Teaching of Writing". This is required for teaching majors and deals specifically in the pedagogical application of theory/ies in K-12 curricula. Also, several prof writing programs seem to farm out the concentration of theory to Communications Studies courses, like here. While we are looking to do much of the same thing in regards to Electronic Media, we still have our theory course as its own requirement.

Stochastic Quantitative Reasoning

Still on the political thought-train... but I'm thinking of using this article in my writing classes. Holland does a good job of working not just with evidence, but also with the vagaries of probability. Since so many of my students want to just put up some percentages or polling data in support of their argument, I'm thinking this might 1) show them how it's done and 2) open up a space for talking about why Holland chooses to make clear the limits of his speculation.

Beyond that, he's probably right. The media was caught up in Obamamania. Women turned out in greater numbers than in 2004 (57 v. 54 percent) and coupled with a switch in Biden voters (I can attest that in my own caucus precinct, we nabbed over 50% of Biden voters largely on the theory that supporting a clear front-runner in our precinct, Obama, might help erode a third-place show so that Biden might make up ground elsewhere in the scramble for that #3 spot. Risky and ultimately it lost, but that was what the Biden precinct captain advised, so I let him go with it.

Ill Risks

I have a fever and so, instead of teaching today as I normally would, I am staying home. This isn't so bad as it allows me time to finish Thomas Rickert's book and start on Jane Smiley's Moo. I'm a little embarrassed I haven't read the latter, but glad to recommend the former. Rickert's work on cultural studies in composition is sorely needed. The cool part is how he so admiringly points out the flaws of icons in the field -- Berlin and Faigley in particular.

I am also interested in what he calls "pedagogies of risk," or the idea that as teachers we need to allow for the unexpected. It seems a very playful move to confront the limits of control and see how the classroom and curricular games we play depend on some form of risk -- the risk of disclosing one's own neuroses, biases, and (as Rickert is wont to say) modus vivendi. But I have to wonder how this meshes with the notions of risk proclaimed by Ulrich Beck. In my reading of Beck, this risk is everywhere and that underwrites our social functions, thus we are a "risk society." However, at the risk of oversimplifying the case here, Beck says this is what drives current progress. At length, he claims

the battle to distribute away the “poisoned cake” turns capital against capital – and,
consequently, occupational group against occupational group. Some industries and regions
profit by this, others lose. But a key question in the struggle for economic survival has
become how to win and exercise power, in order to foist on others the consequences of social
definitions of risk (1995, p. 10).

So, like the neo-Lacanian theory of Rickert, at the heart of contemporary society is the fissured un-whole that spawns only fantasies of societies yet to come -- societies where there is no racism, sexism, classism, or -- to point to Beck's field of influence -- no environmental destruction. But these are just that -- fantasies -- and the hope is that they are powerful enough to assuage any lasting damage we might do to ourselves and those around us. In any even, the tenuous relationships here urge us to work through these fantasies, always inventing fresh approaches to old problems that are continually dressed in new guises.

It is at once lamentable and heartening. I think Rickert is certainly right in saying that we will never be rid of threats to our social and biological beings. However, Beck urges a new Enlightenment and a renewed commitment to the dispersion of power to identify and mange environmental risk so that it can be dealt with through a democratic socious. Rickert is not so Habermasian here. Rather, Rickert still holds out hope for the power of the savvy individual or group -- the continual emergence of Dadaists, Situationists, hackers, and the like. Those may be risks I can take.

Into the Wild

OK, disclaimer: I haven't yet seen the movie. I have two kids, the Halloween season is here which means parties and costume making and, of course, the beginning of baking season (are you listening, K8?). However, I have read the book and want to assign that in my Expository & Report Writing class next semester. Like his other book, Into Thin Air (see original excerpt here), Krakauer does a good job of reporting on an event he finds illuminating about the human condition, its frailty, and, therefore, preciousness. In that regard, it also makes an argument out of the "facts" he gathers; in this case, that local Alaskans were too quick to judge the actions of a young man on his own personal and inward search.

My concern is, though, that the movie's appeal will distract from the book (at least until it comes out on DVD and I can show it in class with references to its visual rhetoric). Fortunately or unfortunately, this genre gets taken up pretty quickly into Hollywood (e.g., Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm and Warner Brothers' adaptation about the 1991 event). Hmmm. maybe that's a better assignment... I dunno. Anyway, I'm just wondering about these migrations of texts across genres. It seems really interesting to get students to think about and compare how each does what it does, why it does it, and to what ends or limitations. What I don't like, however, is the hype surrounding these multi-million dollar movies and/or the cynicism that lends itself to something that is "just a movie" and therefore not worthy of spurring action (see Rickert 2007 for more on this, which, BTW was what MBD used to grill me during my defense.. thanks, Mike!).

Observations

While my posts have slagged off a bit, I'm still here. I just have to deal with my performance evaluation -- a lengthy document that assembles my 2.5 months of experience at UNI into a narrative of progress toward tenure. There are three broad areas: Teaching, Research, and Service.

While I am assigned to 2 departmental committees, they have yet to meet. However, I am conducting a "listening tour" in regards to perceptions of writing on campus. So far, I have met with the Director of Writing Programs, colleagues in the department, the department chair, the Director of the Writing Center, and - tomorrow - the Dean of the College. Not bad for service, eh?

Research is similarly hefty: a book review due out in JAC, an abstract for a chapter in Writing the Earth: Rhetorics and Literacies of Sustainability, and acceptance to next spring's 4Cs.

Teaching is always the tricky bit, isn't it? Not that I have nothing to show for my teaching. I think I have plenty, but the question is, will my observers see it? And, to be clear, there are worse alternatives than the observations required here. I *do* get to write my own narrative that clues my observer's in to my pedagogical philosophy and, hopefully, things they should look for. Plus, after this year's assessment, the observations are also seen alongside those dreaded student assessments administered via bubble sheets at the end of the semester. I can also take liberties to create my own assessment tools to supplement (or offset) these other tools (especially the bubble sheets which, given my high general education load, hold potential to be especially damaging). Starting with year two, then, there is a greater emphasis on holistic measures. So, I'm not griping. I am, however, being self-reflexive.

For me, teaching is a lot about knowing when to step out of the way. It also isn't something confined to the classroom. But here I am arranging for the required observations and I have qualms about the very notion of teaching upon which it is predicated -- largely a lecture-based "performance" whose first act begins at the top of the hour and comes to a curtain call fifty-minutes later. How do we generate an awareness -- with our students, colleagues, administrators, and even in the wider public -- that good teaching often takes place behind the scenes, so to speak? What, exactly, indicates "good teaching"? Does it always appear within the confines of the classroom? For that matter, where is "the classroom" located?