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05/15/2004 Archived Entry: "What is Composition (More)"

When you introduce new terms into a discipline - and consequently, new ways of thinking about that discipline's subject matter - you encounter resistance.
"What? Can't be?"
"That won't work!"
"That's not what we do!"
And such reactions often hinge on the act of forgetting. Those practices we cling to as legitimate were themselves often conceived under doubt and suspicion. I like to point to the once radical position of the novel or the essay, but we can find other contemporary examples like word processing.
The other difficult obstacle is getting others to understand the nature of media and not messages. Media overwork us completely (as McLuhan notes). The content of TV - lost in debates about TV and kids, for instance - is not as important as TV itself.
Where composition has been stumbling is over media. Harvard's English A struggled to understand the nature of print ("Look at this handwriting! You fail and need remedial work!"). Composition in the 1960s couldn't get film or TV (See Braddock et al in Research on Written Composition when they briefly mention the two).
Today composition - as it becomes fascinated more and more with media - still doesn't get it. The logic and rhetorical conventions media produces - just as print produced its own methods of categorization in the table or list, among others - are being looked over as the logic of print is applied to new media.
The real question for what is composition now is - can we develop a pedagogy in terms of networks, remixing, juxtaposition, fragments, interlinking, etc. etc. etc.?
Aligned with this question is who will teach us these things? How will we practice imitatio today? By continuing to read a series of canonical textbook essays? Or by looking to media itself? How can we adopt the language of new media to writing? Why aren't we?
McLuhan reminds us that in times of changes, we use the old to do the work of the new. We see that today as the most popular of all new media, the weblog, is forced into the same position as the short story, the read essay, the advertisement, etc. have been in first year writing: analyze this writing for its rhetorical stance/approach/position. Analysis (and here I wish we used all the word’s meanings) leads to “critical thinking.” Does it? It doesn’t. Zizek tells us otherwise. Barthes tells us otherwise. And as Jenny notes, affect tells us otherwise. Analysis has been shoved into a cubby hole of just another assignment which fails to accommodate the way knowledge is produced. But we like thinking that the rhetorical analysis is responsible teaching – because we wouldn’t want irresponsible writing, would we? Or we should take issue with responsibility and how we convince ourselves of false writing ethics at a latter date….

Posted by Neha @ 05/15/2004 11:10 PM EST