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06/24/2004 Archived Entry: "imagery"
When we write - we share our ideas out here in the blogosphere.
So as I jump around and rework ideas/organization, I construct a chapter around imagery. Imagery is important to cool for a number of reasons (can’t have electronic writing without images, eh?) - but mostly it stems from Robert Farris Thompson's 1963 observations repeated in The Flash of the Spirit that cool is a Yoruban practice which is expressed through colors, weaving, sculpture, and wood carving.
The point is generalized to the more contemporary question of what has come to be called "visual rhetoric" - a popular term more recently emphasized in the title of a Bedford St. Martin's sourcebook for teachers. It's become trendy to throw around this word. But in the narrative of composition's rebirth in 1963, the visual already exists in rhetorical production. It just goes unrecognized. We’re getting to “visual rhetoric” way to late in the game for ideological reasons (for how we have imagined our history).
Cool is a visual practice, as Farris Thompson makes clear. But we also see other moments in '63 centered around the visual - from McLuhan's questioning of alphabetic literacy to the many 1963 advertisements in education journals for video recorders and projectors to Ivan Sutherland's invention of Sketchpad, a pre-Photoshop tool (the first of its kind actually. His dissertation is about Sketchpad. Go read it!).
So all kinds of visual stuff is going on and composition misses out. Research in Written Composition poses 24 questions for the future of research into writing, and not one deals with the visual. Yet, ETV is being used in thousands of schools and film is making serious moves to disrupt linear narrative (Braddock et al dismiss film and TV as unimportant). When this text gets quoted throughout the years as influential (Young and so many others) see what the result is? The visual gets left out..
The consequences can be felt in how we imagine writing instruction today and how we visualize student writers. That Research in Written Composition is only about student writers (reducing students and their work to variables) and not about writers is an important point because it narrows disciplinary focus to only student production (which creates a tautology). How could (and can) composition understand the rhetoric of new media when it is working only to understand the rhetoric of student writing?
So we can't imagine (visualize) a student as a cool writer under the conditions I am laying out because what I'm describing is not a print-oriented actualization of a writer (the topos for cool - popular) but rather a choral description of a media-being (to highlight Burroughs' 1963 acknowledgement that we are media-beings).
Replies: 1 Comment
Keep harping on this, Jeff. One of the worst developments of the professionalization of composition has been the narrowing of focus to courses that show students how to write "academic papers," whatever those turn out to be. In my view, freshman composition is part of liberal studies, part of the humanistic tradition, and should focus on developing each student's sense of being a writer, not on mastering a few text features. Once you take the broader view, the role of the visual as an integral part of human expression is obvious.
Posted by John Lovas @ 06/26/2004 03:33 PM EST