Are you anxious? You look anxious and should be. English Studies is on shaky footing in which every aspect of its subject and method is a challengable territory. The English studies model is responsible for acculturating students into notions of high and low culture and inscribing and promoting the cultural values of the dominant culture.

Worthy pedagogical pursuits in a composition classroom, then, can examine how this acculturation happens through “textual representation and linguistic convention [as they] inscribe cultural values” (201).

Composition classes should feature three elements:

1. politicize teaching of academic rhetoric
2. make academic and disciplinary genres and conventions available sites for student articulations
3. make the critical position of author a realistic possibility for students (201-202)

These pedagogical elements will give students the agency as authors to realize their writings can arbitrate cultural values by inscribing their own subjectivities and values onto the cultural thoughtscape.

English Studies: a tightrope walk over dangerous terrains.

Geoffrey Sirc

At the height of the expressivist revolution in composition studies circa 1968, much carryover existed between composition studies and popular music, as the Beatles were at the height of their crossover from pop dreamboats to cultural forces of nature, but instead of evolving along with popular musical innovations, composition studies instead failed to embrace the punk aesthetic that emerged in popular music at the end of the 1970s. A return to mistrust of popular, non-academic media, then, returned composition studies to dealing with interdisciplinary academic writing, preferring the rawness of the popular only as it transitioned to a tempered and well-wrought academic-type piece of writing (13).

Composition has always looked at itself as helping students to reform their imperfections, but punk, as a pedagogy, focuses only on the process and play of becoming by reflecting the crap that falls through the cracks and remolding it into a useful something. Punk pedagogy deals with ruptures in the status quo as opposed to the seeming linear unfolding of academia (Duchamp, Macrorie, Rotten). Punk (turning nothing into something) made a stark juxtaposition with the academy (often turning something into nothing). Punk is expected to have a productive-destructive element, destroying what is flavorless and uninteresting in favor of better junk, while leaving what is already interesting intact. Punk as pedagogy is fun, do-it-yourself, in favor of succes on one’s terms over conventional success, and prizes writing to hate and reject writing, negation to bring about the new.

The ultimate punk pedagogy is self-negation, negating the self so some other exterior motherfucker (or system) can’t do it first, which is also an affirmation. This is the Quentin paper in the Bartholomae class, writing-as-tattooed-face: “I don’t care. I don’t care. about man and good and evil I don’t care about this shit fuck this shit, trash and should be put in the trash can with this shit / Thank you very much / I lose again” (26).

The Pedagogy of the Tattooed Face: Negation as Affirmation.

Diana George

Cultural Studies in composition levels the playing field between perceived high (literary) and low (mass/popular cultural & media studies) textual models in the composition classroom. It attempts to bridge the gap between intellectual propositionizing and practical, work applications of intellectual projects among academic disciplines. Evidence of these aims can be found in the democritization of composition studies for problems learners including cognitively deficient, poverty-stricken or code-restricted learners, the restoration of rhetoric to the center of composition curriculum in order to produce better writer-interpreter citizens workers and critics, and the engagement of cultural studies and postmodernism in the classroom (80-81).

In practice, cultural studies topics focus subject matter close to student experiences and engage in dynamic readings of a variety of texts. The readily-available materials of the cultural studies composition classroom can funtion as a bridge from self-expression to the experience of culture at large by engaging in the making and analysis of myriad texts.

John Trimbur, pensively

The risks of cultural studies are over democritization of textual material in a low-risk environment leading to an “uncritical populist” audience and the subsumption of student experience by way of the teacher-as-textual-guide through the complicated terrains of mass media culture. A third risk of the cultural studies composition classroom is the priveleging of content over creation. Additionally, the cultural studies model can lead to teachers foisting leftist ideology onto students. Finally, cultural studies has shown divides between process model teachers who develop a community of writers versus teachers who use the cultural studies model to create a contact zone in which cultures meet and clash.

The cultural studies approach to the writing classroom will endure because it presents a kind of mother theory that can incorporate other pedagogical practices into its own practice, including: “encoding/decoding studies, ideological critiques, microehtnographies, literacy narratives, networked classrooms, contact zone pedagogy [...] feminism, race and ethnic studies and queer theory” (86). Students can also be engaged as cultural consumers and producers by employing assignments that engage them to produce texts for the world at large as well as the academy.

Linda Adler-Kassner suggests structuring course content around questions about writing, offering students readings about what happens when people write, and more broadly, why do people write in particular ways. She hopes students find some resonance with the readings.

Nedra Reynolds advises less is more. She recommends structuring course content around a brief rhetoric textbook, but she also advises being able to customize the course content as necessary so it can be focused. Reynolds emphasizes the need to return to texts throughout the course and implement them into classroom work, not simply assign and forget a text.

Jacqueline Jones Royster analyzes why she uses a Studs Terkel story in her writing class. The story features a compromise between a Klansman and woman who have no historical imperative to get along under any circumstance but do so anyway. She believes students internalize the exigency in this story that gives an opportunity for peace instead of war. Ultimately, Jones Royster believes the readings in a writing course can be springboards to consider the prospects of thorny issues.

I am Jack's Bump Halbritter, an image of an image of a man.

Cinema may be the best example of multimodal compositional interface, perhaps because it has a 100-year plus history invested in discovering how this medium works. Cinema, of course, combines three media–verbal, visual and aural–to make a single, integrated medium of rhetoric: the film.

Individual senses are targeted in unison in cinematic composition. Teachers need to develop an anticipatory pedagogy when dealing with students’ multimodal work because the possibilit exists they will create something entirely new for the instructor, and the only guide for interacting with such a composition may be the composition itself. In the words of John Cage, teachers must be ready to “identify[...] with no matter what eventuality” in the multimodal composition classroom.

Prerecorded music may be incorporated effectively into a multimodal composition to serve a number of rhetorical functions. For example, music may serve as a symbolic screen or lens through which to view something else, a thesis (rhetorical screen for evidence and promise to audience), ethos (moral dwelling place) , example of Burkean irony (goes forth as “a” and returns “non-a”) or metaphor (”a” is not “b”; however, “a” is “b”). All these parts interact in Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill (1983), in which a Rolling Stones’ hit “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” serves as thesis for the film, achieving many of the rhetorical effects listed above.

When considering multimodal composition classrooms and rhetoric, instructors must be careful to recognize the difference between technology and pedagogy. For example, taken alone, hypertext and metaphor present technologies that can be adopted in multimodal composition, but a systematic approach to use hypertext, prerecorded song and visuals in a digital composition environment to make a metaphor (the Fight Club example) is a pedagogy.

"I look like you wanna look." (except for the shiner and blood)

Rhetoric is situated within ideology, and for this reason, rhetoric is inherently ideological. Rhetoric can never be innocent or disinterested because it always serves competing ideological claims. Three popular rhetorics, namely cognitive psychology, expressionism and social-epistemic, may then be examined ideologically by focusing on three questions posited by Therborn: “What exists? What is good? What is possible?” (120). These ideological questions reveal epistemology (what does/does not exist), what is ethically/aesthetically pleasing and what is possible/impossible, respectively.

First, the rhetoric cognitive psychology presupposes ideological distance because of its seeming scientific, objective and empirical nature with regard to “mind, matter and language” (135). This rhetoric, however, easily adapts to certain socio-economic and political systems, namely corporate capitalist middle to upper management, priveleging this class at the expense of other classes under the guise of truth.

Similarly, expressionistic rhetoric seeks to criticize the corporate capitalist model (as reaction to current-traditional modes) by radically favoring the individual above all else. As a radically reactionary ideology, however, expressionism fails because it marginalizes those dissatisfied with and resistant to contemporary models, leaving them to protest the status quo in isolation. All the while, the notion of individualism is prized in capitalistic notions of the self-made entrepreneur, and so the expressionistic ideology is easily appropriated to fit this end (135).

Finally, social-epistemic ideology teaches ideology in the writing class. It is collaboratively resistant to the dehumanizing aspect of capitalistic society while offering a “a self-critical and overtly historicized alternative based on democratic practices in the economic, social, political and cultural spheres” (135). Social-epistemic rhetoric, in the Bakhtinian sense, is a novelized rhetoric: indeterminate, self-critical and revealing “knowledge as an arena of ideological conflict” (132). Social-epistemic rhetoric is interdisciplinary, collaborative, chaotic/unplanned, open-ended and liberatory, kind of like a group expressionism in which the collective voice is of central importance.

Karl Marx: "James Berlin's 'Ideas aren't in our control'"

Mary E. Hocks

Digital writing environments are hybrid settings in which words and visuals have a complex relationship in a field that is at once visual, spatial and verbal. This environment leads to “internetworked writing” which weaves together invention, collaboration, publication and consideration of audience into visual rhetorical production.

Visual/digital rhetoric is often devalued or misvalued as “easier” than classical rhetoric, but it actually introduces “a system of ongoing dialogue and negotiations among writers, audiences and institutional contexts, but it focuses on multiple modalities available for making meaning using new communication and information technologies” (340).

Key features of visual/digital rhetoric need consideration in both critiquing and designing visual/digital rhetorical performances, including audience stance and creator ethos, transparency of modalities relating to existing technologies, and hybridity or combining of modalities (visual, verbal, spatial, aural, gestural).

Web page design, as an example of a multimodal rhetorical performance, in addition to engaging the aforementioned features of visual/digital rhetoric, also has built-in relationships with the rhetorical situations genre and forum, as the web page genre dictates publishing online to authenticate the rhetorical performance, adding to the creators’ ethos as the web page becomes indicative of (collective) personal pride and (collective) self-image (nods to Hocks nods to J. Berlin’s social-epistemic).

Achieving the rhetorical stance is a prized if elusive attribute for writers. The rhetorical stance involves “maintaining [...] balance among [...] arguments about a subject, interests and peculiarities of audience, and the voice, or implied character, of the speaker” (166).

Three corruptions exemplify an out-of-balance rhetorical stance: the pedant’s stance (ignoring audience), the advertiser’s stance (devalues subject for pure effect) and the entertainer’s stance (sacrifice gravitas for voice). Oftentimes, these corruptions or inauthentic performances result from a poorly crafted writing assignment.

The prescription for studying balance uses the example of models, who exemplify the elusive balance of rhetorical stance. These models include any author “passionately involved in thinking an important question through, in the company of an audience” (170).

Wayne C. Booth, The Sitter's Stance

William A. Covino

Rhetorical pedagogy emerges as a reaction to Expressivist Pedagogy in the 1970s, and the pedagogy posits “self-expressive writing as an unfortunate constraint upon the range of discourses available to student writers” (37). Rhetorical pedagogy uses an historical approach to rhetoric in order to account for many and often diverse purposes of rhetoric, contingent upon “situations and circumstances.” Rhetorical pedagogy, in addition to reinforcing its teaching through historical review, has, over time, undergone revisions to account for feminist and cultural pedagogies which assert rhetorical history as dominated by Western ideals and white males. Finally, rhetorical pedagogy “consists in both more deliberate attention to the history of rhetoric and the acknowledgment that ‘rhetoric’ names a complex set of factors that affect the production and interpretation of texts” (39).

An historical survey of rhetoric prizes the following:

• Sophists: human knowledge as limited and plastic; truth as contingent
• Plato (Socrates): suspect of ideal truth; ethical idealism
• Aristotle: definition of invention (”available means of persuasion”); ethos, pathos, logos; truth as contingent and relativistic; enthymene; contemporary pedagogical turn from reader-based to writer-based emphasis or process over product
• Quintilian/Roman: schematized discourse (Precept, Imitation, Composition Exercise, Declamation, Sequencing)
• Current-Traditional:failure of objectivity, Cartesian rationality, detachment to perceive world in flux; style and delivery; unity, coherence correctness; modes (narration, description, exposition, argumentation
• Twentieth Century: Richards-misunderstandings and remedies; K. Burke-Act, Agent, Scene, Agency, Purpose; Eagleton-psychoanalytic-text as tied to social relations; “good reasons”-”art of discovering and sharing warrantable assertions”; scientific-language as reality-generating/mismatch b/w constructed & actual experience; rhetoric-as-everything; rhetoric as energy attending communication

Despite all these historical contention, rhetoric will never have a settled, definitive definition. It is better to assert rhetoric is “dynamic and interested.” Dynamism refers to shifting contexts and specific circumstances in defining the rhetorical situation and interested suggests “discourse [as it] indicates motives and desires” (48).

Rhetoric is currently undergoing a feminist and cultural/Postcolonial revision, as its history has been Anglocentric and male. Yet, can rhetorical pedagogy as a varied, historical and expansive model survive in an academy that values formulaic learning?