I just recently participated in William Hart-Davidson’s workshop for teaching rhetorical moves in multimodal composition classrooms as part of the Washington State University series “Composing the New Classroom.” Of course, Hart-Davidson had many useful things to say about teaching both writing and multimodal composition to freshmen. I found his rejection of modalities for rhetorical “moves” the most exciting. From his slides, Hart-Davidson notes that outcome statements should “zero in on what makes a message meaningful, persuasive, compelling, and accurate across media” and that students “improve with guided practice.” As evidence, he cites Kellogg and Whiteford’s 2009 psychological study of advanced writing classrooms in which they analyze the “uniquely intensive demands that advanced written composition place on working memory.” Deliberate practice is important, Hart-Davidson argues, because students need time to practice the appropriate higher level rhetorical moves that make writing successful. He demonstrated in the workshop that multimodal composition is the best form of deliberate practice because students have to translate specific rhetorical demands (audience, purpose, appeals) from one modality to another — forcing them to become more adept at paying attention to those demands.

For me, the moment was particularly compelling because I sense that many of our majors and graduate students in the literary studies track struggle with the purpose of their work. Courtney King, one of our brightest masters students, notes a

cynicism about the future of the humanities that runs rampant in our department. This has not worn well on me, and has caused me to spend many sleepless nights pondering my own worth. In departmental meetings, in the halls, and over coffee, my colleagues and I have engaged in endless conversations about how disposable our field, and by proxy, we are. I have not spoken with one of my cohort members who is completely certain that they made the right decision by getting this degree. Seeds of self-doubt and self-hatred have been planted not by people in the sciences or the media, but by our own mentors and friends.

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English: Portion of Babbage’s difference engine. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Science fiction and its fan cultures have become increasingly popular topics at the MLA’s annual conventions. In 2013’s convention alone, panels were devoted to the intersections of science fiction with everything from ecoterrorism and race to dystopias, religion, and feminism. Still, the MLA has yet to sponsor a panel on the alternative history genre known as steampunk. Steampunk is often seen as “Victorian science fiction,” but it also acts as a genre that retrofits new technology onto the nineteenth century; increasingly, steampunk provides a platform and paradigm for fans to engage with the Victorian period in multimedia environments. Such engagement, and its investment in material culture, is apparent in media like steampunk blogs, where you can find iPod decks that look like gramophones, or laptops constructed to seem like they were sold at a nineteenth-century craft fair. These intersections – Victoriana, science fiction, DIY culture, anachronism, and more – render steampunk an ideal locus for portable and cross-disciplinary insights.

Further, steampunk offers some interesting challenges to traditional acts of historicizing the nineteenth century. Some researchers have associated the genre with nostalgia, or as Frederic Jameson notes, a “historical and dated” version of utopia mixed with the “urban decay and blight” of postmodern life (151). On the other hand, Jussi Parikka has noted steampunk’s rejection of older modernist versions of historicism and embrace of a do-it-yourself (DIY) tinkerer’s attitude towards “alternatives,” “quirky ideas,” and “novel paths that fall out of the mainstream.” (2). Steampunk has also become emblematic of newer theories of history and memory that respond to advances in digital archival technologies that make the past more physically accessible. As Wolfgang Ernst puts it, digital memory is not, “as in traditional archives, clearly separated from present operations [...] but becomes cybernetically a feedback ingredient of present operations itself, its basic condition” (101). The constant presence of accessible historical knowledge made possible through mobile devices, wifi, and other forms of ubiquitous computing means that the experiences of the present are aligned with the past in ways never before imaginable. Parikka and Ernst see the digital presence of the past requiring a historical approach that incorporates repurposing, creativity, and tinkering as essential scholarly activities. To the extent that these actions are represented in steampunk literature, through steampunk culture, and on steampunk objects, this rapidly expanding subculture/subgenre offers a mode—and often an instantiation—of these new figures for history and memory.

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Physical bullying at school, as depicted in the film Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve been following the ongoing conversation about civility on Twitter. Initially, I did not agree with the assessments about bullying on Twitter that I read from my colleagues. Then I read this article from Lee Bessette, yesterday:

I think we, as a community, need to firmly take a stand against bullying. We cannot just rely on the institution (who, let’s face it, has allowed this kind of bullying to happen, but behind closed doors) for a long, long time. If we, as a community of connected academics, don’t stand up for Tressie and stand against this kind of behavior online, it will keep happening. Too many academics from traditionally unrepresented demographics have been silenced (through fear and intimidation) in the institution, and we cannot let the institution re-create that environment online.

She was reacting to a recent post by Tressie McMillan Cottom, in which the latter details how a U of Chicago graduate student threatened her with blackmail. I’m as disgusted as Lee. As an educator, I’m a big believer in having my students engage in public discourse. But if Tressie, one of the most ethical and thoughtful public scholars I know, can have this done to her – what about my students? Should I continue to have them engage in work that shows up online when they – too – can be blackmailed by any bully who comes along? Continue reading »

If anything emerged – for me – as the theme of the first day of the MLA, it was crisis. I attended Todd Butler’s session on “Periodization and Its Discontents” where Richard E. Miller of Rutger’s University powerfully challenged traditional notions of covering literary periods in survey courses. It was a sentiment he first voiced in his 2005 book, Writing at the End of the World:

If you’re in the business of teaching others to read and write with care, there’s no escaping the sense that your labor is increasingly irrelevant. [...] And, so, to fight off the sense that words exercise less and less power in world affairs, one can declare that discourse plays a fundmental role in the constitution of reality. (5)

In the roundtable, when asked about the purpose of teaching outside of period boundaries, he countered with the observation that his core lecture classes had been reduced by 50% in the past few years. This phenomenon, he suggested, is the problem and makes the question of periodization totally irrelevant to the future of our discipline. Richard Utz, Chair of the Literature, Media and Communication program at Georgia Tech wrote in similar terms about the future of literary instruction in a recent blog post at The Chronicle of Higher Education. “[M]any English professors,” he argues, “have depended on literature (narrowly defined), written discourse, and the printed book as the primary elements in teaching and scholarship. But hidebound faculty members who continue to assign and study only pre-computer-based media will quickly be on their way toward becoming themselves a “historical” presence at the university.” Yet Utz also makes the observation that rhetoric and composition instructors, “the one that literary scholars, theorists, and creative writers have continually disdained as too practical and uninspiring,” will be “relatively immune” to the upcoming purge of English Departments.

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