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Brian
Ballentine, Case Western Reserve University
"Rhetoric and Engineering: The 'Ironic' Re-emergence of
Classical Conventions"
While
discussing Brainerd Kellogg's 1880 publication A Text-Book on Rhetoric,
a work used for several decades at the high school and college level,
S. Michael Halloran notes that there is "no sense that the
subject is intellectually challenging or socially important."
Already, courses in rhetoric were beginning to slip from college
curricula and if these texts could generate such lackluster responses
it is not difficult to discern why. Halloran goes on to recognize
not only the disappearance of traditional rhetoric from the classroom
but also its "ironic" re-emergence in the courses that
have taken rhetoric's place. Case Western Reserve University requires
engineering students to enroll in an upper-level English course
titled "Professional Communication for Engineers." This
course not only exhibits the ironic traces Halloran is discussing
but relies on conventions of classical rhetoric for its core foundation.
The
evidence is in both the curriculum (created jointly by the Engineering
and English departments) and the various textbooks designed for
such courses. How can John Lannon's Technical Communication contain
a section titled "Appeal to Common Goals and Values" yet
not list Aristotle in its index? This book is in its ninth edition.
The two other technical and professional communication textbooks
I will examine handle audience analysis and methods of persuasion
in a similar way.
I will
argue that these texts function as "user-interfaces" for
the more difficult, underlying rhetorical strategies. They are thus
similar to web editors like Dreamweaver that are user-interfaces
for handling difficult HTML: users do not have to know programming
any more than the user of these texts needs to know how logos, ethos,
and pathos function.
Much
of the push for courses like "Professional Communication for
Engineers" comes not from the engineering department but from
ABET, the national Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology.
In addition to examining the texts used in CWRU's course, I will
explore how competing universities attempt to meet ABET's demand
for graduating engineers to demonstrate "an understanding of
professional and ethical responsibility" and "an ability
to communicate effectively."
Maurizio
Borghi, Università Bocconi, Istituto di Storia Economica
"Writing Practices in Privilege- and Copyright-System (On
Authorship, Ownership and Freedom)"
The
terms privilege- and copyright-system are not merely intended as
two juridical institutions, historically succeeded one to the other,
but more properly as two ways of instituting, of "founding",
the "space of sense" within which things like works of
writing can take place.
In the copyright-system - the origins of which date back, in England,
to the first half of the 18th century and in Continental Europe
to the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century - the
notion of "author" (already present in the previous system
of press privileges) acquires a peculiar centrality while at the
same time deeply changing its original meaning. Such transformation,
prepared by the thinking of the Age of Enlightenment, finds its
utmost expression in the thinking of Kant and in its well-known
definition of a "book" as "the speech held by an
author to a public thanks to an editor".
The recent debate about the copyright has put all that in discussion
and the matter has repeatedly been raised whether concepts like
"author", "creativity", and "work of intellect"
are still able to represent the real nature of the process leading
to the creation of a text.
The paper will show how these questions have their roots in the
transition from privilege- to copyright system and in certain problems
which remained unsolved in the a. m. transition and which have meanwhile
become even more problematic and knotty. In particular, the paper
will focus on the following point: although the copyright-system
appears as a literal application of Kant's principles, it actually
conceals a profound distortion of Kant's concept of freedom, that
is a distortion of the very concept from which the philosopher draws
his definition of what a "book" is.
The discussion will develop on two parallel levels:
1. The analysis of some passages of Kant's works showing how author's
ownership implies a peculiar concept of "freedom", which
cannot be empirically deduced from any other phenomenon.
On the basis of Kant's definition, the exposition of some reflections
developed by Italian and French authors of the eighteenth and nineteenth
century (Vittorio Alfieri, Pietro Verri, Honoré de Balzac,
Carlo Tenca), who witness the transformation of the sense of authorship
and are involved in the upcoming need to reflect upon the liaison
between freedom and writing.
Kate
Eichhorn, York University
"Writing
Histories and the Future of Writing in the Commonplace-book"
Accounts
of commonplace-books have typically been structured on narratives
of decline or legacy, and subsequently vacillated between attempts
to confirm the antiquated status of these collections of textual
fragments and attempts to identify contemporary examples of commonplace-books.
This paper questions the narratives upon which commonplace-books
have been theorized. Responding to Earle Haven's recent observation
that the "modern legacy" of the commonplace-book continues
to be overlooked, it further seeks to explore how commonplace-books
continue to shape our experiences of print and electronic communications.
Situating commonplace-books as a transitional technology and genre,
this paper examines how commonplace-books helped to anticipate and
even foster many of the concepts and practices upon which modern
print cultures would eventually be defined, including those concerning
authorship and intellectual property. In addition, this paper explores
the possibility that the always already antiquated phenomenon of
the commonplace-book may provide a potential lens through which
to examine today's shifting terrain of knowledge production, organization,
and dissemination. However, in contrast to recent suggestions that
commonplace-books may be analogous to web sites, it questions assumptions
that the "legacy" of the commonplace tradition can be
easily located in contemporary equivalents. Underpinning this examination
of commonplace-books is a broader interest in how the objects and
approaches associated with book history might contribute to discussions
about the future of the book and the future of discursive practices.
Alan
Golding, University of Louisville
"Language Writing, Transitional Materialities, and Digital
Poetics"
One
well-known feature of the writing produced by poets associated with
the Language school is the redirection of readerly attention to
the materiality of the word. This interest expressed itself in multiple
forms, but one underdiscussed form involves the visual component
of Language texts. Visual and concrete poetries are widely cited
as historical precursors to digital or new media poetries, but the
visual and (re)combinatorial component of Language writing forms
a significant bridge or transition between these two projects, most
especially in the work of the writers to be discussed here: Steve
McCaffery, Robert Grenier, and Charles Bernstein. In their visual
works, and in the online re-presentation of those works, they raise
questions about seeing and reading, the mark and the sign, circulation
and distribution, and the meaning of "materiality" that
seem crucial to thinking about new media poetries. Meanwhile, new
media poetries fulfil certain impulses towards different forms of
materiality in Language writing that were perhaps only nascent or
at least partly unfulfilled in the earlier stages of that movement.
With a primary emphasis on Bernstein, this paper will discuss how
these poets' work proposes what I call "transitional materialities":
forms of visual text that go beyond traditional word-centered definitions
of the poem and look forward to the possibilities and achievements
of digital poetics. Marie-Laure Ryan associates print texts with
terms such as "unity," "order," "monologism,"
"sequentiality," "solidity." Readers of Language
writing will recognize easily enough the inapplicability of these
terms to that writing. Far more applicable to the poets discussed
here are Ryan's opposing terms for electronic texts: "diversity,"
"chaos," "dialogism," "parallelism,"
"fluidity." To juxtapose Language writing and digital
/ new media poetry in this way foregrounds the category of "materiality"
to help us understand one recent stage in the history of writing
and to move the discussion and historicizing of new media poetries
beyond such binary oppositions between the material attributes of
print and electronic texts.
Lisette
Gonzalez, University of Illinois at Chicago
"Writing the Revolution: Open Source and the Performance
of a Radical Democracy"
How
can the emergence of a computer operating system comment on the
history of writing? In an attempt to examine this question, I would
like to consider the way both narratives written about the Linux
Open Source system and the language of the systems themselves mimic
and represent the counter cultural narratives of the 1960's. These
narratives, along with the actual operating systems and software,
address and enact the democratic political struggles that were at
the forefront of counter cultural narratives. Presented as driven
primarily by the information revolution, the forces of globalization
have become detached from their political dimensions and appear
as a fate to which we must submit. The Linux Open Source system
(free software downloadable from the web created by bands of programmers
around the world collaborating to write programs and fix bugs on
a volunteer basis) provides a concrete example of the discursive
conditions for the emergence of a collective action, directed towards
struggling against inequalities and challenging relations of subordination.
Linux is a world-class operating system that coalesced out of part-time
hacking by several thousand developers scattered all over the planet,
connected only through the Internet. This community contains a combination
of different agendas and approaches out of which a coherent and
stable system emerges. Users become co-developers of the system,
a collaboration which leads to rapid code improvement and effective
debugging. The programs and operating systems produced by the Linux
programmers can be read as moments of political activity that threaten
the control of such hegemonic corporations as Microsoft. The accretion
of activity that creates these systems works to subvert the medium
of universal integration by producing a viable alternative to Windows.
Open Source programmers construct online virtual communities which
shed light on counter-culture narratives by providing a concrete
example of how a counter-culture can reach the otherwise idealist
goals of both enforcing a radicalized democracy of truly free enterprise
and producing a localized resistance to hegemonic corporate structures.
The Linux world behaves as a free market and also operates as a
community that converges through interests and attempts to return
to the traditional conception of liberty, a conception that characterizes
it as non-interference with the right of unlimited appropriation.
By producing a free alternative to expensive software, this system
allows for a radical disaffiliation from Microsoft. Although each
operator works individually, this system becomes collaborative as
the isolation and fragmentation of the individual artist is overcome
by the virtual community and collaborative effort offered by the
web. Like the sixties counter cultures, these communities reject
the regime of hegemonic corporate and technological expertise that
dominates industrial society. The narratives written by coders,
in which programmers identify themselves in these stories as rebellious
artists, imitate the counter cultural narratives of the sixties.
Elizabeth
J. Hayes, Case Western Reserve University
"The Paragraph: Rhetorical Influences and Bain's Long Shadow"
This
paper reviews paragraph pedagogy historically, locating the ideological
and practical issues that have informed paragraph composition since
the 1860s, when Alexander Bain first detailed his requirements for
a successful paragraph. Composition pedagogy has largely followed
Bain's prescriptions ever since, simplifying his paragraph formula
into the trinity of unity, coherence and emphasis. In the 1960s,
however, a number of process composition theorists questioned Bain's
definition of the paragraph, in part because they found that the
paragraphs of celebrated prose stylists often failed to conform
to Bain's prescriptions Perhaps more importantly, many process theorists
argued that the teaching of a paragraph structure that proceeds
deductively from the topic sentence to supporting sentences can
actually inhibit the development of students' writing and thinking
skills, and that students need to "discover" the form
of their writing instead of adhering to rules that require deductive
thinking. Essentially, many of these writers believed that Bain's
paragraph rules stifled exploratory thinking in the composition
classroom, and were responsible, at least in part, for much of the
tedious writing that we receive from our writing assignments. While
post-process theorists are embracing the need for composition students
to explore their place in the cultural milieu, they have also returned
to an essentially Bainian concept of paragraph development.
I intend to address those of us who teach composition on the freshman
level, and yet are not composition specialists; and to examine the
purpose of the papers we assign in our composition classes. What
do we hope our students can achieve in, and learn from, these papers,
and do the paragraph prescriptions we find in our composition rhetorics
help them toward this purpose? Are we asking our students to deliver
a product deemed conventionally "literate," as Bain and
his followers hoped in the latter half of the 19th century; or are
we hoping that they begin to question their ideas and think more
deeply, as the process theorists of the 1960s hoped? If we expect
our students to discover meaning through their compositions, why
do we insist that their paragraphs be structured deductively? That
is, do we want them to use writing to improve their thinking and
discover new ideas, or do we merely expect our young students to
lay out pre-existing thought in an acceptable format? Can we hope
for both?
We all have to (and some of us want to) spend significant time with
our freshman English students. A review of paragraph theory may
help us to decide what we expect, and how to help our students achieve
those expectations.
William
Huntting Howell, Northwestern University
"Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish: Literary Property, Democracy
and Moby-Dick"
Although
much of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick consists of borrowed excerpts
patchworked onto a purloined narrative frame, scores of 20th century
critics have vigorously defended Melville against charges of dishonesty
and plagiarism. Howard Vincent's source study makes the case succinctly:
as a romantic "artist," Melville necessarily transforms
everything he borrows; "Out of [Thomas] Beale's and [Frederick]
Bennett's sows' ears Herman Melville made silk purses." Contrary
to these arguments that denigrate and obscure the copying in Moby-Dick,
this essay contends that copying (cited and un-) is a key principle
to understanding Melville's critiques of "professionalized"
authorship and his imagination of a post-Lockean American polity.
In particular, I explore Moby-Dick's development and deployment
of the "splice." A nautical figure that Melville borrows
from his experience as a whaleman, "splicing" refers to
the material practice of interweaving strands from two ropes together
in order to form a single line. In Moby-Dick, this interweaving
becomes a controlling metaphor at the level of philosophy and at
the level of textual composition: to explicate the dangers of Ahab's
"monomania," Melville's tale must become collaborative
and polyvocal-it must confederate multiple narratives from multiple
texts along its single keel. Within the plot of the novel itself,
the trope of the splice consistently appears as shorthand for deep
and egalitarian relationships created through emulation, citation,
and non-proprietary sharing among disparate individuals and texts.
Moby-Dick's intertextual borrowing and polyvocality is particularly
important in light of mid-19th century debates on literary property
law: working to counter romantic notions of authorship, Melville's
radically collaborative splicing becomes a program for political
insurgency. Resisting a British conception of published writing
as alienable property (a position espoused by Edgar Allan Poe and
many other American writers angling for "professional"
status), Moby-Dick's copyist sensibilities argue powerfully for
the continuance of the flexible American copyright standards established
directly after the Revolution. In the contingent space formed by
the textual splice in Moby-Dick, literary property disappears, ideas
belong to the masses, and democracy may obtain in the face of the
monomania and totalitarianism encoded in 19th century legal discourse
and in classic liberal thought.
The essay's conclusion takes up Melville's critiques of romantic
authorship, scholarship and literary property in the context of
the continuing practices of modern textual and historical studies.
I argue that Moby-Dick provides an outline for flexible and collaborational
analyses of disparate cultural phenomena: from whaling to writing,
Melville's compositional and metaphorical strategies demand that
metaphysical inquiry, whatever form it takes, must be based on an
ethics of splicing, encompassing collectivism, repetition, and something
like our modern idea of "fair use." Against emergent 19th
century notions of an academy divided along disciplinary boundaries,
Moby-Dick insists that no single intellectual approach may fully
comprehend any given philosophy or phenomenon; as writers, readers,
and thinkers, scholars must be relentlessly democratic in their
interests and methodologies, and must always be willing to work
co-operatively. Since scholarly division carried the day and continues
to inform the structure of the modern American academy, reclaiming
a Melvillean ethics of splicing would be an important step towards
re-constituting scholarship along interdisciplinary lines. More
prosaically, such a reclamation would provide a basis for reconsidering
recent legal restrictions on copyright in the United States: in
the climate of possibility cultivated by splicing, artistic, philosophical,
and historical exploration flourishes; under current U.S. law, Moby-Dick
could not have been written.
Lisa Kuitert, University of Amsterdam
"Author and Technology in the Nineteenth Century: An Exploration"
Historical
perspectives on writing often draw on the symbolic production of
literature (Bourdieu 1985). Any consideration for the material production
of literature tends to be focused on fees, copyright and the like.
Examining technology-related changes on the book market and their
long-term consequences for literary writing including the
ones that occurred before the digital era could therefore
reveal new insights (comp.Eisenstein 1979). I believe that for a
proper understanding of the development of writing in the nineteenth
century it is necessary to further explore these 'technical aspects'
of the book business. First, let us consider the contemporary sales
strategies. My personal background has led me to investigate the
situation in the Netherlands during that period, but nothing suggests
yet that things were very different in neighbouring countries (Germany,
Belgium and England).
Few people are aware that the way publishers and booksellers settled
their accounts with each other affected the status of authors. One
case study has identified such a link (Kuitert 2001). This research
addresses the transition from 'issuing on commission' to 'purchasing
on account.' Until the end of the eighteenth century the prevailing
practice in the book business was to issue books on commission to
each other's shop. This meant
that the recipient party did not need to pay but made money only
after selling the book. When publishers and book dealers (often
a combined trade) used this system consistently with each other,
the result was an exchange. They kept up their respective selections
without money changing hands.
In the course of the nineteenth century, this settlement practice
gradually made way for a current account system both in the Netherlands
and elsewhere. This change resulted from a separation into publishers
on the one hand and bookshops on the other hand. Exchanges were
no longer possible. Publishers had to cover their costs and demanded
payment up front from the booksellers. Required to invest, booksellers
became more cautious about their selection.
This made for a more commercial environment, where publishers had
a vested interest in convincing bookshops that the items offered
would sell, to get them to order large quantities. In turn, bookshop
owners tried harder to find people interested in purchasing books.
Authors became pivotal in this commercial boom. Throughout the nineteenth
century, advertisements from publishers reveal a growing emphasis
on individual authors. Publishers tried to turn authors into national
celebrities, which is rather remarkable, given that a century before
most authors remained anonymous or used pseudonyms.
This trend was reinforced through the use of stereotypy, which surfaced
increasingly in book production during the nineteenth century. Stereotypy,
which was a printing technique that publishers used to reprint in
large quantities, made it necessary for publishers to invest more
than previously in an individual author, rather than simply waiting
to see what prose they might receive from whomever. In the Netherlands
publishers launched carefully planned campaigns to promote the work
of a single, best-selling author. This generally involved issuing
that author's work in different
editions inexpensive, deluxe, included in a popularized series,
illustrated, by registration or an edition of collected works. Stamping
the author's portrait on the cloth binding became a standard practice,
as did its inclusion on the frontispiece in many cases as well.
In other words, authors became visible. In my lecture I aim to show
that this conclusion is to be taken very literally. In the course
of the nineteenth century, authors became visible and recognizable
thanks to the emergence of photography and other replication techniques.
When did photographs of authors become popular? What purpose did
they serve? Were the photographs sold individually, were they cherished,
were they worn in lockets? To what extent did the popularity of
a work depend on the personal appearance of the author? And what
about its production? Is there a link with the rise of autobiographical
prose?
I intend to address these questions in my paper based on a few case
studies. In my contribution I will explore the opportunities that
investigating trade and technology provide for 'authorship' as a
theme.
Lisa
Maruca, Wayne State University
"A New History of Plagiarism(s)"
Plagiarism, it seems, is emerging as the academic problem of the
new millennium. Professors bemoan their students' loose sense of
ethics, the Internet's facilitation of a cut-and-paste mentality,
and a general decline in awareness of research and citation techniques.
At the same time, cases involving established scholars and reputable
newspapers make national headlines.
This paper, however, argues against the prevailing wisdom that blames
plagiarism on moral relativism, new technology, or poor education.
Indeed, it questions accounts that report on this new "rise,"
which rely on yet confuse the categories of empiricism and ethics.
Instead, plagiarism is more usefully understood as a permeable and
mutable signifier deployed at various times and in various interests.
Accounts of plagiarism circulating within academia and in the popular
media, then, rather than seen as merely reflecting an actual increase
in a definitive practice, can be understood as manifestations of
a prevailing anxiety about new media, alternate forms of education
and the morphing of discursive forms that accompany these changes.
Evidence for this new understanding of plagiarism can be found not
just in current rhetoric on this issue, but by looking backwards
at other moments of discursive foment around textual ownership,
attribution and authorship. The print culture of eighteenth-century
England, a similarly anxious age, supplies one such useful case
study. Much of what we understand about plagiarism today was consolidated,
legally, aesthetically and morally, by the end of this period in
the form of proprietary authorship, originality, and other concepts
that buttress traditional understandings of plagiarism. However,
the texts of print workers reveal long suppressed counter-discourses
that supply other ways of understanding copying, imitation and fraud-and
highlight what's at stake when some forms of textuality are coded
as "crime."
Joddy
Murray, Washington State University, Tri-Cities and Damian Baca,
Syracuse University
"Image Writing & Non-Discursive Symbolization:The Limitations
of Alphacentric Historiographies"
Our
paper sets as its aim to expose current historiography as alphacentric:
a history of writing that is always tied to the emergence of an
alphabet. We propose that any "new" history of writing
must also consider what constitutes writing in the first place,
especially in the context of non-Hellenic, non-Western traditions
of writing. If the definition of writing is expanded to include
any surviving symbolization, then the possibilities of including
the histories of cultures more reliant on diverse text systems suddenly
is available. Historiography, then, becomes the act of writing histories
about symbolization in general, whether it be in the form of images
and icons, textiles, architecture, painting, or even ceramics.
What this paper will do is twofold: 1) We will frame the term "writing"
to be the production of "text"--a word that has come to
mean any artifact of symbolization that can be "read"
by an audience; and 2) We will demonstrate how such an expansion
of the term "writing" can change historiography by reconstructing
a "new history" of Pre-Columbian writing beginning with
Olmec glyphs in Mexico. This in turn can also work against the "print
dominance" found in most composition classrooms while attempting
to expand what is considered legitimate products of composition--especially
within the pressures of multi-genre, multimedia view of composition.
Carrie
Noland, University of California, Irvine
"Inscription as Performance"
This
paper examines the act of writing as a gestural practice. Recent
findings in archeology (especially the study of ancient visual culture)
suggest that mark making is at its origin bound up with a variety
of other cultural practices, such as dance and ritual, especially
trance rituals involving repetitive, ritualized gestures. Such a
connection was already intuited by a group of European writers,
painters, and philosophers generally grouped under the heading "modernist
primitivists." My argument is that these modernists press us
to reconceive the gesture of inscription as charged with kinetic
energy. Drawing from a background in performance and visual studies,
as well as Peircean semiotics, I try to tease from modernist primitivism
(with special attention to Bataille and Artaud) a theory of inscription
that challenges the purely textual emphasis associated with deconstruction
and helps us make sense of contemporary multi-media work in poetry
(i.e., African-American sound poetry) and digital art.
Steven
E. Rowe, University of Chicago
"Inscribing Power, Revising Power: Everyday Acts of Writing
among the Working Classes in Nineteenth-Century France"
This
paper analyzes the political ramifications of French workers' writing
practices in the first half of the nineteenth century, in which
particular texts (namely letters and songs) are examined as productive
acts of literacy. Most historical scholarship on nineteenth-century
French workers' writings examines these texts for evidence of militant
politics, e.g. early forms of socialism and communism, and the development
of forms of critical consciousness that reflect on changes that
workers were experiencing in the workplace, due to forms of industrialization.
That is, this scholarship tends to treat these texts as part of
a larger discourse of political liberation, rather than analyze
their production or treat them as the products of specific practices
of writing. This paper proposes a correction to this approach, arguing
that the particularities of different practices of writing demonstrate
the complexities of the relationships between writing and power.
By examining acts of letter and song writing, we see French workers
articulating discourses of political liberation and critical consciousness,
attempting to revise, or challenge, power relationships in this
early industrial society. These same acts of writing, though, also
reinscribed social hierarchies, such as those based on gender roles
and the social status of "worker," and engaged workers
in processes of surveillance and control. This paper argues for
a move away from the assumption that all writing, as a product of
achieving a state of "literacy," autonomously produced
critical, political consciousness among the working classes. Rather,
by analyzing the production of particular literacy practices and
doing away with the literate/illiterate dichotomy and its assumptions
about writing, we can produce more nuanced analyses of the ways
that writing practices reproduced and/or challenged the dynamics
of power and forms of domination in specific social and historical
contexts.
Alison
Rukavina, University of Alberta
"Deleuze, Guattari and Bourdieu: Challenging the National
Model in Print Culture"
Robert
Gross argues that national history of the book projects in Print
Culture often negate the 'actual' history of national book trades
because the projects focus on stable national boundaries that he
contends are actually fluid. He reminds academics that book trades
were not necessarily confined within national borders. Books and
people have always circulated between countries, but national history
of the book projects often fail to take into account this larger
global field within which book trades interacted and developed.
While a number of academics in Print Culture have called for the
study of the international movement of books, the question remains
how might one theorize this global movement of people and books
when the discipline of Print Culture privileges the study of the
national development of the book trade?
In my paper I will first explore the national straightjacket that
binds the study of Print Culture and second, I will suggest that
the problem with Print Culture Studies is its over reliance on traditional
disciplinary models and boundaries. Finally, drawing on the field
of cultural studies, I will examine how a reworking of Pierre Bourdieu's
notion of the field of cultural production in terms of Gilles Deleuze
and Felix Guattari's concept of the rhizome offers a fluid yet rigorous
methodology for exploring the book trade and the circulation of
books. A rhizomic model of the field of cultural production is a
promising way of conceptualizing how agents negotiate their positions
in the cultural production and consumption of books regardless of
whether the field encompasses the local, national, or international
stage.
Anne
Trubek, Oberlin College
"Old Writing Technologies and New Histories of Writing:
What Happens When the Materiality of Writing Surfaces"
This
paper discusses the increased interested in handwritten manuscripts
in late nineteenth century America (with the invention of the typewriter).
It then reflects upon theories and methods of book history today
as a sort of parallel (animation of the old upon development of
the new).
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