the rhetoric of uncool (or, FYC is stuck in a past of paper)

At the end of his book The Rhetoric of Cool: Composition Studies and New Media, Jeff Rice asks a series of interesting questions:

Is writing still the dominance of alphabetic notation, or does writing include imagery as well? Is writing the teaching of thesis-driven representation, is it a rhetoric devoted largely to the concepts of audience and purpose, or is it only logical reasoning? Does a writer really need purpose or a sense of audience each time she sits down to write? Should she be inventing the university or media culture? Or—and possibly in addition to these items—does writing also include those items I note as central to the rhetoric of cool? (157)

Rice defines the rhetoric of cool as a rhetorical practice that hinges on the principles of he identifies as chora (“rhetorical meaning is not stable but instead fluid and moving”), appropriation, juxtaposition, commutation, nonlinearity, and imagery.

I think that in academia, for the most part, writing is still characterized by a reliance on the traditional essay and the traditional academic research paper. In my experience, English departments are reluctant to move away from teaching both the reading and writing of the traditional essay and academic research paper partly out of a feeling that other departments want their students to be able to write traditional essays and academic research papers. In most English departments, first year writing courses account for a significant portion of the department’s enrollment, and first year writing courses are usually considered “service courses”: courses that serve the needs of other departments. So the needs and wants of other departments are important to most English departments.

But I’m not sure if it’s true that other departments want students who can write only traditional essays and academic research papers.

I think another important factor is that English faculty value traditional essays and academic research papers. Some English faculty (such as yours truly) have been moving away from traditional essays and academic research paper and toward multigenre projects and multiwriting, and we’ve gotten some grief from our colleagues in our own departments.

I have had many other English faculty say to me, “But how do you make sure your students can, you know, write?” as if multigenre writing isn’t, you know, writing. Anything other than a traditional essay or academic research paper raises eyebrows among a large faction of English faculty. On the other hand, faculty in other departments, notably history, have thanked me for teaching their students how to write in other genres. Those faculty have commented on the creativity of the projects my students have submitted in their classes, noting not only that my students have miraculously learned to, you know, write, but also that they have learned to engage with a topic and think through a whole range of rhetorical concerns that can be emphasized in writing in all sorts of genres beyond the traditional essay and academic research paper.

Many English faculty have convinced themselves that in “real life,” students will need to be able to write in ways that are most analogous to the ways they write in traditional essays. When I tell colleagues I have my students blog, they sometimes comment, “But they won’t be writing like that in real life.” To say that indicates a dismissal of all the “real life” writing that is done in electronic environments now. In “real life,” I think writing does largely involve the principles Rice attributes to cool rhetoric, and I think that English faculty would do well to recognize this and account for it in their teaching.

tags: academia  books  composition  teaching  writing  

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