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Latterell, Catherine G.  ReMix: Reading + Composing Culture.  Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006.  684 pp.  ISBN: 978-0-312–43018–4.  List Price: $54.95 USD.

Rice, Jeff.  Writing About Cool: Hypertext and Cultural Studies in the Computer Classroom.  New York: Pearson Longman, 2004.  166 pp. ISBN: 978-0-321-10896-5. List Price: $35.20 USD.

Both Rice and Latterell start from a conviction that students are not passive consumers of culture.  Rather, each of these texts endorses a pedagogy that reinforces the student writer’s role as both consumer and producer of culture.  What these texts seek to achieve is a repositioning of the student writer, a relocation from the margins of cultural discourse to an active, engaged role embedded within both cultural product and cultural criticism.  From this foundation, each text guides its users through the practice of cultural criticism as both a point of invention for composition and as a way to develop heuristic thinking skills.  Despite this similar base, however, the texts diverge in both method and structure.

Writing About Cool: Hypertext and Cultural Studies in the Computer Classroom

Rice’s method is based in part on the model offered by Raymond Williams in Keywords.  Using the word “cool” as a topos, Rice traces some of the word’s many appearances through a series of cultural products, arguing that the word’s varied, often conflicting meanings have much to offer as both content and composition.  In this, Rice seems to draw on the work of Victor Vitanza, who has argued that productive analysis can come not only from dominant interpretations of texts, but also from heeding competing and contradictory voices.  (Vitanza is also editor of the series of which Rice’s text is a part.)  Rice contends that “only when we rethink and explore familiar terms and ideas do we truly allow ourselves to learn” (Rice viii).  For Rice, it is in the space between our familiar sense of cool, and the unexpected, perhaps contrary senses of the word that learning occurs.

In demonstrating this, Rice employs cool in two fashions.  First, as content, Rice examines cool as a cultural meme, starting with a look at the presence of cool on the World Wide Web.  Rice follows cool through both advertising and culture-jamming advertising resistance campaigns; investigates cool’s origins in African-American culture; explores cool in popular culture; studies the complex connection between cool and masculinity and performativity; examines cool as a literary trope in both African-American and Beat literature; and considers how technology has used cool as a process of social integration.  Rice’s critical method stems from Derridean deconstruction, as he explains that “we can learn from the ways media form ideological positions to critique those very positions (Rice 6).  Through his deconstructions, Rice reveals a tension at the heart of the popular word cool: it is both a commercialized appeal  to mainstream consumption, and an act of dissent and rebellion that makes an appeal for critical individualism. 

For Rice, however, this contradiction is less a problem than an opportunity.  Rice contends that new electronic media demand a new rhetoric not based on the linear, progressive, univocal  rhetoric of print media, but a rhetoric that takes full advantages of the opportunities offered by new media.  Taking his cue from the website Everything2.com, Rice’s argument for a new media rhetoric is his second use of cool; that is, Rice offers cool writing as a rhetoric that can exploit the nascent possibilities of new media.  As Rice writes, “if you appropriate a saying, image, slogan, etc. for the purpose to create a critique, you are engaging with cool writing” (Rice 41).  The key to cool writing then is the realization that texts are not isolated, but that they exist in social contexts and are available to be used for purposes other than those their creators intended.  Writing becomes less a straightforward statement than a Foucaultian series of discontinuities and redirections.  Cool writing comprises a rhetoric based not on progression but on juxtaposition, ambiguity rather than certainty, intertextual association rather than logical linearity.  In a sense, the book itself is a model of cool writing, as it links together disparate cultural uses of cool rather than organizing a central argument about the meaning of cool.  Thus, Rice offers a possible way to reduce one of the common problems students often have with writing: the claim that they have nothing to say.  Rice’s model of cool writing demonstrates that good writing can come from ambiguity and contradiction just as readily as from a traditional argumentative form.

Where Rice excels is in the use of new media to allow students the opportunity to attempt cool writing themselves.  A typical assignment involves Web-based research on a given chapter’s topic that is then used to create a Web page using one of the cool techniques discussed in the text.  Rice’s assignments further encourage the social aspect of culture production, asking students to hyperlink their Web projects together to form a larger cool text, which then becomes another text for decoding (pun intended).  Further, the use of the Web as the medium for classroom composition disrupts what John Trimbur has criticized as the limited circulation of composition production and consumption.  The results of class compositions are available for the consumption of anyone with a Web search engine.  Discussion questions throughout the chapter can be used to stimulate discussion or as the basis for further assignments.

The book has no problems whatsoever.

However, it should be noted that Rice assumes a teacher and students already familiar with composing for the Web, that is, in constructing Web pages through use of html coding.  On one hand, this could intimidate either instructors without this knowledge away from using the book in their classrooms, or instructors whose students will not have access to the necessary computer equipment.  On the other, this presents braver instructors with an opportunity to adapt Rice’s new media techniques to traditional print media.  Further, Rice’s book is not a traditional composition reader; the texts he uses in analysis must be procured elsewhere.  Or, again, an adventurous instructor can appropriate Rice’s method and model for  a curriculum of her own devising.  Still, with increasingly user-friendly web composing programs such as Wordpress, many of the technology issues that would otherwise limit the adoption of Rice’s book might be minimized.

On the whole, the strengths of the book outweigh its limitations.  Cool writing offers students a chance to write with increased confidence, and, as importantly, with pleasure in working from familiar cultural texts in productive and often innovative ways.  Writing About Cool takes advantage of a student’s natural interest in technology and asks them to examine both how meaning is made with and through technology, and to begin creating new meanings of their own.

ReMix: Writing + Composing Culture

Latterell, like Rice, posits the student as a fully capable critic of cultural product.  The book is organized by three principles: “(1) that as a participator in culture, you [the student] are already equipped to investigate it; (2) that the things that are closest to us—that we most often take for granted—are most worthy of investigation; and (3) that behind these artifacts of everyday life are collective assumptions that shape and reveal a culture’s thinking” (Latterell xxxiii).  In this, Latterell positions her book in a cultural studies field that owes more to the Birmingham school than the Frankfurt school; she conceives of students as active producers and consumers of culture, not its idle ideological victims.  Indeed, the book is presented not as a contained distillation of cultural “issues” to be resolved, but as a starting point for the work of cultural analysis.

 

Latterell’s book, when compared to Rice’s, is a more traditional composition text by far.  Unlike Rice’s book, Latterell’s is a composition reader centered on investigating seven overarching section themes: identity, community, tradition, romance, entertainment, nature, and technology.  Each section begins with three “assumptions” about the given cultural theme.  For example, the section on identity begins by asking students to question the validity of these statements: Identity is what we’re born with; Identity is shaped by culture; Identity is shaped by personal choices (5-13).  Accepted at face value, these statements become mere discursive commonplaces, but the readings themselves seek to problematize these commonplaces to reveal ideology and open divisions where cultural critique can begin.  The readings themselves are generally contemporary for most freshman students; only a handful date back more than ten years.  Throughout, Latterell incorporates humor into her selections—a John Stewart commencement speech is a main reading, and comedians such as Chris Rock and George Carlin are used in sidebars.  A note on design: the book is designed to resemble periodical or trade publishing, ostensibly both to reinforce the omnipresence of cultural production, but also to make the book seem fun and engaging to what may be a resistant audience.

 

If the book has any overarching theme, it is to demystify the work of cultural criticism and ease students into the practice of professional discourse.  The student introduction offers four steps to guide students toward “thinking like a cultural critic” (Latterell xxxv): asking questions, identifying cultural assumptions, testing assumptions by examining context, and writing critically.  What further distinguishes this book from Rice’s is Latterell’s focus on fieldwork and a generally ethnographic approach to cultural studies.  Major assignments might ask a student to research food production or distribution in his community, or to analyze the makeup of participants in a student organization.  The student introduction outlines some considerations that students will have to take into account when conducting interviews, observing locations firsthand, or developing surveys.  The ethnographic approach emphasizes that culture is not merely what we read, watch, or listen to.  The book’s approach stresses that culture in its broadest sense means lived culture, and in this it tries not to encourage student investment in pre-selected readings but rather to show students where they have already made investments in culture and cultural product.

 

The readings, in concert with the user-friendly design, explain much of the book’s appeal.  As noted, humor plays an integral part throughout the book, not just in the print readings but in the incorporation of cartoons and other humorous images as well.  Assignments ask students to use what they’ve read in the book and discussed in class to analyze other cultural products like Websites, television advertisements, and films.  The book further has strong Web support from its publisher, and its website includes guides for both instructor and student.  (The website, in fact, continues the book’s message of personal relationships to culture by asking students to submit playlists of music they have listened to or associated with use of the text; Latterell, in turn, offers a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of her own playlist.)  Material on the website includes web links for each chapter as well as archives of links relevant to material covered.  The website also includes general  resources for writing, grammar, and research.

 

Despite its strong readings and Web presence, ReMix doesn’t seem to offer much for instructors who wish to incorporate technology and technology-based rhetorics into freshman composition.  Those assignments that do incorporate the Web employ the Internet primarily as a research resource rather than a composition medium.  Other than the ethnographic approach and  incorporation of field work, there are few assignments that ask students to do anything more than perform the work of cultural criticism through reading, research, and writing.  Every chapter ends with a Mixing Words and Images assignment, but even in these the image is often at the service of the text; that is, little attempt is made to interrogate the rhetorical possibilities of the images in isolation.  Additionally, despite the text’s repeated assertion that students can produce valid cultural discourse, the text doesn’t offer a medium for making student work accessible to a readership outside the classroom—in effect, keeping the limited circulation of student production in place.

Despite its limits, ReMix is not without value.  Its assertion that students already have important investments in culture is an important one, and stressing this through the readings selected may generate increased student interest in their composition work.  For technologically inclined instructors, many of the assignments could be easily adapted to hypertext composition with only minor changes; likewise, the book’s weaker visual component could be counterbalanced by the incorporation of outside material into the syllabus.  ReMix seeks to remind students that culture is not merely something we do isolated in the classroom, but that it is in everything we do, everything we read, eat, watch, speak.  Culture is all around us, and we are in the mix.

Read more about these texts at their websites:

Writing About Cool

ReMix