FoolsCap

Our original subject line today was courtesy of Messr. Brian Eno’s album Here Come the Warm Jets–a personal fave of your humble narrator.  If you like Bowie (ca. Heroes/Low) or early Roxy Music (self titled or For Your Pleasure) you should definitely check out Eno’s early stuff as well.  Of course, Eno produced Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy and Eno was was also a member of Roxy music on those first two albums, so the recommendation’s not much of a stretch.  But, as you will see, Moby-Dick comes into play so I had use something from Moby as my subject line.

Some disjointed notes inspired my recent thoughts:

I’ve been thinking (a dangerous habit, I know) about the heuristic value of writing.  Specifically: how do we teach writing as a heuristic and not a hermeneutic.  Thinking back to my high school days, even my best writing teacher (Teresa Spear) never really stressed that writing had an intrinsic learning value.  Which is not to say she didn’t know that, but just that I don’t know that our students, many of whom will be recent high school grads, will be ready to make the jump that I only recently made myself.  It’s a question I’ve addressed different ways throughout the semester: how do I use theory through pedagogy, rather than just teaching theory?  That sentence itself is a bit jumbled, I grant you.  I also don’t think that Jeff or anyone in the dep’t necessarily expects us to jump into the classroom for the first time and have the answers to this question which seems to be a matter of debate within academia still.  I sort of feel, though, that the vague ideas I’m trying to generate for assignments don’t mesh together, and might not until I answer the above question–or at least get more comfortable with the idea that I’m not yet ready to answer it.

The English dep’t’s perceived value to the other institutional disciplines stems from the comp side of the dep’t.  How then can we maximize the effieciency of that area?  Part of the problem, as has been addressed time and again, is that we don’t let really qualified people teach writing.  I’m feeling more confident that I’ll have some ideas for teaching next semester, but I don’t really know if I would take my own writing course, you know?  I don’t want to say that the dep’t is failing its institutional role, but I think maybe just in the way the status quo falls that a lot of opportunities are being missed.

I think the two above points are interrelated.  The dep’t’s value to the institution directly (oversimplification noted)  correlates to how well we can teach writing as a heuristic.  Hermeneutics are fine–useful, yes–but every discipline probably has ways to teach its students how to interpret within the field’s demands.  Which is to ask: why does a chem student need to know how to decode the semiotics of Britney Spears?

This points to some of the difficulty I’ve been having with constructing a syllabus.  World is a Text has some strong intro material on semiotics and what it means to "read" texts in the cultural studies way.  And while I think that this sort of reading does have intrinsic value, I’m not sure how to communicate that to the first year chem student who’s wondering what Jackie Chan and John Wayne have to do with one another, or why she has to assemble a poem/image project.

One of the things that I didn’t mention in my review of ReMix is the author’s stated desire to provoke revelatory moments in students–those "aha!" moments when relationships fall into place and connections are made (the sort of things that have been happening to me every other day lately).  I’m not sure if I’m comfortable with the suggestion that revelation can be taught.  I think you can set the pieces up and wait to see if the student sees how they fit, but. . .I dunno.  I’m sort of thinking of the resistance I had to Jeff’s pedagogy earlier this year.  (And I guess I still have it, but I’m trying to work around/through it.)  If I tell the students "Hey look at the big revelation you just had!", it’s not really much of a revelation is it?

What I would hope to do, though, is to get to the point where I can say: Hey, look at all these pieces. . .I wonder if they fit?–and then wait for the gleam in the students’ eyes as they fill with awe and wonder.

I think, rereading what I’ve written, that maybe I’m ignoring my own advice.  I know (well, think) I’ve written elsewhere about our goal being not one of teaching the right answers but teaching the right questions.  My concern over revelations and whatnot perhaps still evinces that answers mindset.  The revelation is the answer. . .assembling the pieces is the question. . .or something.  It’s far too early/late to be thinking about this.  Damn Mountain Dew.

Other thoughts. . .

Some 1/2-assed syllabus ideas:

Sixteen weeks, four units, four major assignments (or maybe 2/3 major and smaller ones as we go along)

• Week One: Intros/Syllabus/Read intro material in World…Text/intro first project (prob research based personal narrative)
• Week Two: Read personal essays in text (which ones TBD)/peruse research material in handbook
• Week Three: More personal essays.  Discussion.  Group work on first drafts of essay.
• Week Four: Essays Due.  Still deciding the rest of it.
• Week Five: Introduce "cool writing" based on what I see in personal essays.  Begin discussion of how cultural definitions become evident when reading texts (in whatever medium)
• Week Six: Definitional essays/how definitions contradict/complement/contend.  Intro assignment: definition essay inspired by Jeff’s book.  More notes on this later
• Week Seven: Peer review of first drafts, discussion based on results
• Week eight: Essays due.  Rest TBD
• Week Nine: Argumentation.  Not with the students, hahaha.  In essays.  How we persuade and are persuaded.
• Week Ten: Image as persuasion.  View Koyaanisquatsi.  Let’s see how the little buggers like that, heh heh heh.Intro assigment that Ellen and I made in two minutes in class.  (More details of course)
• Week Eleven: Persuasive essays/ads in group work 
• Week Twelve: Persuasive stuff due.  Responding to Lit/Poetry
• Week Thirteen: Lit/Poetry?
• Week Fourteen: Poetry/Image assignment group work
• Week Fifteen:  Performance of imagetexts due.
• Week Sixteen: Imagetext essays due.  End of semester bidness. 

A rough sketch of what I’m thinking of.  I’m still trying to narrow down the assignments and readings, so. . .The question that’s ruling the process for me is this: Well, actually, it’s a series of questions.  Let’s assume I’ve only got sort of a vague idea for the "theme" of my class–what I have in mind is something about reading "hypertextually," that is, reading with intertextual relationships not just happening accidentally but actively looking for and trying to make the relationships work.  In Jeff’s terms, it might "cool reading."  So, my question is this: should I pick readings that encourage my theme and then draft assignments, or should I draft assignments that encourage the writing I want to see and then pick readings that fit?  It’s a writing course, right, so I’m thinking it should be more the second one. . . . 

Teaching a lit class would be so much easier.

I’ve been thinking also of going for the masters degree as well.  Not just now, obviously, but something to look into.  I find I’m much more curious about these comp questions than I anticipated; I admit that I sort of thought that 6010 would be a huge pain in the ass and prove of no value to me.  (Instead, I find it has been a huge pain in the ass but of incalculable value to me–not just as a soon-to-be writing instructor but as a writer (and reader) as well.)  Which is to say: maybe I’m sort of thinking about doing the masters in comp?  The problem is, of course, that the courses I’d have to take for that wouldn’t really work for my doc in lit/cult studies.  Alas.  Damn the divisive nature of our dep’t!  Still. . .I was thinking about how comp could inform my lit studies (and vice-versa) and I think I’ve come up with the germ of an answer.

It’s all about Moby-Dick.

One of the things we see in Moby is Ishmael’s struggle to make sense out of the whole Pequod escapade.  In particular, he finds himself in a very tense semiotic struggle to decode the blank horror of the white whale.  In a long, beautiful chapter called "The Whiteness of the Whale," Ishmael tries to wrestle with what whiteness means to Ahab and what meanings have been ascribed to whiteness historically.  (Whiteness as a color, not so much a racial category.  Although Moby might support such a meaning.  Hmmm.)  Thinking about it today, I see now that what Melville/Ishmael does is "cool writing"–he’s trying to frame questions about the idea of whiteness through the conflicting/contradictory meanings associated with it.  As I remember the chapter, he doesn’t quite succeed–or, rather, he sort of abandons the question as fundamentally unanswerable.  My senior seminar paper sort of took this idea in a different direction. . .I’d like to revisit it now with some new questions though. 

Is there any English studies questions that can’t be answered by Moby-Dick, or, The Whale?  Not that I’ve found.