FoolsCap

Responses to this week’s reading.  Well, sort of.  Thoughts that occurred while reading, so maybe inspired by the readings than an actual response to them.

Eh, screw it.  Let’s just say they’re responses.  I’ll type ‘em up and you figure out which articles I’m responding to.  3. . .2. . .1. . .GO!!

This one is actually sort of tied to a reading.  Sue me.  I was reading Dworkin and thinking about semiotics.  (A heady combination, believe me.)  Semiotics, as we all know, is the study of how wordss mean, as opposed to semantics, which studies what words mean.  Derrida, if my skethcy understanding holds true, argues that words only have meaning in relation to other words, without necessarily being tied to an "objective" signified.  Saussure was Derrida’s inspiration (or at least his forebear), but Saussure still thought that words referred to real concrete phenomena.  We could even, I suppose, go back to Plato’s Ideal Forms and make a semiotician of the old fellow.

All of these are theories, right?  Models of understanding, hermeneutics, epistemologies–> theories.  So, in a way, semiotics–although different semioticians may formulate the answer differently–asks, as I’ve already said, How does this mean?  I would elaborate: How does this mean in relation to other meanings?  Semiotics, then, can possibly be understood as representing a potential fulfillment of the rhetoric of inquiry that Dworkin calls for.  The goal, then, if we agree with Dworkin, is to develop a pedagogy of inquiry.  Or, as Jeff might suggest: how do we turn theory (semiotics) into pedagogy (composition)?

Speaking of Jeff. . .

I noticed that, in some ways, the first sections of his piece (453-459) are mystorical, as he traces the appearance of "Whatever" through different fields of experience (the popcycle?).  What’s missing, of course, is the personal history–Family–of the mystory.  Well, not missing, in the sense that it should but that it is merely absent.  I found, reading this, that the idea of the mystory sort helped me follow Jeff’s argument a bit more cogently; I recognized too that in Jeff and Ellen are right in that–while the mystory helped me understand some of Jeff’s essay–the mystory I think is more a different way of thinking about writing/composing than it is a genre unto itself.  (Which maybe it is, but I think what Ulmer and Jeff value in it is not the generic conventions of the mystory but the associative thinking/research models it offers.)

So. . .I wanted to get in on the whole neologism thing too, so I started thinking about a word for the rhetorical move Jeff uses in the first couple sections of the essay.  Recognizing it as being sort of mystorical (at least in my comprehension of it if not in its actual composition), I knew the word should be related to "mystory."  So, I came up with "whystory," which I define thusly: a whystory is the analytic/research function of the mystory divested of the personal history (Family) sector of the popcycle.  What the whystory does, then, is recognizes the pattern in the other fields of discourse (choragraphic voices) and explains why the thread is worth studying.  I’m not saying this is a breakthrough, gang: I’m just saying this helped me read the essay, okay?  Grr!!  Ruff ruff!!

Sorry.  I turned into a dog for a second.

Something that occurred to me whilst reading Haynes.  Something that’s become clear to me in some of the recent reading is that to some degree, rhetorical/composition studies and cultural studies are really not that different.  Or, at least, certain models of rhet/comp studies aren’t.  Anyway. . .Cultural studies is a field of inquiry based on understanding how meaning is created and circulated through given discursive fields, right?  And rhetoric/composition studies–at least in many of our readings lately–are sort of about finding the most effective ways to produce or discover meanings–which are then circulated back through culture (or, at least, they could be–circulation of student writing being a major concern for many theorists as we’ve seen).  I’m not saying rhet/comp should be subsumed into cult studies, but I’m strating to think that the divides between the different concentrations are not as impermeable as we think.

On a related note, I was looking through my copy of Scholes-Comley-Ulmer’s Text Book and noted this:

[. . .] We teachers make a mistake when we separate the writing done by students from the texts they write about.  What literature has to offer us–teachers and students alike–is pleasure, information, and something else: the most powerful and creative ways to use language–those things that make literature literary. (iii)

So, then: Literature as affect rather than literature as genre?  Well, I love it!  The essay is one of my favorite forms, quite frankly, and I think in the hands of the best writers it is literature–in particular, if anyone’s wondering, I love love love Paul Auster’s essays (and his fiction too).  I think too that, to some degree, what Scholes et al point to here is a question of circulation.  I think part of the question of circulation, as the authors note, has to do with pleasure.  So if noone enjoys reading (much less writing) the old 5P theme (as much as I know Jeff is sick of hearing our collective obsession with it). . .why would that boring form circulate?  (Or why has i t circulated so long?)

I’m really very fond of this textbook: it has the mystory, but in context of other approaches to composition, the readings are diverse (A reader that has a Derrida excerpt?!?), and I think the organization is sort of intuitive in that I think its progression sort of mirrors the way our language skills develop–or at least the way I would assume they develop.  It starts with a section on Representation/Narrative; I assume our first language skill is translating experience into language (I went here and then did that), so this makes sense.  The second section is about Metaphor/Literary language: how do I communicate more effectively?  HOw do I use words to achieve affect?  Next: Intertextuality (Freakin’ Sweet!)–how does what I say reflect/impact what others have said/will say?  And, finally, Research: synthesizing the above into a [I hesitate to say it] "standardized" form [and yes I know nothing says research has to be standardized].  The book is subtitled "Writing Through Literature" but I don’t think that its uses would be limited to the lit classroom, as I’ve noted, since it doesn’t teach lit as genre but as affect.  Those of us into lit (I think that’s me and Jenna, and maybe Jessie) might consider this text.  I’m seriously reconsidering Seeing & Writing (which I had temporarily decided on) and might use this instead.  Hmm.

Since I mentioned the mystory:  Another obvious thing, in retrospect, but I’ve been thinking a lot about the mystory and how it might/might not fit into the vague pedagogical ideas I have.  As noted, mystory is a pun on mystery and history but I hadn’t really realized the implications of the most basic one until recently: my story.  First, it signals the writer’s personal investment in the form: this matters to me because. . . .Second, it implies this heuristic value of the mystory, in that it’s sort of intended to prompt new associations in the writer as much (if not more) than in the reader.  Third: it hints at the idiosyncratic (or, as Ulmer might have it, idiosyncretic) nature of the composition.  Finally (for my purposes but not exhaustively) by using the writer’s own experience as part of its model, each mystory is (ideally) unique–my story is not the same as your story. . . .

Further ruminations about totality.  This would be easier with the little chart I drew in my notes, but I’ll do it with bullet points instead.

1. Deconstruction says that signifiers relate not to an exterior signifier but to one another.  [Example: "chair" refers not to the object by butt rests on but to "sit," "stand," "tired," "legs," "ground" et cetera.  I think.  I’m still not quite sure I understand this whole deconstruction/poststructuralist bag.]  I think we might be able to expand deconstruction to say that texts also relate not just to their own inherent meaning (if there is such a thing) but to other texts, other meanings, other other other.
2. Reader-response theory (at least one branch of it) says that a text’s meaning lies as much in the reader as in the text itself.  That is, meaning is shaped as much by our approach to the text as what is printed on the page.  [I’m attracted to reader-response theory while, at the same time, amazed that it is a theory because it seems obvious to me.  Of course, I’ve grown up in a postmodern era which says as much, so. . .]
3. Both decon and r/r, then, dissociate meaning from the text/signifier and locate it elsewhere.
4. So meaning is never "inherent," it always lies elsewhere (it is deferred, right?).  Intertextuality, as I’ve earlier realized, is fundamentally Derridean–>a text’s meaning is in other texts as much/if not more than in itself.
5. I think, though, that a lot of intertextual study makes intertext a byproduct of writing.  True, sometimes it is not–there are response texts and so on.  But the idea of intertext itself doesn’t depend on conscious use of intertextual relationships.
6. This is where I think hypertext comes in.  As a model for composition, hypertext foregrounds those intertextual connections (esp. in products like the mystory).  It emphasizes too the composer’s activity in a discursive field–>I write "x" *because* some one else has written "y"–> not merely I write "x", you write "y", and let’s see where they inform one another.
7. Totality, then, might be understood in this context as a view of a text that accomodates as much of its inter/hypertextual connectivity as necessary for the writer’s/reader’s purpose.  I say both reader and writer because one of the ideas that’s really compelling to me is that we can intentionally write into an intertextual relationship with other texts–which I’ve come to think of as writing hypertextually.  Reading hypertextually, then, is reading in such a way that your understanding of a text becomes consciously dependent on its relationships to other texts.
8. I also think hypertext is a hermeneutic/heuristic analytic tool as well.  To use actual hypertext metaphorically: textual analysis might be compared to using a Web browser’s "View Source" function–>to perform hypertextual analysis then might be to examine the sources of a given text, to trace its connections for patterns, recurring motifs, et cetera. . .to mystory it perhaps.

I’m so sick of this flipping blog entry.

McGinnis OUT.