FoolsCap

For my “Discourse,” I will be writing about my role as a student. I’ve been a student for the majority of my life, and since I have chosen a career field in academia, I will always in some fashion be a student—a life of learning, appropriating, sharing, and teaching. While my essay does not have a story as such, it is, like Barthes’s, a description of a moment of crisis in my discourse role. Until recently, I’ve always thought of myself as a student of literature and cultural studies, but now that idea of myself is going through a metamorphosis: I find myself surprisingly drawn to a field of study that I had not anticipated being interested in. At the same time, I am learning how to become a more effective instructor. On top of those reasons, I am learning new research methods that fascinate me while they frustrate me. I am stuck in a paradoxical crisis: I am both student and teacher, both literature scholar and rhetorician. My “Discourse,” then, is an attempt to resolve this crisis through intertextuality.

My primary text for this assignment is Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. This text is difficult to describe, but it too concerns a moment of crisis (more than one, in fact). The text is a confused tangle of narrators: the central text is a film called The Navidson Record; the next level of narration belongs to a scholar named Zumpanó who has composed a critical reading of the film, also titled House of Leaves; in a tertiary narration, a miscreant named Johnny Truant serves as Zumpanó’s editor; finally, an unnamed editor or editors edits Truant’s own notes on Zumpanó’s text. This text reflects my role as a student in several ways. Johnny Truant—although I don’t particularly identify with him personally—is a student of Zumpanó’s work. Additionally, the novel reflects many aspects of the new fields of study I’m interested in: material textuality, intertextuality, and hypertextuality. The book (including the film, Zumpanó’s book, and Truant’s commentary) is in part about being lost and not knowing which way to turn—much as I am now trying to decide in which direction my academic career should turn.

My other sources for this project so far include texts I’m already familiar with as well as sources I’ve found through research. My research has focused on learning more about new media and hypertext theories in order to understand why I find them so appealing, why they have interpellated me. I am also using many of the readings from my Tutoring Practicum courses; it is because of my (unexpected) interest in this course that I am considering a new field of study, so I think it is important to identify what I find so compelling in some of these texts. I might also incorporate some material from e-mail and blogs from colleagues whose work in rhet-comp has inspired and directed my own interest in the field.

Inspired by a conversation with a (non-academic) friend and by drafting essay for Monday:

Why change to rhet-comp?

1. Boredom.  I already know lit/cult studies.  Not that I’m an expert or anything, but I’m comfortable working in that field and it’s the sort of thing I would do anyway for fun.  So fun + theory (assuming that’s the distinction between bullshitting about popcult and "doing" popcult/lit study as a discipline) (gross reduction admitted). . .So fun + theory=. . .?  Boredom, quite frankly.  I don’t feel doing my doctoral work in lit/cult study is something that really engages me if all that distinguishes my leisure time from my professional time is adding ". . .’cos Derrida said so."  Again, gross reduction.
2. Value.  While committed to ideal of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, and the old saw of academia (generation/transmission of new knowledge), isn’t there something to be said for a discipline that offers broader value to my students?  That is, if I reject Paulo Freire’s (via J. Berlin) pedagogical call to liberation (As I’m unclear whom I’m liberating from what: Ideology?  Who says ideology is bad?  Whose ideology?) what is the purpose of pedagogy and scholarship?  Perhaps rhet/comp answers that.  While I daren’t reduce rhetorical study to the "practical" discipline (heeding Pruchnic’s advice from Thursday) there is something appealing to being able to claim you help students communicate and cogitate more effectively.
3. Careerism.  Job=good.  No job=bad.  Lit=no job?  Lit=bad?
4. Interpellation.  ‘Cos I seem to like it.  I’ll be the first to admit it’s a damn surprise to me–I like it’s emphasis on self-awareness, both at the individual and disciplinary level.  I like the broad scope of the discipline that I’ve seen already–rather than saying "I study 20th century post-war American Michigan Detroit Woodward Avenue literature," I can claim a broader field of interest and see how it works or doesn’t work within the field.
5. I have other reasons.

Why not change to rhet-comp?

1. Unfamiliarity.  While I don’t mean to reify the divide between rhetcomp and litcult, part of it is that I don’t really know what I’d do in the field.  Not that I’ve already got a niche planned in litcult, but I’ve got more ideas, let’s say–since I’ve only recently even realized that rhetcomp is something I’d ever consider studying.  To find the opportunity in that problem: how can I use my litcult interests (non-linear narrative, intertextuality, adaptation between media, postmodernism, graphic novels et cetera) in rhetorical study?
2. Snobbery.  A (very-respected) colleague from the comp side of the program here perceives a feeling that rhetcomp is dismissed as not being the intellectual equal of lit/cult study.  On one hand, I disagree, ‘cos I respect her very very much, and respect all of my colleagues on the dark side.  On the other hand, "the dark side" itself, however playfully intended, suggests my own latent snobbery: rhetcomp is not something you aspire to but something you succumb to [the rhetoric of Star Wars analogies].  Like malaria.  Do I think rhetcomp is a wuss discipline?  Of course not.  Would I feel as though I’d "betrayed" something/someone if I changed?  . . .A little.
3. Melville.  How do I write about Moby as a rhetcomp scholar?
4. Inertia.  Changing my field of study–and doing justice by new field of study–demands more of me than just sticking with the field where I already have some understanding of the work being done and how it’s being done.  This ties into point #1 above.  To understand the field at the level necessary to make a real go of it means playing some catch-up with myself: what do I not know that I should?  How do I find out what I should know in order to learn what I want to know?  Drawing on a month-old image, I might ask: What is the shadow knowledge beneath what I’m learning now?
5. I do not have hope my other reasons are justified.