FoolsCap

So, this teaching racket might pan out after all.

A serendipitous moment of realization during class discussion the other day: intertextuality as invention strategy!  Which is, of course, part of the motive behind Text Book anyway.  But, here’s what came out of discussion:

Intertext is not just about overlapping texts or texts in dialogue with one another, but also about the spaces where the overlap doesn’t quite fit or where the dialogue falls silent–these spaces are places for invention, to add to the intertext with one’s own contribution.  Not a breakthrough, really, but given my muddle lately trying to think of my own approach to invention, I was quite zipped to have this come up in discussion. 

Thanks students!

I was trying to whip up some ideas for articles or research or something.  I failed, but I started thinking about something else in the process.  I asked myself: Looking at the work of the scholars who’ve made an impact on you lately (that is, the scholars whose work made me interested in moving from lit/cult studies to rhet/comp), what does their work have in common?

An interest in metaphor is the answer I arrived at.  Consider the way these shcolars play with metaphor:

• Geoff Sirc: Virtual Urbanism vs. the Virtual Academic.  Writing as space for exploration and wandering.
• Geoff Sirc again: Box-Logic.  Writing as space for collection of curios and artifacts.
• Cynthia Haynes: Ungrounded, homeless refugees.  The writer as someone unsettled and unresolved; the essay as the search for a place to stand.
• Jeff Rice: Hip-hop pedagogy.  Writing as juxtaposition, sampling, reorchestration and mash-up.
• Greg Ulmer: the Mystory.  Writing as site for personal exploration and revelation, as method of discovering patterns in one’s life.

While I don’t think any of these scholars thinks of writing only in these terms, this little thought-experiment made me ask: What’s My Metaphor?

I’m not sure I have one yet (not that I need to), but it’s something to think about. . .maybe even as assignment idea in the future.  As the previous post mentions, I am drawn to the idea of writing-as-web–but that’s not really my metaphor, just one that I find compelling.  What I do like about the idea of the web is how it accomodates the models of the above scholars in various ways.  (Well, maybe not Haynes, but the others certainly.)

So, reader. . .what your metaphor?

Something Jeff wrote got me thinking. . .

In his post, Jeff describes a sort of pleasurable drift through the content on YouTube, comparing it to Benjamin’s <i>Arcades</i> or Barthes’ drift.  At one point, Jeff uses the phrase "fascinating Web" to describe his pleasure in such drifting. 

I find something engaging in this phrase.  With a slight tweak, "Web," capitalized and heralding the WWW, can become simply "web" and for me thus retains more metaphoric value.  The "fascinating web," then, as metaphor for writing: a place of connection and connectedness (if the two can be understood as unique).  I like the idea of web-as-writing for a number of reasons (I’ll know what the number is when I’m done writing):

1. Connections.  As I come to understand more how all writing is intertext, one thing that fascinates me is how ideas/words/practices are repeated through different levels of disourse.  Nothing new here, but I’m always geeked by this phenomenon anyway.
2. Connectedness.  To sound maybe a little too meta for a moment: The distinction between connection/connectedness, for my purposes, is this: connection is simply the fact of the connection, the raw data behind a link between two sites/cites, while connectedness is our awareness of and ability to exploit/manipulate/use that connection.
3. If we think too of what web is biologically, we can expand the metaphor even further.  Of course, one bio-web is that of the spider–a trap, a sticky lure.  Writing depends on that sticky lure, right?–the promise of pleasure and fascination is what hails us to those subjects we write about.  (And yes, I know that the spider’s web is also a sight of consumption and destruction, but I admit I haven’t really thought the metaphor all the way through.)
4. In biology, there’s also the idea of the food web, a model that supersedes the linear food-chain to emphasize the mutlivalent, expansive relationships between produces and consumers.  (Some of that language–producers and consumers–I note is echoed in some composition theory.  I’m looking at you, Trimbur.)  Our web–those of us who are rhet/comp scholars rather than biologists–is the textual web.  While certainly there’s a text-chain as well, the text-chain is just the linear strand that makes up one radius of the text-web
5. Of course, the WWW is part of this metaphor too–hypertext as conscious exploitation of the connections between sites and texts.

All of this as a serendipitous prelude into my next post. . .