FoolsCap

The results of the diagnostic essays I asked my CBS students to compose:

            Overall, the products of the diagnostic in-class essay were encouraging.  Every student was able to produce at least one substantial paragraph of writing.  Although I had planned to allow students one full hour to compose the diagnostic essay, student questions about the demands of the assignment took some time and I was only able to offer students forty to forty-five minutes to complete the essay.  This information might seem of little relevance to understanding the products of the exercise, but I think it is important to keep in mind the limitations under which students were working when drafting these essays.

Not only are these limits part of the rhetorical situation behind these writing samples, but it is interesting, for my purposes, to note how substantial a piece of work a student can produce in a limited amount of time.  I had been planning on including an essay exam in the Fall 1010 course, so seeing here how students respond to a writing prompt when given limited time to compose a response is instructive.  Furthermore, I want to emphasize these time limits as a sort of overall caveat to any of the comments that follow.  While I am confident that all of our students responded to the best of their ability, the scene of writing here is neither organic nor optimal, so students who produced work of less-evident sophistication cannot and should not be dismissed as incompetent writers; given a longer period of time to draft, revise, and edit the same prompt, we can safely assume that all of the diagnostic essays would show marked improvement.

Caveats aside, the results, as mentioned are encouraging.  Of the thirteen essays collected, none exhibited major faults in use of the English language or in basic English grammar or sentence structure.  I emphasize the fact of English grammar here for multiple reasons.  First, although I had been instructed that these were not ESL students, CBS’s emphasis on the need to instruct these students in appropriate written forms of academic discourse—specifically as opposed to the blend of Spanish and English language discourses many of these students participate in at home—left me with some concerns as to the level of basic skills these students possessed; as it turned out, however, my doubts in this regard were unwarranted.  Second, one of the students spoke with me personally after the subsequent class session to voice some concerns about an upcoming assignment.  She was afraid, she said, of not being able to complete the assignment because English was not her first language; she was concerned that the difficulty of composing in English would inhibit her from completing the work.[1]  If other students share similar fears, they have not yet expressed them; I hope, of course, that between myself and the peer mentors we will be able to address this student’s concerns and find ways to address her needs.[2]

Above the grammar and sentence levels, most students again exhibited a satisfactory level of performance at the paragraph design level.  Most of the essays collected here displayed an understanding of basic concepts of paragraph composition: one main idea per paragraph, each paragraph starting with a topic sentence, and the first line of each paragraph beginning with an indentation.  At this level, we can begin to see where students might need instruction.  Although many students accurately used each paragraph to develop one main idea or connected series of thoughts or events, there were a number of essays in which parts of the essay which may more properly have been divided into separate paragraphs were instead run into one or more paragraph units.  I can conjecture some reasons for this.  As we will shortly see, this could stem from unfamiliarity with the conventions of essay form.  Alternatively, there may have been confusion over the genre appropriate to the writing prompt: the prompt was described as a “short essay about a literacy event from your own experience.”  The question, then, becomes whether students understood “short essay” here as a conventional, multiple-paragraph essay of brief length, or as a “short essay” answer typically found in examinations.  Regardless of causes, I hope to be able to offer some instruction on paragraph design with one of the exercises scheduled on the syllabus.

It is at the level of essay form that the greatest gap between levels of achievement becomes apparent.  To look more closely at this, I divided the essays into two groups: one in which the use of conventional essay techniques (multiple paragraphs, paragraph breaks clearly signaled through indentation, use of transitions between and within paragraphs) was apparent, and one in which such techniques were either absent or haphazard.  I further opted not to question the content of the essays in this step of the analysis, nor to look specifically at how students developed theses or arguments.  My main concern here was whether students exhibited an understanding of essay form—that is, whether students could produce a piece of writing that recognizably looked like an essay, setting aside (for the moment at least) whether they were using the form accurately or effectively.

Curiously, the divide was almost exactly half; of the thirteen essays collected, seven fell into the first group and six fell into the second.  Each group, of course, varied within itself as to the level of achievement evident; in the first group (recognizable essays) the main points of deviation were whether students used transitions to signal connections between ideas and how they tied their supporting details and ideas to the main point of their essays.  In the second group (those not readily recognizable as meeting essay conventions) such variation was far broader.  Among these students, some essays used complex sentences and transitions between sentences and thoughts while other students used primarily simple, declarative sentences with few transitional cues.

Finally, the content of several of these essays is worth noting, given the larger aims of CBS and the SEP.  Roughly a third (five of thirteen) of these students wrote about the acquisition of a new language and the attendant difficulties of socialization.  While in some of the essays the students do not describe what John Trimbur defines as a literacy event,[3] these essays are nonetheless an interesting window into the different discourses these students occupy.  For those students to whom English is a second language (the majority of students in this particular set), the events described in their essays were typically narratives of isolation, of being divided from larger social groups by the barrier of language.  For other students, who described learning Spanish as an act of ancestral exploration, acquiring the second language was a significant accomplishment.  Further students described the experience of growing up in a bilingual household as an advantage to their own development and a skill with which they can assist recently emigrated family and friends more effectively assimilate into American culture.

Desperation for subject lines sets in when I find I’m resorting to homonyms.  Homonyms!

I know I’ve been the object of some fun-making regarding my devotion to a certain prof’s work, both in the classroom and out of it; of course, much of that is self-deprecating fun-making too: I admit I’ve been sort of in thrall to the prof in question.  I try not to use this space for too much self-analysis anymore, so I’ll spare my reader(s?) my third-rate psychoanalysis on why that should be the case.  In any event, while it seems fruitless to deny his or her influence on my work, this prof is soon to be leaving my institution, it seems like a valid opportunity to start crafting–or at least, looking for ways to craft–a scholastic identity apart from being this prof’s acolyte but still admitting his or influence on my research interests.

And no, dear reader, I don’t kid myself that all the efforts toward ambiguity and anonymity in the above paragraph mean you won’t figure out to whom I’m referring.  Hint: with all due respect, it’s not Cannon Schmidt.

Anyway, as I have so often in the past, I start with this prof’s work as a way to begin my own post.  Particularly, what is written here:

Those conversations, implicit and explicit, can occur in a shopping list (which is one example Trimbur provides from his textbook; a writing some students dispute and label irrelevant) or on a website or in an encounter, or in a book, and so on. This writing, however, is not, as Trimbur offers, symbolic. Its process or flow does not represent another experience or encounter. It is writing itself. The challenge is to ask: how does one generate or maintain such relations with references? How does one teach that writing within an already established network that poses references as proof or confirmation?

I was revisiting this post (from January 07) because I’ve been using Trimbur’s textbook, The Call to Write, for one of the courses I’m teaching this summer.

Granted, I’m still a new teacher, so I don’t make any claim to owning an expertise or even having the necessary body of research to draw from when framing some question and comments that follow.  My goal here, if anything, is to ask some questions about my pedagogy and (hopefully) get some helpful feedback from more experienced readers.

I’m teaching two classes this semester.  One is good ol’ 1020.  No problems there (but I am growing bored with the syllabus so might draft a new one for fall).  The situation for my other course is a bit more interesting: I’m teaching a writing workshop for my university’s Center for Chicano and Boricua Studies (CBS); the program & the workshop (there’s also a maths workshop) are designed to lay the groundwork so that students can enter collegiate level courses in these subjects and be prepared to perform at the expected level.  I’ve decided to teach the course as sort of a prelude to 1010; in fact, I’m already committed to teaching a CBS-sponsored section of 1010 in fall with these students and a handful of other CBS students.

What has been instructive for me, thus far, is the difference between expectations in teaching for CBS and for my own dep’t.  My dep’t (at present at least) allows its GTAs an extremely wide latitude in how/what they teach in their composition courses.  For example, I teach from Scholes/Comley/Ulmer’s Text Book and have a very strong emphasis on technology and hypertext (in this syllabus at least); many of my peers from this year’s crop of GTAs opted for World is a Text and took a more conventional cultural studies approach.  My dep’t, to the best of my knowledge happily accomodates both pedagogies and that has been a source of much pleasure and relief for me.

The organizer and administrator of the CBS program, a friend and colleague named Ethriam Brammer, has been very gracious about my role in the program.  While the CBS program has specific goals of its own, Ethriam has made very clear that I have pedagogical autonomy in both this workshop and in the fall 1010 course; CBS sets no expectations from me other than academic rigor and a commitment to the mission and goals of the Summer Enrichment Program.

This will be my first time teaching 1010 and in drafting the syllabus I moved away from the sort of textual research work used in Text Book to (what I assume is) a more conventional stance of writing pedagogy.  Why? 

One thing I’ve picked up from teaching two courses from Scholes et al. is that students have expectations of their own; on the recently returned student evals from last semester, one student complained that they didn’t think they’d learned anything about academic writing from my course.  (I had expected this reply, but it still stung a little.)  This could mean at least a couple of things.  First, this student didn’t understand the connection between the research and (sorry, Jeff) critical thinking I was asking of them and conventional forms of academic research.  This, in turn, would indicate a gap in my pedagogy: I failed to make clear these connections or to establish their value.  Another suggestion, one that is most problematic for my formative pedagogy, is that the value of such text work for academic use is nil.  (As Jeff might counsel, drawing on Sirc: But do we choose to teach writing simply for school or for life?)  Of course, I don’t thinkthat such theories of writing and research are without value, but having a student make that claim so emphatically gave me pause to consider the possibility.

Given, then, that students have expectations of their own, as do departments and centers of study and universities, the experience of the novice instructor (like myself) can sometimes seem a precarious one.  While I like the emphasis on textuality, mystorical work, and poststructural theory that Scholes et al. incorporate into Text Book, I didn’t really feel it was appropriate for the CBS course.  I think, in part, it had to do with my own boredom with parts of the syllabus that uses it, but also because I had some uncertainty about what level of writing development I would see in these students.  (Thus far, results have been encouraging.)  So I wanted to approach the workshop (and 1010 as well) in a somewhat more. . .eh. . .conservative fashion in order to be able to better help any students who were having particular difficulties with the assignments.  That is, I wanted to be able to focus more on improving student writing than on explaining the theories and value of and behind the work I ask students to do in my current 1020 syllabus.

But, at the same time, and after looking at some sample 1010 syllabi, I didn’t want to just push the 5P theme on these students either, and the sample syllabi that I looked at relied too hevaily on that model and texts that taught that model for my interests.  So I chose Trimbur’s The Call to Write for its emphasis on context and connectedness in writing as well a stress on the flexibility of the essay form.

The word essay is derived from the French word essai, which means to try or test out.  This derivation captures the spirit of the essay as a genre of writing in which writers invent forms to embody their purposes.  Many examples of writing in this book might be described as an essay as well as, say, a memoir, a commentary, or a proposal.  The exact meaning of the term essay has been debated by scholars in literary studies, rhetoric, and composition.  Some want to restrict it to a particular type of literary or journalistic essay that uses a personal voice and other self-revelatory features to fashion experience and observation into writing.  Others use it more broadly to refer to writing tasks where the form in open and flexible.  In this chapter, we’ll use the term essay in its broader sense, as a catch-all category that includes a range of other genres.  For our purposes, the defining feature of the essay will be the openness and the flexibility it gives writers to shape their thoughts, feelings, and experiences into written forms.

I quote Trimbur at length here because I think the explanation of the essay here reveals something important of both why I chose this text and why I’ve always like the essay personally.  Pedagogically, I like Trimbur’s emphasis on openness and flexibility and invention–that form is something that is created by the writer rather than something the writer is slavishly beholden to.  In this sense, then, I could (if I chose) teach the "Discourse" assignment as an example of the endless mutability of the essay form–or the cut-up, or, or. 

There’s a lot more I’d like to say about Trimbur and 1010 and pedagogy, but my thoughts are drifting.  Perhaps later.

1. Further thoughts on C & W
2. Responses to two articles I’ve read
3. Response to Spivak’s into to <i>Of Grammatology</i>
4. The usual excoriations of my own limited talents

A compendium of lessons learned and thoughts thunk during the 2007 Computers and Writing Conference, May 17-20, at bee-yoo-tee-ful Wayne State.

1. Holy damn, putting on a conference is a lot of work.  I do not envy the organizers of larger conferences (the Cs, for example) their task.
2. The best way to learn your campus is to tell a stranger where they’re going.
3. The Ferry Street Inn is on Ferry Street.  And, on Friday morning, had the most scrumptious fresh-cinnamon roll smell wafting through the lounge/dining area.
4. The C&W community likes the following stuff: free crap, beer, bowling, helpful grad volunteers, accessible parking.
5. The C&W community does not like the following: unreliable wireless access, the staff at the Towers dorm, lunch shortages, name-tag shortages, program shortages.  For all participants who suffered through these and other inconveniences: apologies and gratitude for your patience.
6. Geoff Sirc is, in person, as interesting and engaging as his writing and nowhere near as intimidating as his UMinn faculty pic.
7. Richard Doyle reminds me of a favorite line from <i>Hamlet</i>: "Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t."
8. Who is the fellow with the mutli-colored mohawk?
9. Oh, that’s [insert respected scholar’s name here]!
10. Helen Liggett is a terrifically nice person and I wish I had been able to make it to her talk.  Still, I had the chance to drive her and Keith Dorwick from the Ferry St. Inn to McGregor and had a nice chat about WSU landmarks.
11. If someone compliments me personally one more time, I’m going to get paranoid.  But thanks, Richard and Jeff, anyway–it meant a lot.
12. I think Vered would be huge here.
13. McGregor has the ugliest doors in Christendom.
14. A (partial) standing ovation from one’s peers and colleagues for all one’s hard work?  Priceless.
15. I love free books.
16. These publisher people are really helpful.
17. I’m horribly underdressed for this museum banquet.
18. A flitting uncertainty as to who’s faculty and who’s still grad students.
19. Open Source Software: I understand its importance and all, but I’m not sure I really quite care yet.  Although Pruchnic’s New Order-themed panel was pretty sweet–in particular, I liked the extrapolation from this one phenomenon to broader social/pedagogical/theoretical concerns.
20. If you want to, you know, attend panels, volunteering to work the conf is not the best way to do it.

Other thoughts that require more in-depth explanation:

I admit I’ve been hesitant to send out paper proposals/abstracts because I didn’t feel like I had had the necessary "Big Idea."  But from what I’ve seen during the conference, the BI doesn’t seem to matter so much.  This is in no way a diminishment of the work presented at the conference–all the panels I was able to attend offered creative, engaging, rigorous scholarship.  Rather, though, one thing I’ve learned from the conference is that the conf paper doesn’t have to be a major statement or a field-changing intervention, but rather can be a work-in-progress, some half-formed-thoughts, a way to present ideas and conjectures and get feedback from one’s peers.  A major relief, then, as I start hypothesizing ideas for next year’s C & W.

I am not a natural schmoozer, but need to work on it a bit.  The few participants I had a chance to talk to at length were gracious and warm, so I’m encouraged about future attempts to meet and/or greet.  I admire those whose crippling personal doubts and anxieties don’t stand in the way of successful networking.

My impression is that the event was a huge p.r. smash for WSU and the Detroit area in general.  Which, as we WSU students eagerly assured each other, bodes well for the next round of hirings and future grad applications.  In particular, conf participants seemed impressed by the dedication and efforts of the grad volunteers, by the accessibility of most campus points of interest, the close proximity of two bars to campus, the proximity of Detroit’s cluster of museums to our campus, and the attractiveness overall of Wayne’s cmapus.  This last point is of interest, I think, because too often Wayne folks take their surroundings for granted–at least I do.

I’m sort of getting sick of writing this, but I’ve more to say about various panels I attended, and a possible realization about a direction of study for yours truly.

My brain has been fried by all the writing lately, what with seminar papers coming due.  But I still want to write here, in this space–indeed, I often had to resist writing here while drafting seminar papers.  This venue seems, in some ways, so much more compelling.  Is it the promise of instant feedback, or that I can respond to people’s comments–where I can’t exactly write Dr. Flatley a note about his comments on a seminar paper. . . .

Interesting things afoot on Rice’s blog of late to which I want to respond, at least in brief:

1) The emphasis not on what is new or not new, but rather on the changing work/writing space that shifts from hypertextual paths (Bolter) to networks (managing these environments/synching them/seeing them in relationship to one another on the desktop/browser).

Hmm. . .while my first instinct is to freak out–just as I’ve started getting some thoughts together on hypertext, networks come along and shift the whole paradigm–I’m not sure that it’s as big a leap as that gut reaction suggests.  In a sense, we might think of networks (and someone please correct me if I’m wrong) as hyper-hypertexts.  That is, if hypertext is the creation and use of connected texts, one way to think of networks is as the connection of texts that comprise connections–and, as Rice suggests, mananging those connections-within-connections, putting them to work in increasingly flexible, movable, and personalizable writing spaces.  What is compelling (for me at least and, understanding some of Rice’s interests, him as well) about these new spaces is how they seem unbounded by questions of genre (as he notes in his post) and just sort of unbounded generally.

For example, what does it mean to have a kairotic moment if your writing moves with you across writing spaces?  Marback pointed out in seminar last semester that kairos is at least somewhat dependent on physical space, and this leads to interesting questions here–mot only about kairos (is kairos the same at different workstations, or the same at work and home, or . . .?) but about the very "space" metaphor itself.  There is a tendency, at least from my limited exposure to the metaphor, to equate space with either

• medium:the blog is one space but print is another

or

• genre: the academic essay as space vs. (say) the personal narrative as space.

Of course, material spaces become spaces for writing as well–I’m thinking here of Rice’s HASTAC presentation, with his layered metaphors  of space, networks, and databases.  I’m not criticizing the space metaphor, here: I’m interested, in one hand, on its flexibility, but on the other I’m wary of getting too accustomed to one metaphor, regardless of its flexibility.  Still, the space metaphor seems to have some life in it yet, so the question then becomes more about how we adapt the space metaphor to acknowledge an increasingly unbounded understanding of writing.  One thing might need to be thought of: is our use of the space metaphor dependent on assumed boundaries?  If so, how do we work past that or accomodate those boundaries into new forms of writing–or, should we have boundaries?  Hmm.

And as long as I mentioned networks here, I can include the quick blurb for a thought on a possible project about them:  Heidegger mentions Aristotle’s Rhetoric as the first practical study of being-together (god I hate H’s neologisms).  If we can think of networks and network theory as also a study of being-together, how can we use that link to Aristotle to construct/perform a rhetoric that is inherently and essentially of, in, and, for the network?

2) And yet there comes a time when calls for awareness and activism must acknowledge not only their desire for change and eye-opening but the limitations of such acts in of themselves.

Admittedly, I sort of chose this sentence at semi-random to serve as the jumping-off point for something of my own.  It is tangentially related to Jeff’s post though.

In designing my FYC syllabus for this semester, I deliberately avoided doing the semiotics/cultural studies approach specifically because I couldn’t really convince myself that it was my responsibility to show my students how they’ve been oppresses and exploited by the culture industry.  For one thing, I’m not sure I buy the whole culture industry hypothesis.  For another, it seems awfully presumptuous of me to assume I can do so anyway.  I admire Berlin’s idea of social-epistemic rhetoric, but (maybe naively) I just don’t feel that cultural production is all that sinister.  (Though Marcuse’s "Affirmative Character of Culture" has been a big influence on me of late–but that is more about the ideological uses of culture than an outright suspicion of culture.)  Liberation sounds like a great ideal, but from who or what am I meant to be liberating my students?  Ideology?  Big Business?  Globalization?  The Man?  Whitey?

One trope I’ve observed in my students’ writing this semester is the rush to condemn popular culture/the media (or often, "The Media" as though it’s the brand name of an international conspiracy) for ideological constructions.  "’Culture’ teaches us . . ." or "’The Media’ tells us . . ." are usualy how such sentences begin.  On one hand, I admit, this might point to a weakness in my pedagogy–did I accidentally somewhere suggest that such a conspiracy was taking place?  On the other, I think it points to a certain degree of student awareness that we (as instrucutors) often teach with the aim in mind of bringing students into "awareness" or "critical consciousness" or something similar–and if students just plug in the buzz word du jour (the Media, Popular Culture, Ideology) they’ll show us, gosh darn it, that they’ve been enlightened and (in Townshend’s words) won’t get fooled again!  I find the appearance of this trope so interesting specifically because it’s been so absent from what we usually talk about in my class–which is more about texts and their relationship to other texts we’ve read.  It must indicate something, then, that students are recognizing this trope and exploiting it–not always (or even usually) with great accuracy or efficacy . . . but I wonder why it pops up so much.

I think it’s well understood.

I wish I could take my own frustration and anger more seriously, but I realize what a. . .I dunno–failure? joke? stooge? creep?. . . it would make me if I took it seriously.  Hence the ironic distance btw what I think and feel.

A friend once asked me if I ever felt depressed because I always seemed so cheerful.  I laughed in her face; I’m hardly cheerful.  Life’s a bad joke with no punchline, no gag, no payoff.  The only response to the arrogant presumption that my life (or anyone’s really) has any significance beyond daily toil is to recognize the absurdity of human endeavor and take delight in it–to champion the absurd fact that we exist in the first place.  It’s not cheerfulness, see–it’s desperation.

Recently, someone was alarmed by a playful little cartoon about suicide I posted here.  Hm.  Why?  That is, what would it matter to that reader, or to anyone, if I were to snuff it?

Some admittedly melodramatically grim thoughts tonight in part due to frustration with the Erb paper, but also in light of the VTech shootings.

I hate to blog about them (it seems like a cliche’–much worried hand-wringing about how I’m supposed to treat students and their writing after recent horrors).  Yet it prompts writing nonetheless, though not of the sort I imagine is being posted on other blogs.

I sympathize with Cho Seung-Hui.  This is not to say I valorize him or think of him as some martyr, but at darker periods of my life, I’ve been prone to the sort of dissociation that his writings and video suggest (and, in younger days, wrote similarly gruesome things).  I like to think that I wouldn’t go to the extreme that Cho did, of course–but who’s to say that until some strange confluence of events Cho didn’t also think himself capable of those deeds he has since committed?  Why does Cho become a killer and I don’t?

Because:

• I recognize as I’m not really as tormented as I sometimes make myself out to be.
• My rampant ego would never let me do it knowing that the names of massacre killers like Cho are quickly forgotten.  In two years’ time we’ll ask: remember when that Asian kid shot up that school?  Hence the enduring appeal of such colorfully named killers like Son of Sam, the Boston Strangler, or Jack the Ripper (my personal favorite).  Although none of these matched Cho’s body count, their work seemed personal, driven, motivated, in a way Cho’s random kill-crazy rampage can’t replicate.  It’s quality, not quantity, folks.
• Although I gave up religion a decade ago and profess to be agnostic, I can’t surrender the idea that such actions would mean damnation for a soul I’m not sure I believe exists.
• As silly as this sounds–I wouldn’t want my mother to be ashamed of me for doing it.
• It seems so juvenile, as though one is so weak and possesses so little control of one’s emotion that there is ultimately only one violent choice left.

None of the points above simply says: "Because it’s wrong."  Why?  An intentional omission?  A sop to moral relativism?  I suppose that the third point implies a moral judgment, but it’s the punishment I’m afraid of, not the transgression itself.

There are already two wikipedia articles about the VA Tech shootings.  It already has an official name: "The Virginia Tech Massacre;" Cho has been dubbed "The Question Mark Killer"–which sounds like a particularly redundant Batman villain to me.  But, putting the scholar hat on for just a moment (which means removing the lonely, angry, heartbroken stooge one) there is something to think about here–but it’s not (just) the role/duty of comp or English or whatever profs to catch these people.  Rather, it’s a matter of the need to label something, to give it a title and impose a narrative.

This week’s tragedy (a word I’m sick of hearing (both in light of VTech and in general) because it has a very specific meaning in literary study that almost never applies to the way it’s used in the news) is insensible if it is left to be understood and puzzled over as raw fact: a man shot and killed 30+ other human beings on a college campus.  But with a title, with nomenclature–"A Massacre!"–it’s easier to digest; we can assign roles to heroes and villains ("Boo!  It’s Question Mark!") and then claim to have learned something from this little morality play ("Don’t ignore the crazy desperate loner!").  Really, though, what lesson is to be learned from Cho’s rampage (another representation–Cho as bloodthirsty, insatiable madman)?  Be nice to people?  Hug your students?

I’m sure that the students and faculty and staff at VTech have some long and troubling weeks ahead of them.  I refuse to end this little screed with any call for resolution, healing, or (god forbid) a coming together in a shared renewal of our sense of human brotherhood.  Let’s do something wild–let’s deny any effort to make this event a story, a parable, a fable.  Let’s not learn from it.  Let’s let it linger and fester in the back of our consciences until we can’t tolerate its stench anymore–then, we’ll have learned something.  I don’t know what it will be, but it won’t be the tidy moral platitude that I’m sure we’ll soon see being attached to these events.

So I have a possible line on joining a 4C’s panel submission with some colleagues from Fresno (some of whom will be joining MSU in the fall).  The theme of the panel is "Writing the Material(ity) of the Body: Inscribing Change through Rhetoric(s) of Corpo(reality)."  I think this might be a good place to use the Lennon project–I’m thinking now of using the Lennon project to investigate the role corporeality (in this case, the celebrity body) in persuasion and rhetorical critique–and I could even do some new media work here by focusing on the role not just of Lennon’s body but specifically of his mediated body as the site for rhetorical critique–what Lennon does with his body should be what the reader-viewer does with his or hers . . .

Feedback from the unusual suspects is welcome–er, usual suspects.  That’s the ticket.

As a post script to an as-yet-unscripted post: the Lennon project is proving suprisingly versatile.  I’ve been able to think about in at least several dimensions thus far:

• as protest rhetoric
• as material/embodied rhetoric
• as mediated rhetoric
• as celebrity rhetoric
• as site of rhetorical critique
• as pop cultural rhetoric
• as entry into looking at historical rhetorical scholarship
• as avant-garde-influenced rhetoric

On one hand, I think it’s great that one project has proven so copious in terms of possible scholarship . . . maybe, in this instance, I can (finally) say I’m thinking rhetorically?

On the other . . . I don’t want to get known as "The John Lennon Guy" and have this one (versatile) project define my early scholastic career.  Similarly, I don’t want to get too absorbed in Lennon and lose sight of my other interests in metaphor, psychogeography, new media, and technology.  So, things to keep in mind.