Hannah J. Rule

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Bibliography: General

10/7/2015

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10/07/15  
Brooke, Collin. Lingua Fracta: Toward a Rhetoric of New Media. Cresskill: Hampton Press, 2009. 
"This project recasts two of our more venerable frames from classical rhetoric, the canons and the trivium, setting them almost as axes along which to plot a rhetorical approach to technology. A revised trivium, I argue, can help us to map out differently scaled ecologies (code, practice, culture), and the canons provide a rich articulation of ecologies of practice. This framework is particularly useful in the case of interfaces, those imperfectly bounded encounters where users, technologies, and contexts intersect. Instead of describing a process that culminates in the production of a textual object, the trivium and canons help us envision a discursive space that is ongoing--one that is shaped both by the intentions of individual users and contextual constraints" (200)

Scalability (40), ecology of practice "one scale at which we might examine new media...and which is embedded in an even more generalized ecology" (45); most important changes in new media are in eco of practice (47); "practice implies conscious, directed activity" (49) and "those practices that may be unintended" 

Great chapter on delivery as performance rather than transmission

​10/7/15   Keller, Christopher J. and Christian R. Weisser, eds. The Locations of Composition. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007.

The collection presents place space and location, material/immaterial, as figures useful the disciplinary questions in composition studies. While the editors establish some senses of their animating figures they generally leave place, space, location open to the collection's contributors. 
       "places are located and relational"; "consider the place's position in relation to others"        (3); "places are bounded areas endowed with human meaning" (3)
Again, Dobrin pushes violence (30): "composition is in need of spatial disruption" (31)

Public writing turn: marked by Weisser's 2002 collection, Moving Beyond Aca Discourse Gary Olson's declaration that acad discourse is over (2002)

Devitt's chapter,  "Transferability and Genres" 215-228. 
Establishes clearly the genre approach and communicates clearly why writing teachers can't be fully blamed for a student's challenges in writing across the curriculum. Copy and use in WAC/WID training. Really terrific. 

Reynold's chapter, "Cultural Geography and Images of Place" 251-266.
"The emphasis on place, the influence of postmodernism notwithstanding, makes geography very much a seeing discipline, whose premises and proofs, methodologies and conclusions, stem from visual evidence....For contemporary research in geography, a reliance on visual evidence is particularly difficult to avoid or resist because of the wide availability of images, cameras, surveillance systems, and the like" (252)
Visual data is crucial to our understandings of place and space in part because images, like public spaces, can be commodified, a process that intensified with the expanse of modern cities and the singular images with which they became associated: New York = the Statue of Liberty, or San Francisco = the Golden Gate Bridge" (252)
Kress: "The visual is dominant as a way of knowing in a number of contexts. Gunther Kress writes about the 'spatial-simultaneous logic of the visual (1999, 68) and argues that written language 'is being displaced from its hitherto unchallenged central position in the semiotic landscape' and that the visual is taking over many of the functions of written language' (68)" (253)

Explores the visual rhetoric of Harvard's 2002 video "Shaped by Writing: The Undergraduate Experience"--a video which attempts to dislodge spatial specificity from its student comments, but can't escape its own location. Reynolds' point: "The field of composition needs more longitudinal studies and more videos featuring student writers; in fact, the best response to the film is for campuses to make their own videos about writing: 100 such videos, each from a different place, might give composition teachers alternative representations of the work of writing, of the messiness and the confusion and the ways in which student writers are shaped by the place, the institution, as much as they are by acts of writing" (264-5) 

10/7/15   Mathieu, Paula. Tactics of Hope: The Public Turn in Composition. Portsmouth: Boyton Cook, 2005. 
Again, 2002 as the 'start' of the public turn, links to CCCC
community literacy, but also the "real world" (1); place-based, web publishing, community literacy, community publishing, service learning (8)
Derek Owens, Composition & Sustainability

"tacit assumptions underlying much university work in the streets outside of campus" (x); "a need to understand the politics and dynamics of place--as well as time--are paramount" (xi)
   street as spatial metaphor
   specificity not stability
   tactical orientation: situationally responsive (go to support the positive, not fix a                  problem); offer a range of ethical and proactive concerns
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Bibliography: Supporting Writing in Graduate School, Professoriate 

9/28/2015

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1/06/16 2016 MLA panel on Graduate Writing Pedagogies, discussion page.

​10/7/15 Peter Vandenberg and Jennifer Clary-Lemon. "Looking for Location Where it Can't be Found: Possibilities for Graduate Pedagogy in Rhetoric and Composition." The Locations of Composition. Christopher J. Keller and Christian R. Weisser, eds. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007. 91-105.

"Community based graduate education encourages future teacher-scholars to view themselves in relation to the world around them by engaging a space beyond the classroom" (102)

"At the graduate level, academic acheivement typically follows the capacity to write one's way into a "hyperreality," a conceptual or transcendent "where" whose authority in some measure derives from the perception of being cut loose from place and time. Canonical modeling implicitly proposes that both student and evaluating faculty member are located not 'in place' but within a virtual reality populated by generalizations" (95)

"We must find ways to get graduate student bodies out into those localized publics--not for the purpose of revealing the other to a disciplined gaze, but to allow an estimation of the limits of the scholarly perspective through the approximation of a perspective marked by difference" (99)

​Graduate Writing Across the Disciplines, Introduction
Marilee Brooks-Gillies, Elena G. Garcia, Soo Hyon Kim, Katie Manthey, and 
Trixie Smith
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Bibliography: Neuro, Embodiment

9/24/2015

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9/24/15  Churchland, Patricia. Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain. New York: Norton, 2013. 

"Lately I think about my brain in more intimate terms-- as me" (11). Churchland works to dismantle clingy notions of soul, heaven, and morality chipping particularly fiercely at dualism. 

Neurophil: "works at the interface between philosophy's grand old questions about choice and learning and morality and the gathering wisdom about the nature of nervous systems" (20)

On those that would argue that neuroscience can't possibly tell the full story of self: "The great advantage of nay-saying is that it leaves lots of time for golf" (60)
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The Performance and Discourse of Busyness

11/10/2014

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Reading a couple of articles today about the pervasive culture and practice of busyness. This comes on the heels of a Chronicle article about the number of hours worked by those in academia, but indeed the scourge of busyness pervades more than just academic culture. Here is Hannah Rosin's write up in Slate which focuses on Bridget Schulte's book Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play when No One Has Time. 

Just so much YES to this article and this sentiment. The performance of busyness most likely operates as a grab at social currency (though it could be other things: unjustly or unfairly distributed responsibilities, social and emotional pressures and challenges, etc.). But in general, most talk about our lives in terms of "the overwhelm"---now even our students.Why is this? Or why this illusion? 

The point is we can stop talking about being busy and that just in itself will make us less busy.  This is a toxic cultural impulse, and one we need to help spare our students from especially. 
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Recent Attention to the Materialities of Literacy

8/19/2014

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Being a Better Reader Online 
The New Yorker Online | Maria Konnikova | July 16, 2014

Reading Literature on Screen: A Price for Convenience? 
New York Times Online | Stephen Heyman | August 13, 2014

The above articles (focused on the same study, Mangen) engage in the very visible and current rhetorics of lamenting the loss of reading. These are, of course, not new arguments. I'm also reading Nick Carr's The Shallows now, which is a pleasant expansion of his 2008 "Is Google Making us Stupid?" (which was an argument that sought to incite and failed to do more (for this reader) than sound unfounded alarm bells). I'm thinking about these arguments a lot this summer. I think most of what culture has been worried about is the loss of "deep reading"--initial studies about how readers' eyes track on the screen lead to the sense, as Carr has suggested, that reading online is equivalent to skimming, surface understanding (we can't even read WAR AND PEACE anymore!!! ahhhh! I have many things to say about this flavor of lament, but one question for now is, what is deep reading FOR anyway?)

But in the above articles...I'm seeing much more attention to the materialities of reading processes coming to bear on the conversation. While I think ineluctably these conversations are still tinged with panic (for me, unfounded...see: all of the histories of new literate technologies), there is now much more consideration of how the physical specificities of  screens, kindle pages, pens vs. laptops impact our practices and cognitive processes. 

The study discussed finds essentially no differences in the experience of reading a short story in paperback vs. a tablet except on the ability to sequence events in the short story. Those on the tablets had a harder time explaining which events came when. What accounts for this? The conclusions point to the idea that the materiality matters: “It’s a confirmation that these ergonomic dimensions, the tactile feedback of holding paper, might actually matter” (Anne Mangen, lead researcher on the study). 

It's exciting to think about why it matters, or what account we can make of this difference. What could account for this difference? My instincts point toward our acclimation to the technology of the printed book page; that reading has all along actually been a dimensional, physical, spatial experience (I'm thinking, I guess too, of the ways our memories on a test--how often we remember the location of the "facts" based on where they were on the textbook page. Or how ancient poets, rhetoricians memorized speeches by placing their points in different rooms of their homes). Order is enforced, echoed, perhaps, in the rhythm of the turning page (but not [yet] in the swipe of the finger?) or in the flipping back of pages, or something... Perhaps kindle reading, as yet, does not provide a sense of spatial accumulation and ordering (elsewhere, I've heard that tablet reading doesn't provide a sense of access to what's coming up or what you've already read...you can flip around as much, nor feel the progress you've made). 


Interesting how the virtues of new technology exposes features and virtues of the technology that we've been living with for a long time. It's hard to "see" that the book as a technology (of course) and hard to access how its specific material manifestations, how its plain old features, have trained us. What could a tablet do to more closely remediate book features? (or SHOULD it closely do "book things"?) Or how long might it take readers to acclimate to the materiality of tablet reading? What will the tablet contribute? 


It's cool, I think, to see a turn toward evaluating material differences--the ways to experience and make texts is constantly changing, and far from tossing one out to replace with something new, these choices are just piling up (take account, right now, of all the ways you have around you to take in and make text). I think this is where we'll learn the most (sidestepping some of the cultural fear noise) about how digital technologies are affecting reading and writing processes in our present moment. 
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What Writer's Block Feels Like

10/3/2013

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I am feeling something today that I guess is called writer's block. I've begun writing several things today, two job market documents and a proposal for a presentation at Computer Connection. The writing, it hurts; sentences are barely formed, I can think only in half-phrases, words come out and I erase them all, write them again, erase more. Click around on my desktop. I feel entirely unprepared for dealing with this and my best brain thoughts filled with conventional wisdoms provide escape routes that I simply don't take. I'm just stewing in it. I think of washing the dishes, or starting again tomorrow in the early morning, of flipping on some pop music. But instead I sit here and fear that writing is over, forever. That sentiment is at once haunting, silly, lingering, and physically felt--behind the eyes, in the throat and down into my belly.

I've just cried tears, tantrum-ones, which brought me to write in this space, to try to capture the feeling of this block. There is a sharp, tight web of tension that sits behind the bridge of my nose. I picture it a throbbing red network, like those pictures of nerve bundles alight. There's a twisting in my middle that rises as though out of my body; it moves up and down, and sporadically feels like it's trying to escape through my fingers. To tame it or release it I pound on the keyboard. I can't go I can't stop. I need to move I feel stuck. It needs to rest I can't sleep. This is writer's block. It's an off-relationality with these tools, with the page; it's a feeling you just can't shake.  


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I Need a Standing Desk

12/11/2012

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Today the pain of writing really set it. Doing line editing on two chapter drafts left me contorted, with a literal pain in the neck. My writing pain usually strikes at this one point in neck--it's a dull pull, where my neck meets my right shoulder. This pain presents in every chair (dining, home office, work office) and every table I regularly use for writing. And while the following is probably not true, I must say that I think this pain happens *only* when I'm "really" writing, as in, writing my diss or other critical endeavor. Never do I think I feel it as I pound out tons of emails or otherwise spend an afternoon hunched at my computer.

We know sitting is bad for our health. Sitting really kills us, they say. So workplaces have been pushing the standing desk. On the Today show and NPR were stories about  the standing desk with the treadmill attachment--your computer and desk surrounds you as you keep a slow walking pace. In another study, reported here, participants tried out a stand-up desk configuration that allowed them to raise their workstation and lower it easily by hand. The study found massively positive results, like unbelievable ones: "The workers who used the devices were lavish in their praise – 87 percent felt more comfortable,  87 percent felt energized, 75 percent felt healthier, 71 percent felt more focused, 66 percent felt more productive, 62 percent felt happier, and 33 percent felt less stressed."

Whoa. Those are good results. Surely easing a little nagging neck pain is also possible.
Picture
American Writers at Home (J.D. McClatchy), a beautiful coffee table book with photos and descriptions of the writing spaces of many of our most iconic American authors, features Longfellow's standing desk (pictured, left). He positioned a wooden lectern on a large circular table in the center of the room. Here he apparently stood to write long-hand, using the standing desk primarily to take advantage of the light from two big windows.

Longfellow's is my first inspiration for my OWN standing desk. I have decided it's an important experiment for me to try this out. Not only, it seems, will a standing desk ease pain, but it *may* make me happier, less anxious, more creative and healthier. It may just change writing. What kinds of designs are out there for a standing desk? How will this change my practice? Will I like to stand as all these studies claim? Will I be a less stressed and pressed writer? More to come on these questions.

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On Slow Writing 

9/20/2012

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Writing always brings me to process writing; today is no different. Today, I took all day to finally begin revisions to an essay for publication. It's been accepted to a journal and I'm working on revisions from the editor. They are sharp suggestions, ones that are inspiring me to reshape the whole introduction (oh, and probably more). I feel like I know where I'm going, but I'm struck tonight about how perfectly LONG I feel like it's going to take me to get there.

Today I'm shocked by the extent you can reshape a piece of writing.
How did I ever think this piece was "there"?
This is all bold evidence for the idea of the writing process!

I am not a writer with much patience. I always want to write  fast; I want to write so fast and without thinking much about it, so fast that I can't even realize that I'm writing. If I slow down, if I think about it too much, that achy, deep resistance takes over, that sharp doubt that every writer knows. When that feeling of almost done creeps upon me, my eyes no longer stick to the words on the page. I reach capacity. I decide I'm done.

Tonight though, deep in the throes of deep revision, I found myself waiting a lot--sensing the defined feeling of what the paragraph should do, but just having to wait for a long time for how to articulate. This was a strange feeling for me. It was so slow. Such a different feeling from the rhythm I normally take in generating drafts (frantically, fueled by caffeine and blaring pop music). Slow writing requires that I sit in what I've written, not flee from it. And slow writing probably won't respond to my emphatic deadlines highlighted in my planner.  It will take whatever time it needs.
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On Reading and Thinking Subtractively; or, How a Sandcastle is like a Dissertation

9/18/2012

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On a weekend trip to Lake Erie, my friend enlisted me to build a sandcastle with him. He had a great sand castle building secret. The trick, he revealed, was to build a large pile of sand, regularly dumping water on the growing, solid mound. This, he promised, could be the basis for a sandcastle unlike any one I'd made before.

Skeptically, I consented to help. As he piled the sand, I dumped the water. Soon the mound was ready. We divided the tools, pink plastic trowels, a purple shovel, an orange bucket. We each took a side and began to make a sandcastle.

I sat with my tools and stared at my side of the mound. I pushed the sand around. I sighed and began to fill the orange bucket with sand and a little lake water. I tipped the mixture, making a sad, imperfect tower against the side of the mound. I made two more of these. I was frustrated. This did not look like a castle. It looked like nothing.


I peered over to my friend's side of the mound. He was busy constructing a wonder of the world, a more complex version of a Babylonian temple! There were in-set doors and perfectly straight platforms, deep windows and geometrical crevices, even trees! I complained like a child. He tricked me into making a sandcastle when he knew his sandcastling skills far outperformed my own. As I complained, he insisted I could make just like he was...

You just have to think subtractively, my friend said.

I thought about this idea, as I took my beach chair. Think subtractively. I stared at my meager, sad towers and saw them as perfect products of thinking additionally. I failed to realize there could be something in the mound already, failed to see what's could be in there, failed to see what I could get if I took something away.

As I'm spending time today, on a tired, caffeine-seeking rainy day, trying to get back to my dissertation, I'm thinking about my friend's sandcastle creed in relation to the process of dissertation writing. On one hand, a dissertation could be the ultimate act of thinking additionally---what other towers can I add to that big mound of thinking and writing that's preceded me? What is that one thing I can add on to what is already been said on this topic? As my castle would demonstrate, rarely though does this way of thinking about this task result in any elegant architecture. Just some ill-fitting towers.


Instead, today, though I wasn't able to think about my castle subtractively, I'm thinking about my dissertation as such. Something that I've relished doing during my dissertation writing is regular interludes of just reading. Rather willy-nil-ily, I decide to start a writing session by reading something that seems interesting. Today, I read a study focused on the material practices writers use to write from source material. The study, using a distributed cognition model, described how the writer's cognitive practices were externalized across their movements, arrangements and annotation practices with source material. I realized, with these researchers focus on the materiality of cognition, that though I too am interested in how writer's structure their environments and use their physical bodies, I'm actually less interested in their thinking experiences than their feeling one.

Ostensibly, I selected to read this study because it seemed to have the same interests and framework as mine. It could be the solid base to my tower. But what it became instead was a way to think subtractively about my ideas about the physicality of writing and what compels me about this idea. The study became the sand I can take away from that big dissertation whole, hiding somewhere in the unassuming mound.
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Place, Ritual, (no) Writing

8/10/2012

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As usual, times of writing difficulty and aversion put into relief the kind of forces that get wrapped up in and complicate the writing process. I had an afternoon today in which I thought I was going to  work on an essay that's past its deadline. I just didn't do it. Instead, I organized things, I paid bills and sent mail, spoke to my mom on the phone, napped, wrote this. I resolved that I absolutely must get out of the house tomorrow morning and to a coffee shop for three hours. In that space I can buckle down. That space, the public space of a coffeehouse, has less control over me, it seems.

I think everyone, every writer who's ever written something that required attention, has experienced the pull of the domestic space on their writing. I don't think I'm exaggerating to say that this is one of the most common experiences of writing: the not-writing activities that we talk about as nonetheless implicitly related to writing. Most of these forces are organizational and physical and are experienced as absolutely compulsory. Writing work is displaced by vigorous dishwashing, sock drawer organization, ritual cleaning of the workspace, "going through" the email inbox, doing laundry. As a researcher interested in process and the stories writers tell about how they do writing work, I want to know what is up with this utterly common experience of being compelled to physically act and organize your space instead of write. What compels these behaviors? What does physical space and physical, ritual activity have to do with the act of composing? And perhaps most importantly, why do writers understand these activities as related to writing, as part of the writing process rather than a distraction to it?  
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    Dr. Hannah J. Rule
    University of South Carolina

    Teacher/Writer is a reflection space for thinking about writing process, pedagogy, research ideas, and writing projects and problems.


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