Blogging Pedagogy - theory

Technological Nostalgia and the Academic Year to Come

Eric Detweiler — Fri, 15 Aug 2014 18:13:30 +0000

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I feel so out of touch when it comes to video games.

During my time in the Digital Writing and Research Lab, I've worked to incorporate new technologies and media into my scholarship and pedagogy: I've published webtexts, rhetoric podcasts, and--as you might have guessed--blog posts about pedagogy. I've had students in my classes record podcasts of their own, collaborate on wikis, and use digital platforms to create visuals. But despite their vast array of pedagogical possibilities, I've yet to bring video games into the classroom. After all, the most recent gaming console I own is the eight-year-old (eight years old?!) Nintendo Wii, which--let's be honest--I mostly use to watch Netflix.

Except, that is, for a few months last fall when I got my hands on a Wii Classic Controller.

wii classic.jpg

image via Amazon.com

This controller is not exactly a groundbreaking piece of technology. In fact, it's decidedly backwards, a way of retrofitting the Wii's more innovative controller so you can use the console to play games from past platforms. In my case, the game in question was Mario Kart 64, an eighteen-year-old game (EIGHTEEN YEARS OLD?!) and the only multiplayer game at which I've ever been any good. As I lack both the hand-eye coordination required by many newer games and the funds required to purchase newer consoles, Mario Kart 64 still represents--alongside the halcyon days I invested in the Final Fantasy games released for the first-generation PlayStation--the pinnacle of my gamerly achievements. So, following my accomplishment of a key graduate-school achievement, I used the classic controller to descend into a few days of '90s nostalgia. With my good friend Toad, I sped across 64-bit beaches, turnpikes, and boardwalks. I won gold cups and blasted my competitors with heat-seeking turtle shells. I drove, I raced, I karted. And then, eventually, I felt the pull of responsibility, put down the controller, and picked up my copy of Maurice Blanchot's The ~~Racing~~ Writing of the Disaster. Done with krashing karts, I returned to the various spin-outs of scholarly writing.

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image via Fanpop

Which is to say that it's all too tempting for me to shake my head at undergraduates these days, what with their fourth-generation PlayStations, eighth-generation Mario Kart games, Steam accounts, and Flappy Bird victories. Soon, Beloit College will release their "mindset list" for the class of 2018 and surely give those of us who teach them--whether we're 27 or 72--plenty more excuses to panic about students' cultural touchstones.

My hope for myself, though, as I begin academic year 2014-15, is that I can resist such allergic reactions to students' cultural and technological habits. Following the suggestions of John Warner, I'd hope to avoid projecting my own anxieties about and lack of discipline with digital technologies onto my students--at least not without first asking after my students' relationships with technologies new and old. This strikes me as one of the many tensions teachers--perhaps especially teachers of rhetoric, writing, and composition--must constantly balance: Resisting the urge to fume at and dismiss technologies with which we're unfamiliar while also resisting the urge to celebrate technologies about which we know very little for the sake of novelty alone or as part of some dream about the inevitable march of progress.

What excites me about the digital rhetoric classroom--the reason that maybe I should work harder to plug post-millennial video games into my classroom, and that I'm excited about the work the DWRL's new Video/Games group will undertake in the coming year--is how fruitful a place it can be for negotiating and questioning this tension. With any new technology--even the most seemingly ubiquitous--at least a few students in any given class are going to be disoriented by it. And at the very least, perhaps we as teachers will be disoriented by it (or, in the spirit of dissoi logoi, we can pretend to be). The digital rhetoric course, in short, can be a place not for socializing students back into old forms of composition, nor for naturalizing new technologies into institutional structures, but for denaturalizing both our own and our students' expectations about and approaches to various technologies, forms of communication, and ways of being--from the ancient art of Mario Kart 64, to the crystallized realms of academic English, to the technological relations that may only come into existence in the courses we teach this fall and in the future.

A Course of Ice and Fire: on Literary-Critical Pairings

Aaron Mercier — Mon, 25 Nov 2013 17:42:49 +0000

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Aaron Mercier

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Aubrey Beardsley

When I was getting my B.A. at the University of British Columbia in the early 2000's, the English professors there assigned primary text readings almost exclusively. There are things to recommend this approach, but one result was that students were left to discover and master literary criticism, theory, and history (or not) on their own. Professors used their expertise to fill in the blanks and keep class discussions focused and productive, but a lot of my papers were kind of unfocused and wandering. When I got to grad school, I quickly came to understand that tendency to wander as a lack of critical framework and self-consciousnesses of methodology.

So, when I finally got to teach literature, I was really interested in getting my students invested in the idea of using secondary materials to create critical frameworks that would allow them to see things in the primary text that they would otherwise have missed. As it turned out, I was dogged and lucky enough to secure myself a teaching assignment that raised a lot of eyebrows. I was to teach an introductory lit course entitled simply "A Game of Thrones." I mentioned to the powers that be that since I'd actually be teaching both the novel A Game of Thrones and its sequel A Clash of Kings, and would not be referring at all to the HBO series Game of Thrones, that the course title should be A Song of Ice and Fire, but the powers that be didn't really care.

It didn't matter, either. As my class filled out, I filled out my reading list, and decided that I wanted to introduce a basic notion of the aesthetic and thematic rules of thumb for the books. The idea was that if my students had that common ground to work from, the class discussions and, by extension, their written work, would have a kind of critical framework that would productively direct attention to significant moments in the text. In class, the next step would be to unpack those moments with the analytical tactics of close reading. In papers, students could use those habits of mind to direct their own research and interpretive synthesis.

So I'm a medievalist, and 14th-century English romances figure prominently in my dissertation. As a result, I've come to view the five currently extant volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire not so much as a series, but as a cycle, in the manner of Malory's great compendiums of Arthuriana. This observation, which was long a source of private, nerdy enjoyment for me, led me as a teacher to Eugene Vinaver's two groundbreaking essays on medieval literary aesthetics, "The Poetry of Interlace" and "Analogy as the Dominant Form." Without going into too much detail, Vinaver argues that romance cycles have these two features as the operative center of their aesthetics. So in romance, enjoyment is created and thematic meaning is established on the one hand by the analogy of disparate persons and events, which reflect and distort each other in meaningful ways; and on the other by entrelacement, the interweaving of seperate but related adventures or narratives, whose course spans the whole cycle, whose whole unfolding we do not see because as one narrative strand is foregrounded, the others are backgrounded, in a continuous interweaving pattern. The novel's "plot arc" is an irrelevancy in romance: one is better off imagining something more like a celtic knot design.

If you've read ASoIaF, this aesthetics should sound familiar, which is weird since it was published in the '50's and meant to describe literature published in the 1490's. Nevertheless, I assigned these two essays in the first three weeks of class and have been stunned by how often, in class and in writing, my students have referred to Vinaver's arguments, and the essays I've been grading have been startling in their evidentiary scope and incisiveness of argument.

The conclusion: assigning criticism is good, in moderation. Even if you're setting out to teach close reading practices, pick the one or two essays that best suit or describe or speak to a text, and encourage your students to apply criticism ... well, critically. It's just like food and wine. When you have the right pairing, the experience becomes more than the sum of its parts.

That, Those, and the Other

Eric Detweiler — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 04:27:54 +0000

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Eric Detweiler

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via The Atlantic

"[H]ere. Where? There." — Jacques Derrida, "Signature Event Context"

When I think of the concept “technology,” I think of computers. Well, I think of other things too—mostly things with screens and occasionally things that explode—but if I were asked to draw a picture of “technology,” it’d probably resemble a laptop.

I should know better (or think better), though, than to be forgetful of the technological, mechanical nature of even more familiar things. Take grammar, for instance, which is nowhere and everywhere for a rhetoric instructor. Right smack at the beginning of a chapter entitled “The Rhetoric of Testing” in her book Stupidity, Avital Ronell writes, “He would not have claimed, as did Heidegger to his friends, that his greatest accomplishment was thinking through the elusive premises of technology.... Nonetheless, Paul de Man’s work is essentially engaged with and inflected by the question concerning technology” (97). De Man, Ronell argues, “tracked the unstoppable technology of a grammar.”

I would assume I’m not the only one who’s usually ignorant of grammar’s technological nature. The interface breaks occasionally (I’m looking at you, writer’s block), but everyday writing/speaking/signifying seems heavily reliant on suspending one’s attention toward grammar’s relentless mechanicity and just hammering or yammering away.

But perhaps I’m just living up to Ronell’s book’s title here. If I’ve gotten off track above, I’ll switch metaphors and buckle down: The point is I’ve been less forgetful of grammar’s technological function in the past few weeks, and it’s all thanks to two short words: “those” and “that” (stop me if you’ve heard this one).

You may know the drill. Last year, Elizabeth Warren said the following:

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there—good for you! But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea—God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

Then, a couple of months ago, Barack Obama reiterated her sentiment on the campaign trail:

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business—you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.

And one line from that Obama speech—“you didn’t build that”—got pulled from its context, becoming the (arguably fallacious) apotheosis of Obama’s economic and moral failings at the 2012 Republican National Convention.

A charitable reading—and I’m not the first to try it—might consider the context of “you didn’t build that” and assume Obama’s “that” was actually meant as a “those” referring to “roads and bridges” or infrastructure in general. Of course, if you want to read with the technological rigor of a grammar machine, the deictic reference is—mechnically speaking—to “business,” which is singular and thus a match for “that.” When the grammar robots rise to rule the world, they will surely remember Obama’s utterance as meaning this: All your business are belong to us.

But—to offer an interpretation of Obama’s reiteration of Warren—reading in line with a “grammatical automation” that accepts “business” as the referent of “that” would seem to require a willful ignorance of context (Ronell 97). Or, perhaps, requires charging President Obama with a great deal of stupidity for letting “that” one slip. A glance at the comment sections of articles on 2012’s Great Referential Fiasco (Thatergate?) reveals plenty of readers who think there’s a deeper, truer context—perhaps psychological, perhaps anti-capitalist—that can help us understand what Obama really meant when the grammar machine broke down on him. His slip of the tongue was a Freudian one, or so the argument might go.

I’ve got my own feelings on that subject, but I’m not blogging politics. I’m blogging pedagogy. So what’s the pedagogical significance of the words above?

First, I’m always excited (when I'm not distressed) to teach a rhetoric course in an election year. In that sense, I’m excited for what “you didn’t build that” bodes—who could build a class discussion without some a campaign season's deadwood? There is certainly much more of that to come.

Second, I wonder what meaning’s breakdown in such a seemingly obvious context as “you didn’t build that” suggests about how I communicate with students as the semester unfolds. I try to tread lightly when bringing political issues into the classroom, at least insofar as I try to resist taking a firm stance while students think through whether they’d rather vote for “that” or “those”—or “these” or “this” or the other. But though I can anticipate the engine’s sputterings when I’m intentionally playing "devil’s advocate" (sorry, Mr. Eastwood [see 7:18 for another fruitful moment for those teaching rhetoric]), I’m generally cruising too absent-mindedly to notice the tiny hitches every time the grammar bus runs over a deictic term. At which points can I practice more rigorous grammatical awareness and avoid the breakdown, and at which point is it better for me to realize that my grammar or my metaphor is collapsing no matter how hard I try to stay on the same page with my students?

Who’s driving this classroom anyway? The same person(s) who built this road we’re on?

Foucault Vivant

Anonymous — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 16:05:30 +0000

Author:

Pearl Brilmeyer

Image Credit:

Bruce Jackson

Teaching Foucault to undergraduates can be a daunting task. However, I find that an enthusiastic group can handle short portions with ease when appropriately prepared.

As an instructor of sexuality studies, I regularly teach the introduction to Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality. While I've taught this text in the context of a rhetoric course on monogamy, this semester it grounded the historical unity of my course, Gay and Lesbian Literature and Culture in the English Department. Notoriously difficult, this introduction is often misread due to the failure of scholars to pick up on Foucault's sarcastic tone, as he narrates the "history of sexuality," traditionally understood. In the past, I've had trouble conveying this tone to my students, who, like many of us have been taught that "theory" is serious stuff. This bias makes it difficult to get Foucault's jokes and miss the point that the "history" Foucault begins with is a kind of "story" we tell ourselves, as the French word "l'histoire" connotes.

I wanted to create a lesson plan that would lighten up class discussion and make transparant Foucault's joking tone. I also wanted to focus our discussion on the construction of historical narratives, and to talk about the relationship of narrative to history. This in-class assignment was designed to help students understand Foucault's theory of the "repressive hypothesis" by physicalizing the "story" he tells in the introduction of The History of Sexuality. Engaging with the humorous aspect of this introduction, students are asked to act out, in the fashion of the tableau vivant, scenes in throughout the parodic history Foucault seeks to overturn. In small groups students used the computers to find music to accompany their assigned paragraph/scene. We then performed them as a class, while I narrated the first few paragraphs of the text.

Image Credit: OldOnliner

In my class, I have a students with a range of familiarity with gender and sexuality theory--some are women's and gender studies majors and others have little experience thinking about gender and sexuality in a theoretical way. In general, the queer theory "pros" in class found the assignment a bit juvenile. Before the exercise, they pouted a bit about having to treat such a serious text in a silly manner and many expressed annoyance at having to perform in front of the class.

Others, particularly those for whom "theory" was a more foreign object, however, completed the assignment in good humor and discovered creative ways to represent various stages in Foucault's parody of the tale of Victorian prudishness from which we need to liberate ourselves. The performance ended with the final group ripping a piece of paper on which they had written "Freud"--a silly, but succinct way of conveying Foucault's call to move beyond the narrative of repression/liberation.

In general, there were a lot of laughs and the assignment helped students visualize the "history of sexuality" Foucault was attempting to counter in the rest of the book.