Formalist Boxes

So I want to address "From Formalism to Inquiry" first because I thought it was a little less out of the box (pun intended) than the box article.

First of all I kinda liked the rhet comp/lit analysis hybridity that is going on the article. Who would have thought that Antigone had so much to teach us about the fallacies of argument. That said, it took James Kastely a long time to get to the meat of his argument there towards the end. I really like the idea of reorienting students to focus on entering into a conversation by trying to understand different perspectives on a idea rather than immediately leaping to persuasion/domination. I think this especially makes sense because it is practically impossible for a student to fully understand let alone create a truly believable argument about a subject their first semester of college. Heck, it is still hard for me to know when I fully understand every facet of a conversation happening in my field about a text, and I do this for a career. That is why I am really warming up to the exploratory essay, because it forces the students to recognize their limits and instead simply seek comprehension. In the end though I am concerned that learning how to argue is still something to be expected out of most students in college, and it is thus something we are responsible for addressing. It seems though that the more time I spend in this class, the more this concept of the composition course as preparation for the rest of college composition seems to be absurd and impossible. I think I will still have a lot of argumentative essays at the end of the semester, but this article does encourage me to begin thinking about creating realistic and approachable writing scenarios with goals they can truly accomplish. Not to toot my own horn, but I think I have already started applying this in my classroom by having my students write papers based on a book that no one has written about besides reviews. This means that it takes very little but textual analysis and good ideas in order to discover and articulate an idea based on the text and be authoritative as a result. Maybe I am off the mark though.

Now that that is out of the way, lets talk "Box-Logic." What the heck is going on this article? Seriously, this one was blowing my mind. Does Geoffrey Sirc want students to create abstract representational art instead of the essay? I am not directly opposed to such an idea (well, maybe I am) but I was a little bewildered by his approach. It seems like a create approach to cultural studies mixed with phenomenology: analyzing unconventional texts and trying to get at the personal and cultural implications of a text. I liked the idea of infusing "play" into the classroom, as well as the idea of thinking of the computer screen as a empty box awaiting an infusion of objects in order to create meaning, but it was difficult to see how a teacher could base a class on this idea, or how it would be pedagogically sound. Instead I could see these ideas as simply ways at showing invention, organization arrangement and so on. I will say though that while I still don't completely see the real-world application it was a fascinating article and I loved how he manipulated his text creating interesting arrangements and unconventional, almost poetic word pictures. I guess maybe this was what he was trying to demonstrate, that the essay could be art. At the end of the day though I am still concerned about that traditional issue, how much of this class is preparatory and how much of it can stray outside of real-world applications (what are our students paying for when they sign up for this course)? Fantastic essay though and a blast to read. Would love to see other people's thoughts.