The Rhetorical Situation of New Media

This week’s readings have been helpful for me in conceptualizing the multimodal assignment I would like to do next semester in my possible “Arguing Differently” focused English 1000 course. Specifically, I am interested in Anne Frances Wysocki’s focus on the materiality of all texts, as it reminds me that students need to be able to study texts-as-objects before they can begin to analyze and compose “traditional” and “new media” texts. In the classroom, I am interested in some of her shorter exercises, such as the “materialities of seeing” exercise in which a stranger walks into the classroom and students are asked to recall what they can about the individual or her “justifying choices” assignment, which asks students to literally analyze and reflect on ever material choice they make concerning formatting, placement, emphasis, paper size, font choice, color, etc. in a formal piece of writing. Along these same lines, I am interested in Cynthia Selfe’s lesson plans and suggested assignments for visual essays that not only include guidelines but also templates for student responses and a  follow-up reflection that asks designers/composers to judge their own success as creating a visual literacy narrative or visual argument.

With all of this said, I still found myself bogged down in Wycsocki’s jargon. Places where Wycsocki expresses what seems to be evident and accepted in Composition and Rhetoric and could therefore be expressed in a much more abbreviated fashion include passages such as the following:

But we do understand, now, that writing, like all literate practices, only exists because it functions, circulates, shifts, and has varying value and weight within complexly articulated social, cultural, political, educational, religious, economic, familial, ecological, political, artistic, affective, and technological webs (you can name others, I am sure)…. (second page)

But why would we need to because Wycsocki has taken it upon herself to name pretty much all the ones we could think of, all in an attempt to emphasize the complex matrix of the rhetorical situation. Here is another example involving the concept of “interactivity”:

Manovich’s words can encourage us to consider the various and complex relations we can construct with readers through the ways readers are asked to move through texts we build, whether that is by turning pages, clicking links, making conceptual connections between a photograph on one screen and poem on another, or solving a puzzle that opens the gate to the next level of a gametext. (page?)

I am probably being too critical here, but it seems like the notion of the audience’s interaction with the text (even at the level of materiality) goes back far enough that we don’t really need to re-establish it – I’m thinking Bakhtin here (many of you could probably name multiple other discussions). I do see why Wysocki feels it is necessary to argue that we “define ‘New Media Texts’ in terms of their materialities,” which essentially involves foregrounding materialities and forces us to consider the how and why of “new media” in the first place. In other words, Wysocki is encouraging us to be incredibly thoughtful in understanding how we design texts in multiple media because she maintains these texts situate us in the world.

In many ways, Selfe’s “taking up the challenges of visual literacy,” as the subtitle of her chapter states, continues the task of defining “visual literacy” and attempting to suggest a composition teacher’s approach toward this type of literacy, not as a new, hip composition-classroom novelty but instead as strategic broadening of “texts” and “literacy” in the twenty-first century. My main objection to Selfe is the same objection I had the first time I read Selfe in my Teaching Writing course at SLU. She chides those in “our profession” (which, I take to mean here those in the field of Composition and Rhetoric but also in the broader studies of the English Department in general) for being suspicious of visual forms. She writes “When English composition teachers have thought to bring visual forms into their classes—a practice which they have carried on for at least forty years – they have typically presented them as second-class texts: either as ‘dumbed down’ (32) communications that serve as ‘stimuli for writing but […] no substitute for the complexity of language’ (22) or as texts related to, but certainly not on an equal footing with, the “’real’ work of the course.” Let’s face it -- I think reservations from some in the field have a point. Visual texts do communicate in different ways from the written word. This doesn’t mean they’re less valuable, it just means they are going to emphasize different things. Even more so, however, I think Selfe should allow for the fact that there are entire departments (namely Studio Art and Design and its many related fields) that precisely solely deal in “visual literacy” (though, I doubt they would refer to it as “literacy”), which begs the question of why, exactly, English composition teachers should be pushing so hard for appropriating those techniques entirely.  These questions become even clearer when I consider that for all of the “visual literacy” assignments Selfe suggests, there is always a reflective element that forces designers/composers and audience/viewer to translate into words how affective a specific visual presentation is based on categories that sound awfully close to the types of standards we apply to written texts (impact, coherence, salience, organization). Obviously, I see the benefit of focusing on “visual literacy” to some extent and plan to do so both this semester and next. But I keep kicking myself for not asking Selfe these questions in person when I met her last March at the CCCC. She’s a delightfully nice woman, by the way.