Field Statement: Ontology and Materiality in Composition (Attempt 1)

            It is difficult to imagine a single list for composition which would gather all of my research interests together. Thus, I’ve created this list as a way to broaden my knowledge of the field as a discipline and pursue my enduring interest in ontology and materiality. This exam could be divided into three focuses: foundational texts and ontological critiques; texts that ask questions about what is the writer; and issues of materiality in public writing and circulation. Although these focuses might seem disparate at first glance, I believe they are fundamentally connected by how composition has treated – or ignored – issues surrounding ontology and ethics. The title “Ontology and Materiality in Composition” is perhaps misleading, as throughout its history, composition has largely focused on epistemological concerns and has only recently begun to question the ontology that underwrites these epistemologies. Thus, many of these texts deal with the histories and taxonomies, the stories told by the discipline to describe and reproduce itself. James Berlin’s Rhetoric and Reality begins with the major theories of epistemology (objective, subjective, and transactional) and reads the history of composition across and intertwined in the perspectives. Berlin’s work here and in Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures laid the foundation not only for a specific understanding of what the discipline was and from where it came, but also paved the way for a cultural studies approach to the teaching of writing. Several of the texts in this list are similarly foundational – either for the discipline as a whole (e.g. Steven North’s The Changing of Knowledge in Composition) or for a disciplinary focus like public writing (e.g. Paula Mathieu’s Tactics of Hope).

This list is not exclusively concerned with past depictions of composition’s ontology – or lack thereof; it also looks to where composition currently wrestles with questions of ontology and ethics: depictions of the writer, and circulation in public writing. The idea of the writer as an autonomous thinking and creating subject has never been increasingly come under question. However, following the critiques of anti-foundationalism, postmodernism, and posthumanism, composition scholars have returned to the questions of the writer and the writer’s body in order to grapple with questions of agency, authorship, invention, and ethical interaction. These returns are often coupled with either a renewed focus on the materiality of the body or theoretical arguments to support their positions, but rarely both. Several questions will drive my exploration of writers: How are writers depicted in scholarship? What are they depicted in relation to? How do they accomplish the act of writing? What assumptions about materiality are bound up in these depictions? And finally, what are the affordances and limitations of these assumptions?

Faced with rhetorical situations where oppositional writing practices could not, at least alone, alter large social arrangements, despite mounting urgency (see Welch), recent scholarship in public writing has turned its attention to how circulation impacts the writing’s efficacy. In this conception, circulation is less about the content of the written message, and more about the materiality of the message – the what, where, and when of the message. As Trimbur notes, this focus is necessary to continue “the unfinished business of democratic education” (217). In response, scholars have pushed the claims further, asking academics to go public with their work, act as public intellectuals, and engage critically in service-learning (Mathieu Circulating 11). The shift to activism, community publishing, and writing for, about, and with the community have led to all sorts of ethical questions about the proper relationship between the academy and the community. However, when I turn to consider materiality and ontology in public writing and circulation, I’m particularly concerned with how shifts to integrate circulation into service-learning and public writing studies and pedagogies might have led to a shift away from the complex ways writing is shaped, exchanged, and distributed as a commodity and as a material thing, rather than as messages and meanings. Thus, I will be asking several questions to guide my reading of circulation and public writing. How is circulation depicted in public writing scholarship? What is depicted as circulating? How are agents described as related to writing? What assumptions about language, words, and materiality underwrite these depictions? And finally, what are the affordances and limitations of these assumptions?

Part 1: Histories and Writers in Composition

Beard, David E. “A Broader Understanding of the Ethics of Listening: Philosophy, Cultural Studies, Media Studies, and the Ethical Listening Subject.” International Journal of Listening.  23.1 (2009): 7-20. Print.

Berlin, James A. Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures: Refiguring College English Studies. Lauer Series in Rhetoric and Composition. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press, 2003. Print.

---. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges. 1900-1985. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987. Print.

Bernard-Donals, Michael and Richard R. Glejzer. Rhetoric in an Antifoundational World: Language, Culture, and Pedagogy.

---. “Against Publics (Exilic Writing)”. JAC 28.1-2 (2008): 29-54.

---. The Practice of Theory: Rhetoric, Knowledge, and Pedagogy in  the Academy

Bloom, Lynn Z., Donald A. Daiker and Edward M. White. Composition Studies in the New Millennium: Rereading the Past Rewriting the Future. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2003. Print.

Brooke, Collin Gifford. “Forgetting to be (Post)Human: Media and Memory in a Kairotic Age.” JAC 20.4 (2000): 775-795.

Brooke, Robert. “Control in Writing: Flower, Derrida, and Images of the Writer.” College English 51 (1989): 405-17.

Cooper, Marilyn M. “Rhetorical Agency as Emergent and Enacted.” College Composition and Communication. 62.3 (2011): 420-449. Print.

*Courser, Thomas. Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing.

Crowley, Sharon. Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1998. Print.

*Davis, Diane. Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric and Foreign Relations. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2010. Print.

---. “Finitude’s Clamor, or Notes Toward a Communitarian Literacy.” College Composition and Communication 53.1 (2001): 119-145.

Dobrin, Sidney I. Beyond Post-Process. Utah State UP, 2011. Print.

Dobrin, Sidney I. Postcomposition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2011. Print.

Faigley, Lester. Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1992. Print.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 1993. Print.

Gil-Gomez, Ellen M. “The Practice of Piece-Making: Subject Positions in the Classroom.” Feminism and Composition Studies: In Other Words. Eds. Susan Jarratt and Lynn Worsham. New York: MLA of America, 1998. 198-205. Print.

Hairston, Maxine. “The Winds of Change: Thomas Kuhn and the Revolution in the Teaching of Writing.” College Composition and Communication. 33.1 (1982): 76-88. Print.

Harkin, Patricia and John Schilb. Contending with Words: Composition Rhetoric in a Postmodern Age. New York: MLA of America, 1991. Print.

Harris, Joseph. A Teaching Subject: Composition Since 1966. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997. Print.

Haswell, Janis and Richard Haswell. Authoring: An Essay for the Profession on Potentiality and Singularity. Logan, Utah: Utah State UP, 2010. Print.

Hawk, Byron. A Counter-history of Composition: Toward Methodologies of Complexity. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2007. Print.

Knadler, Stepher. “E-racing Difference in E-Space: Black Female Subjectivity and the Web-based Portfolio.” Computers and Composition 18.3 (2001): 235-255.

Knoblauch, C.H., and Lil Brannon. Rhetorical Traditions and the Teaching of Writing. Upper Montclair, NJ: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1984. Print.

Kopelson, Karen L. “Tripping over Our Tropes: Of ‘Passing’ and Postmodern Subjectivity? What’s in a Metaphor?” JAC 25.3 (2005): 436-467.

Lu, Min-Zhan. “An Essay on the Work of Composition: Composing English Against the Order of Fast Capitalism.” CCC 56.1 (2004): 16-50.

Lundberg, Christian and Joshua Gunn. “Ouija Board, Are There Any Communications? Agency, Ontotheology, and the Death of the Humanist Subject, or, Continuing the ARS Conversation.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35.4 (2005): 83-106.

Lyotard, Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1984. Print.

Massey, Lance and Richard C. Gephardt. Changing of Knowledge in Composition: Contemporary Perspectives. Utah State UP, 2011. Print.

Miller, Susan. Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991. Print.

---. Rescuing the Subject, 2^nd Edition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2004. Print.

North, Stephen M. The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field. Upper Montclair, NJ: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1987. Print.

Racevskis, Karlis. “Returning to the Subject.” Works and Days 49-50 (2007): 79-86.

Rickert, Thomas. Acts of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Zizek, and the Return of the Subject.

Rose, Jeanne Marie. “When Human Subjects become Cybersubjects: A Call for Collaborative Consent.” Computers and Composition 24.4 (2007): 462-477.

Sanchez, Raul. The Function of Theory in Composition Studies. Albany: SUNY Press, 2006. Print.

---. “Outside the Text: Retheorizing Empiricism and Identity.” College English. 74.3 (2012): 234-246. Print.

Scott, Tony. Dangerous Writing: Understanding the Political Economy of Composition. Utah State UP, 2009. Print.

Shipka, Jody. Toward a Composition Made Whole. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2011. Print.

Sirc, Geoffrey. English Composition as a Happening. Utah State UP, 2002. Print.

Slevin, James F. Introducing English: Essays in the Intellectual Work of Composition. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2001. Print.

Thacker, Eugene. “Data Made Flesh: Biotechnology and the Discourse of the Posthuman.” Cultural Critique 53 (2003):72-97.

Part 2: Public Writing and that Troubling Circulation

Anderson, Erin. “Global Street Papers and Homeless (Counter) Publics: Rethinking the Technologies of Community Publications.” Reflections 10.1 (2010):76-103. Print.

Ackerman, John and David J. Coogan.. The Public Work of Rhetoric: Civic Scholars and Civic Engagement. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010. Print.

Brandt, Deborah. “Sponsors of Literacy.” College Composition and Communication. 49.2 (1998): 165-85. Print.

Coogan, David J. “Service Learning and Social Change: The Case for Materialist Rhetoric.” College Composition and Communication. 57.4 (2006): 667-93. Print.

Coogan, David J. “Counterpublics in Public Housing: Reframing the Politics of Service-Learning.” College English. 67.5 (2005): 461-82. Print.

Cushman, Ellen. “The Public Intellectual, Service Learning and Activist Research.” College English. 61.3 (1999): 328-36. Print

de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1984. Print.

Deans, Thomas. Writing Partnerships: Service-Learning in Composition. Urbana: NCTE, 2009. Print.

Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text. 25/26 (1990).

George, Diana. “The Word on the Street: Public Discourse in a Culture of Disconnect.” Reflections. 2.2 (2002): 5-18. Print.

Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: AnInquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: Cambridge Polity Press, 1989. Print.

Harter, Lynn M., Edwards, Autumn, McClanahan, Andrea, Hopson, Mark C.  and Evelyn Carson-Stern. “Organizing for Survival and Social Change: The Case of StreetWise.” Communication Studies.55.2 (2004):407-424. Print.

Marx, Karl. Capital v. 2. London: Penguin Classics, 1992. Print.

---. Grundrisse. London: Penguin Classics, 1993. Print.

Mathieu, Paula. Tactics of Hope: The Public Turn in English Composition. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2005. Print.

Mathieu, Paula and Diana George. “Not Going It Alone: Public Writing, Independent Media, and the Circulation of Homeless Advocacy.” College Composition and Communication. 61.1 (2009):130-150. Print.

Mathieu, Paula, Steve Parks, and Tiffany Rousculp. Circulating Communities: The Tactics and Strategies of Community Publishing. New York: Lexington Books, 2012. Print.

Mentzell Ryder, Phyllis. Rhetorics for Community Action: Public Writing and Writing Publics. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010. Print.

Morley, David and Worpole, Ken. The Republic of Letters: Working Class Writing and Local Publishing. Philadelphia and Syracuse: New City Community Press/Syracuse UP, 2009. Print.

Mortenson, Peter. “Going Public.” College Composition and Communication. 50.2 (1998): 182-205. Print.

Negt, Oskar and Alexander Kluge. Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. Print.

Parks, Steve. Gravyland: Writing Beyond the Curriculum in the City of Brotherly Love. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2010. Print.

Parks, Steve and Eli Goldblatt. “Writing Beyond the Curriculum: Fostering New Collaborations in Literacy.” College English. 46.2 (2000): 584-606. Print.

Shirkey, Clay. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. New York: Penguin, 2008. Print.

Trimbur, John. “Composition and the Circulation of Writing.” College Composition and Communication. 52.2 (2000): 188-219. Print.

Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books, 2005. Print.

Weisser, Christian. Moving Beyond Academic Discourse: Composition Studies and the Public Sphere. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2002. Print.

Welch, Nancy. Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Privatized World. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook, 2008. Print.

Wells, Susan. “Rogue Cops and Health Care: What Do We Want From Public Writing?” College Composition and Communication. 47.3 (1996): 325-41. Print.