"from literacy to electracy"

Stumbled upon "from literacy to electracy" in my travels. Haven't had time to get a sense of the site, but I did click on enough links to find this observation from Claude Lévi-Strauss:

My hypothesis, if correct, would oblige us to recognize the fact that the primary function of written communication is to facilitate slavery.

I wonder whether C's "Writing the Essay" instructor would like that.

I'm thinking Yes.

Writing the Essay at Urban Dictionary

I think someone's going to be getting a Writing the Essay mug for Christmas.

AND SEE:
the boss compositionists

stop the multiverse, I want to get off

So I was propounding my theory that Something Happened in 1985, a world-jarring event that catapulted us all into a parallel universe where Not Teaching is Teaching and Salman Khan is the man you summon to help you spice up your presentations.

Then a couple of minutes later I came across this: The Accidental Universe: Science's Crisis of Faith by Alan P. Lightman.

Why are we living in a world where Writing to the Point is out of print and Grammar to Enrich & Enhance Writing is in print?

I blame the multiverse.

Disappearing act

Having now spent two fall semesters in a row trawling the web for research and advice on the teaching of freshman composition, I have come to the conclusion that all useful thinking on the subject ceased in 1985.^*

Prior to 1985, people are thinking and writing all manner of helpful stuff; after 1985 you get the rise of the boss compositionists and the erasure of the sentence.

The compositionists are still busy erasing the knowledge we used to have:

Before: Campus Writing Program | Indiana University - grading; sequenced microthemes; pamphlets for students, etc. Good stuff.

Now:

After: Node Chairs Move Students to New Activity

Honest to God: this is Indiana University's Campus Writing Program, and they've devoted an entire page to a furniture purchase.

^* a proposed factoid that supports my hit-by-a-meteor hypothesis

wrong turn

from the Instructor's Notes to The Everyday Writer by Andrea Lunsford, Alyssa O'Brien, and Lisa Dresdner:

In his essay “Structure and Form in Non-Narrative Prose,” Richard Larson explains what he sees as the three categories of paragraph theory: paragraphs (1) as expanded sentences, governed by comparable syntactical forces; (2) as self-contained units of writing with their own unique principles; and (3) as parts of the overall discourse, informed by the strategies a writer chooses for the overall piece. 

Reading this passage, my reaction is: Interesting!

And: Help is on its way.

Any one of these theories of the paragraph sounds as if it might be very useful to me in teaching college freshmen how to write a 5-paragraph English paper.

Unfortunately, Larson is not findable on Google, and there's no more to be learned from Lunsford, who buries Larson and his ilk in her next paragraph:

Today, partially as a result of the poststructuralist and feminist critique, scholars are challenging conventional paragraph norms. In Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, V. N. Volosinov notes that “to say that a paragraph is supposed to consist of a complete thought amounts to absolutely nothing.” Beginning with this provocative insight, Kay Halasek’s book A Pedagogy of Possibility [the Amazon results, not the book] shows the ways in which composition textbooks have traditionally taught the paragraph in strictly traditional ways, as unified, coherent, and tightly linear. But Halasek works to redefine the paragraph as dialogic, as a negotiation among writer, audience, subject, and other textual elements that surround it. Most important, Halasek insists, is for instructors of writing to understand that the process of producing “unified,” “cohesive” paragraphs calls for ignoring, erasing, or otherwise smoothing out a diversity of discourses and voices. Thus teaching students to be aware of this process not only illuminates a great deal about how “good” paragraphs get constructed but also introduces them to a philosophy of language that is not based on current traditional positivism or objectivism.

Even if I agreed with the sentiments expressed in this paragraph, which I don't, the words "to say that a paragraph is supposed to consist of a complete thought amounts to absolutely nothing" tells me absolutely nothing about what to do in class next Tuesday.

Then there's this:

Today theorists are questioning the ideologies surrounding practices of quotation. An early critique of such practices appears in the work of Bakhtin and Volosinov, who question the ways in which quotation perpetuates a view of language as the property of a radically unique individual rather than as a set of socially constructed systems.

and this:

Volosinov, Valentin N. “Exposition of the Problem of Reported Speech.” Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1973. Here Volosinov mounts a powerful critique of quotation practices, revealing the ways they are inevitably embedded in ideology.

The Everyday Writer costs $57.99 on Amazon.

citing the polysyllabists

John Trimbur cites Lunsford and other polysyllabists as arguing that composition studies, a postmodern pastiche resistant to "the positivist certainties and foundational accounts that shaped the older disciplines," follows "the cultural logic of postmodernism" and "situates itself in a nondisciplinary or postdisciplinary place where multiple, heterogeneous, and polyvalent discourses, projects, and interests intersect" ("Writing Instruction" 136).
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by James Sledd

A postdisciplinary place?

Doesn't that sound like middle school?

Meet the new boss

The charge that their research is chaotic does not, of course, disturb the complacency of the boss compositionists. Their easy but empty response is to give chaos an honorific name. Andrea Lunsford sees the nature, the space, of composition studies as "large and loosely bounded, informed by cross-disciplinary, trans-institutional, multiply mediated, multi-geared, multi-voiced, and radically democratic principles" (11) principles which understandably do not console exploited TAs and parttimers.
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by James Sledd

A brief history of the compositionists

In this necessarily brief essay, I argue again that the supposed revolution in composition has in fact been a conventional campaign for academic status and privilege-a campaign that has eventuated in a culture richly comic. Instead of the compositionists' struggle for upward mobility in the academic pecking order, I propose 1) a meltdown of academia's detestable frozen hierarchies by the abolition of rank and tenure, 2) the formation of militant, inclusive unions of faculty with staff to battle swarming administrators in corporatized education, and 3) the serious teaching of the general-purpose prose that our students need and our colleagues want. Proposal, of course, isn't prophecy; but something is accomplished just by speaking the officially unspeakable-namely, that composition's "revolution" has left all the old hierarchies intact while producing a new group of hierarchs, the boss compositionists. I make no apologies for undignified concern with maligned Freshman English, a course whose careful teaching is infinitely more important than the further development of "composition theory."
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by James Sledd

where is Vlorbik?

I predict V is going to LOVE this thing....

Reading that blurb closely, I take it as evidence for my conclusion that upward mobility for a minority of lower managers has been mistaken for deep change. The mobile managers-good professionals sincerely devoted to high principle-have lacked only the imagination to escape professionalism. They've made themselves upwardly mobile, but in so doing they've duplicated the wider society's division into haves and haven'ts. They now are boss compositionists, overseers (obishas) on Pomocompo, the plantation of postmodern composition. Under their administration, exploited field hands (TAs, part-timers, and untenurables) still teach the vast majority of the thousands of sections of the freshman course in writing.

Rip-roaring.