Call for CCCarnival: Sirc’s “Resisting Entropy”

A few years back, when an interesting article would seem to capture the attention of blogging scholars in rhetoric and composition, someone might call for a blogging carnival about the article. There might be a more recent example, but the one that comes to mind is Derek Mueller’s 2008 call for a CCCarnival about Karen Kopelson’s “Sp(l)itting Images; or, Back to the Future of (Rhetoric and?) Composition” (CCC 59.4).

I’d like to renew the idea/practice of a blogging CCCarnival. In the most recent issue of College Composition and Communication (63.3), Geoffrey Sirc has a review essay (PDF) in which he calls out rhetoric and composition for seeming “so stunted and contrary” (508), asking (or perhaps, rather, demanding) that we question and re-imagine our “sniffy attitude toward literariness” (510) and leave behind our “bland, sanitized pedagogy” that has misread vitalism (511) and fetishized and reduced the complexities of invention and audience as a teachable method (512, 514). (I hope that, at the very least, this is a fair and concise summary of his polemics.)

Bonnie has already asked “us” to discuss Sirc’s claim that the pedagogy that has persisted in “Official composition” is “so limited, it’s unbearable” (511). And I’ve seen numerous Twitter posts questioning his various claims and logics, or, at the very least, his tone toward those scholars’ recent books he derides.

Despite some’s belief that it might not be worth blogging about the piece (hi Brian!), I think it would be interesting to hear responses that are a bit more in-depth than Twitter conversations. (Though I won’t make this a post about how blogging is dead. haha!) And it seems that the piece is rich for topoi to launch from.

So, if you’re in, post something in response to Sirc’s piece on your blog—say by a week from today. Post a comment here or a trackback, and I’ll try to keep track of the links and post them all so they’re easily accessible. UPDATED: You could also tweet a link at me (@sisypheantask).

CONTRIBUTIONS to the CCCarnival:
• Earth Wide Moth: Resisting “Resisting Entropy”
• The Parable Maternal: Sirc/Blog Carnival
• Transmedia Me: Sirc, Shipka, Summers
• Political & Rhetorical: Joining the (proposed) CCCarnival on Sirc’s “Resisting Entropy”
• Digital Digs: First Year Composition’s “Doomed Enterprise”
• Steven Krause: Nothing Personal
• Page Techtonics: Sirc Blog CCCarnival
• Culture Cat: Fashionably Late to the Sirc CCCarnival
• Clinamen: Back and Forth on the See Saw
• englishgal516: CCCarnival: Sirc’s “Resisting Entropy”
• Resembling Amber: Sirc — Resisting Entropy
• The Blogora
• Vitia: Literary Texts and Solipsistic Pedagogies