I’m reading some of the articles in the November 2006 College English, and a few things have stuck out to me so far:
Miles McCrimmon writes that “A first-year composition course that asks students to read and write the widest possible discursive array of complicated and problematic texts is surely the best hedge against a superficial understanding of the demands of the college experience” (122). He is interested in erasing the divide between literature and writing by using literature in the composition course. I have nothing against this, really, but I’m not so interested in that aspect of his work as in his understanding that we need to complicate what it means to be writing.
Jeff Rice, too, wants to complicate our understanding of writing. Drawing on Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, he notes that writing is a poor metaphor for the work that is now being done (129), and instead proposes that “College English should be new media” and we should use the metaphor of networks (127). I agree that networks is a good metaphor for the work we do, especially since it is a spatial metaphor that privileges connectivity. He notes that Bartholomae stresses work on the page:
Composition — or, the space within English studies where student writing is a central concern — is positioned to promote practical criticism because of its historic concern for the space on the page and what it might mean to do work there and not somewhere else. (Bartholomae 17-18)
Bartholomae’s definition is limiting, Rice argues, because it ignores “the open space constructed out of connections where multiple writers engaging within multiple ideas in multiple media at multiple moments function” (130).
Bartholomae, David. “What is Composition and (if You Know What That Is) Why Do We Teach It?” Composition in the Twenty-First Century: Crisis and Change. Ed. Lynn Bloom, Donald Daiker, and Edward White. Carbondale, Southern Illinois UP, 1996. 11-28.
McCrimmon, Miles. “Across the Great Divide: Anxieties of Acculturation in College English.” College English 69.2 (November 2006): 117-126.
Rice, Jeff. “Networks and New Media.” College English 69.2 (November 2006): 127-133.
