Edbauer

Edbauer

This article was great! I love articles that make me think and rethink any situation, and this one had me thinking about all manner of things, from Latour to the classroom. In speaking about Phelps’ critique she states, “That is, the elements of a rhetorical situation can be re-read against the historical fluxes in which they move” (3). She then goes on to explain, “The rhetorical situation is part of what we might call, borrowing from Phelps, an ongoing social flux. Situation bleeds into the concatenation of public interaction. Public interactions bleed into wider social processes. The elements of rhetorical situation may simply bleed (3). This, of course, made me think of Latour and his network, or ANT. However, I think she “invented” in my mind something a bit different from Latour.

She states, “Rather a rhetoric emerges already infected by the viral intensities that are circulating in the social field. Moreover, this same rhetoric will go on to evolve in apparallel ways:” (6). While Latour’s notion of networking evolves from a star burst—lines shooting from a central blast—Edbauer makes me wonder if he hasn’t gotten his metaphor a little off. Think of it this way, rather than lines shooting straight out from a star, how about a large rock in a pond or lake. As the concentric circles move away from the point of impact the circles still maintain their original shape, but they grow in size and in ability to effect things beyond that first impact. The network is maintained, but rather than a straight shot there is a circle of growth and mutation as growth is maintained. The original survives as it mutates, creates, and perhaps corrects. She states, “The intensity, force and circulatory range of a rhetoric are always expanding through the mutations and new exposures attached to that given rhetoric, much like a virus” (5).

She also made me wonder about the universities composition program. She quotes Margaret Syverson, “Our theories of composition have been somewhat atomistic, focusing on individual writers, individual texts, isolated acts, processes, or artifacts” (5).
We see young writers as budding in composition, and then through other writing intensive courses as flowering. But I wonder what would happen if we broadened our horizons and theirs. First year students would take English 1000, but in the junior year, after having taken some of those writing intensive course, would take another course in composition. The point of this being that by adding lived experience, knowledge obtained through classes, we could encourage this more developed writer to take the skills further. Incorporation of lived experience and academic knowledge into what they have written about. Finding out what connections these students may find between History and Literature and the development of Literature. What types of thinking learned through college algebra have they learned that might spark better writing. Rather than simply teaching them basic academic writing, bring life experience in to create a course that asks them to synthesize this knowledge with a new, perhaps grander, writing experience.

That’s all.