The "Giant Whale" at the St. Louis City Museum
Photo by Jillian Sayre
In recent decades, a number of disciplines have begun to turn attention to the nonhuman. Work on the posthuman, actor-network theory, speculative realism, and animal studies (among numerous other fields and theories) attempts to expand the scope of scholarship in both the humanities and the sciences. This scholarship is looking beyond the human, and Composition and Rhetoric has begun to take this turn as well. This seminar takes up the lines of research that have begun to address writing, rhetoric, and the nonhuman. The course examines recent work in the field that asks: What is the role of the nonhuman in studies of composition, literacy, and in rhetoric? What does a nonhuman theory of composition, literacy, or rhetoric look like? How does accounting for the nonhuman reshape or reimagine the various scholarly agendas of the field?
The course covers work in Composition and Rhetoric that addresses the nonhuman along with the work of scholars outside the field who address these questions. In addition to reading and writing about contemporary scholarship, students in this course will also address these questions in a less traditional way: They will make something. Throughout the semester, students will work toward the construction of some object. This can take a number of forms, including (but not limited to) knitting, carpentry, cooking, and computer programming. We will treat this process of making as an opportunity to meditate on how nonhumans intervene in and shape writing processes and rhetorical action.
Professor: Jim Brown
Class Meeting Place: 2252 Helen C. White
Class Time: Wednesday, 9:00am-11:30am
Office: 6187E Helen C. White
Office Hours: Monday 12:30-2:30 [Make an Appointment]
Email: brownjr [at] wisc [dot] edu
Website: http://courses.jamesjbrownjr.net/706_fall2012
Course Goals:
Required Texts:
Other Readings (available for download):
Course Work
With the exceptions of Maker Reports and the questions you post to Google Docs, I will provide letter grades on assignments and a letter grade for your final grade. Maker Reports and questions will be graded on a credit/no-credit basis. Unless you hear from you, you should assume that you've received credit for these assignments.
Below are the grade criteria I will use when providing letter grades:
Follow the links below for descriptions of our assignments.
For each reading, we will have a shared Google Document in which you will post questions prior to class. These contributions will not be graded, but participation is required.
By midnight on Monday, you should post two different kinds of questions to our Google Document:
1) Questions of Clarification
These questions should be about terms or concepts you didn't understand or about moments in the argument you found unclear. These questions are, for the most part, focused on understanding the reading, and we will address these first during class discussion.
2) Questions for Discussion
These questions are more geared toward opening up class discussion, and they can be focused on connections you see to other readings, the implications of the argument we've read, or ways that you think the argument might be applied to research questions.
This document will be open during class discussion, and it will serve as a collaborative note-taking space.
During weeks when we do not have a project or paper due, you will complete 250-500 word reports about your "making" project. These are informal reports, and they are a space for you report on your progress, discuss anything you've learned about the various nonhumans with which you're interacting, reflect on how your experiences intersect with our readings, or any other information that you think might help you (or the rest of the class) gain insight into your ongoing project.
You should think of these brief snippets of text as opportunities for invention. Ideas that emerge in these papers may find their way into your other assignments (the encomium, the alien phenomenology project, or the summary-response papers), so take advantage of this space as you work through our readings. While we won't read these in class, we will share them in a Dropbox folder. At the beginning of class, I will ask you to give a very brief (no more than 2 minutes) report that condenses some of what you've said in the maker report.
In Alien Phenomenology, Ian Bogost gives us two methods for engaging with nonhumans: ontography and carpentry. In this first project, you will use one of these methods to make something. The book presents a number of examples, from I am TIA to the photography of Stephen Shore, and your task is to follow these examples, to make something that tries to put some of Bogost's methods to the test.
This project can serve as the launching point for your semester-long making project, or it can be a way of accounting for an object relationship happening within that larger project. For instance, if your semester-long project involves knitting, you could approach the Alien Phenomenology project from a number of angles: you might consider how knitting could be used to create an ontograph, or you could use knitting to simulate the experience of a nonhuman, or you could create something in another medium that accounts for the relationship between needle and yarn. These are just three possibilities, but the example is meant to suggest that this project is pretty much wide open.
In addition to creating a work of carpentry or an ontograph, you will write a 1000-word reflection on the project (this word limit will be strictly enforced). This paper will briefly summarize the concept you've chosen to deploy, explain how you've incorporated the methods laid out in Alien Phenomenology, and lay out what you hope your project accomplishes. You will read this paper aloud in class.
When evaluating these projects and papers, I will be asking the following:
In "Things Without Honor," Arthur Pease gives us a detailed history of adoxography, demonstrating how the encomium was used to praise a number of things, including inanimate objects. Our second major project will operate in this tradition as we compose our own encomia to a nonhuman.
Your encomium can focus on any nonhuman connected with your making project, or with the object that you are making. The ecomium should follow the format detailed in Crowley and Hawhee's Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students (handout provided in class): prologue, birth and upbringing, extraordinary acts of one's life, comparisons used to praise the subject, and an epilogue.
Your encomium should be no longer than 1250 words, and you will read your encomium aloud in class.
When evaluating these papers, I will be asking the following:
[This assignment is adapted from Diane Davis' Summary-Response paper assignment]
Your final two papers in the course will be Summary-Response papers that summarize one of the theorists we've read and then use that theorist to "read" or describe some of the nonhumans you've been interacting with during your semester long making project. You will read these papers aloud in class.
The rules for these papers are as follows:
When responding to and grading these papers, I will be asking the following questions;
Methods
1/23: Bogost, Brown and Rivers
1/30: Brandt and Clinton, Latour's Aramis (through page 123)
2/6: Hallenbeck, Spinuzzi, Latour's Aramis
2/13: Alien Phenomenology Project Due
Materiality
2/20: Pease, Bryant (through page 134)
2/27: Hesse et. al., Bryant
3/6: Marback, Bennett
3/13: Encomium Due
3/20: Bay and Rickert, Harman
Browse: Random Shopper, Metaphor-a-Minute, RapBot, Objects in Prince of Networks
[Virtual Visit from Darius Kazemi]
3/27: SPRING BREAK
4/3: Hawk; Deleuze and Guattari; P&R Manuscript and Peer Review Docs
4/10: Summary-Response 1 Due
Mammals
4/17: Davis, Derrida
4/24: Hawhee, Kennedy
5/1: Muckelbauer, Oliver
5/8: Summary-Response 2 Due
What is the purpose of a graduate seminar, and how does one use such a space to usefully engage with texts? I offer this document as an answer to that question and as a kind of constitution for our class.
The military root of the phrase "rules of engagement" is unfortunate because we are actually interested in something as nonviolent as possible. Of course, any interpretation of a text will do violence to it. This is the nature of interpretation. We fit a text or a set of ideas into a pre-existing framework that we already have. This is unavoidable. But we can try our best to forestall that violence or to at least soften the blow. In the interest of this kind of approach, I offer the following rules:
1. Disagreement and agreement are immaterial.
Our primary task is to understand, and this does not require agreement or disagreement. The only agreement the seminar asks of you is this: I agree to read, consider, analyze, and ask questions about these texts.
In his essay "The Rhetoric of Hitler's Battle," Kenneth Burke presents us with a succinct encapsulation of this first rule of engagement:
The appearance of Mein Kampf in unexpurgated translation has called for far too many vandalistic comments. There are other ways of burning books than on the pyre - and the favorite method of the hasty reviewer is to deprive himself and his readers by inattention. I maintain that it is thoroughly vandalistic for the reviewer to content himself with the mere inflicting of a few symbolic wounds upon this book and its author, of an intensity varying with the resources of the reviewer and the time at his disposal. Hitler's "Battle" is exasperating, even nauseating; yet the fact remains: If the reviewer but knocks off a few adverse attitudinizings and calls it a day, with a guaranty in advance that his article will have a favorable reception among the decent members of our population, he is contributing more to our gratification than to our enlightenment" (The Philosophy of Literary Form, 191)
Of course, we will not be reading anything like Mein Kampf, but the principle still stands. We are more interested in enlightenment than gratification.
2. An argument is a machine to think with.
This is another version of I.A. Richards's claim that “a book is a machine to think with." The "with" here should be read in two different ways simultaneously. We read "with" an argument by reading alongside it. We "tarry" with it. We get very close to it and join it during a long walk. Notice that this requires that we stay with the author rather than diverging down a different path, questioning the route, or pulling out our own map. But "with" here also means that the argument is a tool that we must first understand before using. Our job is to learn how this tool works. It has multiple moving parts and purposes. It has multiple audiences. We need to understand all of this before we make any attempt to use the argument, and we certainly need to do all of this before we can even think about disagreeing with it.
3. Ask that question sincerely, or the principle of "generous reading."
Why the hell would s/he argue that? If you find yourself asking this question, then take the next step by answering your own question. Why would s/he argue that? If I am indignant about the argument, does this suggest that I am not the audience? If the argument seems ridiculous, is it relying on definitions that I find foreign? If I think the argument is brilliant, is it because I am in fact the target audience, so much so that I am having a difficult time gaining any kind of critical distance?
The principle of "generous reading" has little to do with being "nice." Instead, it is more about reading in a generative way, in a way that opens the text up rather than closes it down. This requires that we read a text on its own terms, understanding how an argument is deploying certain concepts and ideas (see Rule #2).