Mics, Cameras, Symbolic Action

Bump Halbritter

Description

Mics, Cameras, Symbolic Action: Audio-Visual Rhetoric for Writing Teachers begins by placing audio-visual writing within established theoretical frames in rhetoric and composition and moves through a variety of applied pedagogical concerns with the aim of helping writing teachers use audio-visual writing assignments to realize a wide variety of learning goals in their writing classes.

Sujets

• Disciplines
• Language Arts
• Rhetoric

Informations

• Publié par: Parlor Press, LLC
• Date de parution: 26 novembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781602353398
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

New Media Theory
Series Editor, Byron Hawk
The New Media Theory series investigates both media and new media as a complex ecological and rhetorical context. The merger of media and new media creates a global social sphere that is changing the ways we work, play, write, teach, think, and connect. Because this new context operates through evolving arrangements, theories of new media have yet to establish a rhetorical and theoretical paradigm that fully articulates this emerging digital life.
The series includes books that combine social, cultural, political, textual, rhetorical, aesthetic, and material theories in order to understand moments in the lives that operate in these emerging contexts. Such works typically bring rhetorical and critical theories to bear on media and new media in a way that elaborates a burgeoning post-disciplinary “medial turn” as one further development of the rhetorical and visual turns that have already influenced scholarly work.
Books in the Series
Ready to Wear: A Rhetoric of Wearable Computers and Reality-Shifting Media by Isabel Pedersen (2013)
Mics, Cameras, Symbolic Action: Audio- Visual Rhetoric for Writing Teachers , by Bump Halbritter (2012)
The Available Means of Persuasion: Mapping a Theory and Pedagogy of Multimodal Public Rhetoric , by David M. Sheridan, Jim Ridolfo, and Anthony J. Michel (2012)
Avatar Emergency by Gregory L. Ulmer (2012)
New Media/New Methods: The Academic Turn from Literacy to Electracy , edited by Jeff Rice and Marcel O’Gorman (2008)
The Two Virtuals: New Media and Composition , by Alexander Reid (2007). Honorable Mention, W. Ross Winterowd/ JAC Award for Best Book in Composition Theory, 2007.


Mics, Cameras, Symbolic Action
Audio-Visual Rhetoric for Writing Teachers
Bump Halbritter
Parlor Press
Anderson, South Carolina
www.parlorpress.com


Parlor Press LLC, Anderson, South Carolina, USA
© 2013 by Parlor Press
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Halbritter, Scott K.
Mics, cameras, symbolic action : audio-visual rhetoric for writing teachers / Bump Halbritter.
p. cm. -- (New media theory)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60235-336-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-337-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-338-1 (adobe ebook) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-341-1 (ibooks) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-339-8 (epub) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-340-4 (mobi)
1. English language--Rhetoric--Study and teaching--Data processing. 2. Mass media--Authorship. I. Title.
PE1404.H332 2012
808’.0420285--dc23
2012019812
1 2 3 4 5
Cover design by David Blakesley.
Cover image created by Bump Halbritter
Printed on acid-free paper.
Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is available in paper, cloth and eBook formats from Parlor Press on the World Wide Web at http://www.parlorpress.com or through online and brick-and-mortar bookstores. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 3015 Brackenberry Drive, Anderson, South Carolina, 29621, or email [e-mail].


Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
1 Twenty-First Century Writing as Symbolic Action
2 Learning Goals: The Unfinished Works of Twenty-First Century Writing
3 Reading Like a Writer: Exposing the Layers of Multidimensional Rhetoric
4 Mics: What Do Writing Teachers Need to Know about Audio?
5 Cameras: What Do Writing Teachers Need to Know about Video?
6 Teaching Twenty-First Century Writing as Symbolic Action
Afterword
Notes
Works Cited
About the Author
Index for Print Edition


Preface
We view language as a kind of action, symbolic action. And for this terministic perspective we have proposed the trade name of ‘Dramatism’ precisely because we would feature the term act.
[A] Dramatistic approach to the analysis of language starts with problems of terministic catharsis (which is another word for “rebirth,” transcendence, transubstantiation, or simply for “transformation” in the sense of the technically developmental, as when a major term is found somehow to have moved on, and thus to have in effect changed its nature either by adding new meanings to its old nature, or by yielding place to some other term that henceforth takes over its functions wholly or in part).
—Kenneth Burke
Why All the Drama?
Terministic Catharsis: the expression itself sounds dramatic. Terministic suggests the linguistic—logos, the word; however, it seems also to resonate with reference to crisis, urgency, and finality—telos, end or purpose. Catharsis suggests, as Kenneth Burke claims, rebirth, transcendence, and transformation ( LSA 367). As such, the expression, terministic catharsis, at once suggests death and rebirth: a lexical phoenix bursting into flame and rising again, anew, from the ashes of its previous manifestation. Logos sheds its skin to escape the constraints of a definition that is too tight—a word who has grown too big for its britches.
This book was written at a time of terministic catharsis and its author assumes that the particular instance of terministic catharsis examined in this book is not a relic of history, a momentary event like a tsunami wave that forms, crashes, and dissipates. This terministic catharsis remains in flux, like the ongoing ebbs and flows—the tugs and pushes—of the tides themselves: always moving, always changing, always effecting movement and change. This book explores the terministic catharsis of writing , and it will argue for the terministic catharsis of that ancient term, telos , as it is applied to the teaching of writing transformed. Our goal, our telos , will be to question the goals of writing instruction and to match those with the writing goals we assign, asking, when is a work of writing done and when is the work of writing done? As such, we will attend to writing as a verb primarily and we will access that by way of the production of writing as a noun. The noun is the vehicle. The verb is the goal.
Mics, Cameras, Symbolic Action will attempt to expand the territory of writing by way of symbolic action. It will amass and test theory, terminology, and both writing and teaching practices that will aid our progress into that expanded territory of writing. This pedagogical approach will remix the old with the new: the pious with the impious. What will help us make the new stick to the established? Duct tape.
Let me explain.
In my years spent as a working musician, I learned the essential, practical value of duct tape. Little, at the time, did I realize the full scope of its rhetorical value. That dawned upon me at a conference for writing professionals. I was presenting on a panel devoted to a discussion of electronic publishing opportunities for undergraduate writers and researchers, with emphasis on the publishing of multimedia products. When I arrived at the room where our panel would present (one hour before the first presentation of the day—as always—to scope out what we would need in order to use the room), I found a table covered with pitchers of water and drinking glasses, six round tables with chairs for attendees, and a long narrow table for the presenters. All of the tables had white tablecloths and the venue had supplied notepads and pens for participants. However, there were no presentation materials: no overhead projector, no digital projector, no speakers, and no projection screen. None. Of course, I was showing a movie —not only as usual, but as promised. And, of course, I was prepared—or nearly prepared. You see, I’m used to showing up at academic conferences that are ill-equipped or, as in this case, completely un-equipped for the sort of media I will be presenting. I brought my own computer, digital projector, speakers, and extension cords—oh yeah, and a roll of duct tape, as always—just in case. However, as you may imagine, I was unable to travel to this conference with a projection screen—and this room did not have one. Yet with all I had brought, I was unprepared to conduct my presentation.
Venues usually charge exorbitant prices for presentation media. I understand that. However, reading the rhetoric of the situation, the conference organizers communicated this decision: for a conference of writing professionals, who according to formal position statements value audio-visual writing, tablecloths are necessary, but presentation media are not. In other words, it is perfectly reasonable, even if undesirable, to conduct a conference on writing without presentation media. Audio-visual writing is the parsley on our disciplinary plate. Writers and writing professionals read papers and take notes on paper at their conferences. What they need is a room, some drinking water, a few notepads and pens, chairs, tables, and tablecloths. The basics. The pious materials of our work. We say we value audio-visual writing, for our students, but we do not expect that it will be essential to the work that writing professionals do . Even if that is what they do.
Well, I am grateful that white tablecloths were deemed to be worth the investment, because with my roll of duct tape, we were able to make a screen. Duct tape made audio-visual writing stick in this session at this conference. Duct tape. Now, it wasn’t pretty. The duct tape signaled an obvious case of jury-rigging. It said quite clearly, “This is NOT what we do here.” Even in the few rooms that were equipped with screens and projector