On the Blunt Edge

Description

On the Blunt Edge: Technology in Composition’s History and Pedagogy tells the stories of composition’s techno-history, from the roads of the ancient world, which allowed students to travel to school, to the audio-visual aids that populate the classrooms of the modern world. Computers are only a small part of this discussion, a technological Johnny-come-lately in a long-running pedagogical palaver.

Informations

• Publié par: Parlor Press, LLC
• Date de parution: 22 décembre 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781602352230
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

On the Blunt Edge
Technology in Composition’s History and Pedagogy
Edited by Shane Borrowman
Parlor Press
Anderson, South Carolina
www.parlorpress.com


Parlor Press LLC, Anderson, South Carolina, USA
© 2012 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
On the blunt edge : technology in composition’s history and pedagogy / edited by Shane Borrowman. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-60235-220-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-221-6 (alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-222-3 (adobe ebook) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-223-0 (epub) 1. English language--Rhetoric--Study and teaching (Higher) 2. English philology--Study and teaching--History. I. Borrowman, Shane. PE1404.O487 2011 421’.1028--dc22 2011011270
Cover design by David Blakesley.
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 Adobe 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
Introduction: Process and Place, Technology in a Glass
Shane Borrowman
1 Writing Without Paper: A Study of Functional Rhetoric in Ancient Athens
Richard Leo Enos
2 Adsum Magister: The Technology of Transportation in Rhetorical Education
D aniel R. Fredrick
3 Motivations for the Development of Writing Technology
Richard W. Rawnsley
4 “The Next Takes the Machine”: Typewriter Technology and the Transformation of Teaching
Shawn Fullmer
5 Handwriting, Literacy, and Technology
Kathleen Blake Yancey
6 “Making the Devil Useful”: Audio-Visual Aids and the Teaching of Writing
Joseph Jones
7 Textbooks and Their Pedagogical Influences in Higher Education: A Bibliographic Essay
Sherry Rankins Robertson and Duane Roen
8 Disciplining Technology: A Selective Annotated Bibliography
Marcia Kmetz, Robert Lively,
Crystal Broch-Colombini, and Thomas Black
9 The Rhetoric of Obfuscation and Technologies of Hidden Writing: Poets and Palimpsests, Painters and Purposes
Jason Thompson and Theresa Enos
Contributors
Index


Introduction: Process and Place, Technology in a Glass
Shane Borrowman
Although possibly now threatened by discs as a medium for recording the printed word, the book is still regarded by many as an ideal information recording and transfer medium (28).
—Charles T. Meadow, Ink into Bits
The story of my writing process is a story of place: I remember what I wrote through remembering where I wrote. My first published poem was written in Morrison #307, the dorm room at Eastern Washington University where I lived for three years. The TV was playing Sunday night news programs, and the smell of urine was strong. When my roommate was too drunk to stagger to the bathroom, he peed in our garbage can. This happened so often that the bottom of the can rusted out, quickly developing both a stink and scabrous, crusty edged holes. My first article on pedagogy—penned for a regional English Journal affiliate—was written in the sunbeam that came into my breakfast nook from six to seven o’clock during June and July mornings. The apartment was half of the top floor of a former boardinghouse, and the galley kitchen had so little counter space that my microwave sat atop the refrigerator. My last poem was written while parked on I-90, near Missoula, Montana, waiting for the tow truck to come and rocking with the windblast from passing semitrucks. The most recent article on pedagogy was written in my office at Gonzaga University, with the bells from St. Al’s cathedral tolling just outside the window. I wrote a lot in that office, including the proposals for both my first edited collection and first textbook, and there were always bells. St. Al’s was the neighborhood place of worship, and not a week went by when there wasn’t a marrying or burying. The burials came with bagpipes to supplement the bells.
The list could continue virtually ad nauseum, could include more poetry, more articles, two theses and a dissertation, other collections and textbooks and proposals. I wrote in rental duplexes while neighbors argued loudly next door, sometimes slamming one another against our shared wall. I wrote while floating on a raft in the Tucson sun. I wrote in cars that reeked from my cigarettes and in cars I bought after I quit smoking. The list could continue, but it would never get any closer to being accurate. The story of my writing process, I have always mistakenly thought, is a story of place. Location anchors the narrative scraps of memory nicely, but memory is a variable that, I have come to realize, doesn’t matter much for me. Wherever I happen to be writing, I am still the writer. The poet sitting in Morrison #307 smelling rust and urine is the researcher sitting in his Troll’s Den at the University of Nevada, Reno—departmental slang for the office that’s beneath a footbridge. Places change, but places don’t change the writer.
Rather than focusing on place, my thoughts on my writing process focus more and more on the story of technology, on the changes reflected in/wrought by technologies of writing. My first poem was written longhand, in blue Bic ink, in a flat-bound notebook. The cover of this notebook was bent and torn and marked with coffee rings; it was where my creative writing happened, including “Cold Warrior”—two or three stanzas of free verse written during a 60 Minutes biography of then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney. That poem happened because of pen, paper, and TV, and its publication marked the beginning of my professional life, although I wouldn’t realize this for nearly twenty years. For half that time, I continued to write poetry. Always longhand in blue ink. Always in those same flat-bound notebooks filled with non college-ruled paper.
My nonfiction writing never happened longhand after seventh or eighth grade. In high school I drafted on a Commodore 64, saving on 5 ¼” floppy disks and printing dot matrix. A typewriter with correction tape carried me through the first years of college, while a Brother word processor—fold-down keyboard hiding a monochromatic orange/black screen—that weighed in at maybe thirty pounds sufficed until I began my thesis on Norman Maclean. The Macintosh Quadra 650 that drafted that thesis served me well for four years, through a second MA program and into my PhD. And so on. Somewhere along the narrative arc, I switched to a Toshiba laptop that weighed just under fifteen pounds—a laptop I hated almost from the beginning and that I gave to Goodwill after it sat unused in a closet for several years. Two or three Dell desktop computers came and went, plus school-owned systems, including the one on which I write these words. If I were working at home, then I would be using my laptop, since my desktop system has been relegated to a dusty table in the garage, where it sits almost unused.
I no longer write poetry—no longer write much of anything longhand, other than notes-to-self and marginal/terminal comments on my students’ essays. My cycle of purchasing and discarding computers seems to be accelerating, at least in part because of dropping prices and rising financial resources.

On the Blunt Edge began as a proposal typed in Reno. While that proposal made its way through the physical labyrinth of the postal system, all communication that followed has been via email, including my correspondence with contributors, some of whom I have never met face-to-face. Might never meet face-to-face. Although the manuscript has come together through the interaction of Dell hardware and Microsoft software—and thousands of miles of cable—the idea for this book had its genesis in a strangely technology-rich experience.
I sat atop a bar stool in the Seattle-Tacoma Airport, drinking a beer brewed locally and waiting for my connecting flight to Atlanta. I was typing on a full-size foldout keyboard attached to my Palm Pilot and trolling through my much-annotated copy of George Kennedy’s translation of Aristotle’s Rhetoric . My cellular phone sat, open, beside my beer, and I was using it to check my email on America Online. Beneath the phone sat my tiny composition book with its marble-patterned cover. The television hanging above the bar broadcast live CNN coverage from the Afghan theatre of operations in the ongoing war on terror, the footage itself comprised mostly of black-and-white video from an unmanned drone—a weapon’s eye view of an attack carried out only hours before in mountains literally half a planet away.
The moment was ripe for reflection: travel across nearly the breadth of the nation to speak at a conference, travel via the technology of flight, itself less than a century old; notes taken on inexpensive paper in a notebook bound in China; notes in the margins of a book so easy to replace that I don’t hesitate to defile it as needed; typing on a keyboard small enough to fold into my suit coat pocket, a keyboard attached to a computer small enough to fit in the other pocket; a telephone that worked virtually anywhere in the country and didn&