Justin Hodgson

Rhetorical Invention in the Age of Multimedia

Course Description:

Invention has, on multiple occasions, across multiple eras, found itself as central focus of rhetoric and composition studies.  But this focus has nearly always associated it, somewhat exclusively, with discovery, with an act of discovery—a legacy stemming from Aristotle.  And as rhetoric and composition scholars have attempted to discover and articulate further uses, applications, and pedagogical strategies for rhetorical invention practices, they have not only generated additional topoi and other inventive practices (heuristics), they have also opened critical questions into the nature of invention (see the Janice Lauer and Ann Berthoff debates, Richard Young's works, Karen Burke Lefevre's Invention as a Social Act, etc.).  What was missing, up until roughly the postmodernism/post-structuralism influence, was an attempt to understand rhetorical invention in terms of techne, poeisis, chora; to understand invention as an act of becoming.  The relationship of being and becoming, the explorations of how we bring forth or allow forth ideas, is of critical importance in the age of multimedia because the singularity and dominance of literacy-based ordering principles, methodologies, and inventional techniques no longer apply in all cases.  They are just some among the many.

In the multimedia age, rhetorical invention has been influence by or exposed to, explicitly so, the arts and practices of remix, juxtaposition, obstruction, catastrophe, absence, and so on.  Technology (and its very essence) has opened us to not only the possibilities for a more complex, perhaps even ecological, since of rhetorical invention, but it actually demands new rhetorical invention strategies and possibilities.  In the age of multimedia, to understand rhetorical invention, requires that we bring Art and Philosophy as well as Rhetoric to bear on the conversation.  And to do this, we need to understand rhetorical invention not only in practical terms, but in abstract terms, in theoretical terms, for this will help us grasp the profound implications of invention across cultural shifts.

Thus, this course will be a drifting into the interspaces of techne, poeises, methodology, epistemology, historiography, culture, and Being; and our very drifting will be an intricate part of the course's intention.  But it will also attempt to situate the implications of that drift across primary oral cultures, literate cultures, and electronic/digital cultures.  Understanding these shifts may help us grasp not only how rhetorical invention is changing/evolving in the age of multimedia, but it may also help us better understand our current cultural moment.

Potential Requirements:

Critical Response Poster(s) (10%) – Make a poster that critically responds to a selected reading, and then present that Poster Response in class.

Critical Response Aural Creation (10%) – Make an audio project (podcast, remix, etc.) that critically responds to a selected reading, and then present that Audio Response in class.

Critical Response Digital Video (20%) – Make a video project that critically responds to a selected reading, and then present that video in class.

Multimedia Project & Presentation (50%) – Multimedia Creation making scholarly "comment" on or engagement with a critical issue for rhetorical invention.

Conference Proposal (10%) – Proposal to present (paper/multimedia/poster) at conference. 

Potential Texts:

Aristotle, On Rhetoric (selections), Metaphysics (selections), Poetics (selections)

Artaud, The Theatre and its Double

Atwill & Lauer, Perspectives on Rhetorical Invention

Benjamin, Illuminations (selections)

Blanchot, Writing the Disaster (selections)

Bolter & Grusin, Remediation (selections)

Borges, Labyrinths (selections)

Calvino, Invisible Cities

Csikszentmihalyi, Flow (selections)

Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play" and "Invention of the Other"

Foucault, Language, Counter-memory, Practice or The Order of Things (selections)

Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write

Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology" and "Building, Dwelling, Thinking"

Jarrett, Drifting on a Read

Latour, We Have Never Been Modern

Lefevre, Invention as a Social Act (selections)

Lyotard, Differend

Muckelbauer, The Future of Invention

Ong, Orality and Literacy

Ovid, Metamorphoses

Plato Phaedrus (selections), Theatetus

Serres, Parasite

Ulmer, Applied Grammatology (selections), Heuretics: The Logic of Invention

Virilio, Open Sky

Vitanza, "Subversive Rhetorics"

Wagner, Invention of Culture (selections)

Handouts & Other Selected Essays

Digital Rhetoric/Multimedia Scholarship

In Orality and Literacy: Technologizations of the Word, Walter Ong tells us, "Once the word is technologized [by writing, print, or computer], there is no effective way to criticize what technology has done with it without the aid of the highest technology available" (86). Thus, to make critical inquiry into the rhetoric(s) accompanying emerging digital literacies, we must use/utilize the highest technologies available, which move us firmly out of text-only considerations and into multimedia productions—"writing" with light rather than lead (or ink[jet]). But there is radically more to consider than merely producing (rhetorical) discourse in multimedia platforms, and it is these other considerations that are coming to shape this emerging area within Rhetoric and Composition studies.

The aim of this course, then, is to familiarize students with these other considerations: ranging from new media theory to broader questions concerning technologies, and from multimedia production to scholarly evaluation and reception. We will examine how changes in technologies alter the ways in which we communicate, the ways in which we enact (digital) rhetorical strategies, and also how these changes impact the very foundations of how we think. The course will revisit the medium/message divide, considering this relationship both historically and inventively (in relation to previous communication technologies as well as to future possibilities).

It will investigate the limits and the potentialities of "digital literacy," and ask students to critically consider the implications of this label for the field. And, perhaps most importantly, the course will require students to produce digital and multimedia scholarship on issues related to digital and multimedia rhetoric(s).

Potential Requirements:

Conference Proposal (10%) – Proposal to present (paper/multimedia/poster) at conference.

Poster Project (10%) – Visual Rhetoric piece (poster/image) making scholarly "comment" on an issue important to the field of Rhetoric & Composition.

Aurality Project (15%) – Create an Audio Production (podcast, remix, mashup, etc.) that makes critical inquiry or offers critical insight into a current issue Rhetoric & Composition.

Digital Video Project (15%) – Create a digital video "short" that creatively engages a current issue in Rhetoric & Composition.

Multimedia Article (50%) – Using a multimedia platform (Sophie2, Flash, Web, etc.), compose a work suitable for submission to a journal, an edited collection, or to a conference.

Potential Texts:

Berger, Ways of Seeing

Bolter & Grusin, selections from Remediation: Understanding New Media

DJ Spooky, Rhythm Science || Havelock, selection from The Muse Learns to Write

Gee, selection from What do Video Games Have to Teach Us About Literacy

Heidegger, selection from The Question Concerning Technology

Kuhn & Vitanza, eds., From Gallery to Webtext (Digital production, Kairos 12.3)

Lanham, selection from The Economics of Attention

Lyotard, selections from Just Gaming and from The Differend

Manovich, Language of New Media

McLuhan, Understanding Media and The Medium is the Massage

Moulthrop, "Interventions" || Ong, selections from Orality and Literacy

Shedroff, Experience Design 1 || Ulmer, Teletheory and selections from Electronic Monuments

Zizek, selections from The Plague of Fantasies