Abstracts

Abstracts

Peter Biello

I've written a paper on what I see in graduate classes and published critical essays as a failure to answer the question: Why is this important? Essays of the unpublished, student-authored variety as well as published essays increasingly isolate the average reader--a trait that academics applaud more and more often. My essay explores the reasons behind this failure and traces it back to a variety of factors, including the economy and general selfishness. It's basically a funny essay that I hope will make people think about why they should or should not choose a career in academia.

Michelle Bliss

Today's Memoir

Memoir is more popular than ever before, accounting for several spots on the New York Times Best Seller List and filling the shelves of popular book stores. Readers are yearning for “real stories” and many writers are eager to provide any sense of truth that they can. But is every story worth telling?

At its best, memoir can share an important, unique story that improves or changes the lives or ideas of its readers by drawing larger connections to other people, places, and situations. It can use personal experience to provide moments of clarity—pieces of reality that fit into a larger context so that readers can find their own meaning within the text. At its worst, however, memoir can take the form of a rant or a diary entry—raw material that although powerful, has not yet been crafted into a meaningful work for a critical audience.

Every story, no matter how interesting or dramatic or horrific, needs to be transformed into a piece of literature that allows readers to converse with the text and draw their own conclusions. Much of contemporary memoir has the story, but the act of storytelling, of providing vivid scenes, character descriptions, and plot within poetic prose, has been forgotten. Although such stories, usually filled with excessive gore or drama, may initially seem provocative and powerful, their luster always fades.

Without a choice, all nonfiction writers are being associated with just one sect: memoirists. This current trend of popular memoir, filled with immature, confessional writing is detrimental to nonfiction—a genre that already suffers in academic circles where many doubt its merits and credibility. I wish to discuss the state of today’s memoir and explore how its popularity affects the genre of nonfiction and its writers.

Jacki Booth

The Art of Teaching: A T.A.’s Journey from the Stage to the Classroom and Back Again

This piece documents my journey as a young T.A. in the English department at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. I trace the steps I have taken in the pursuit of a better understanding of what my goals should be as a composition teacher. After discovering these goals, I have then discussed some of the difficulties that myself and others have experienced while pursuing goals in the classroom space. My journey eventually leads me to the world of Art for an answer to how I can become more comfortable and effective in my classroom space. I discover that my love for Art and English complement each other as I pose the theory that teachers should consider themselves artists. As such, we can use techniques that artists use in order to become more effective at their jobs. In particular, I explore the idea of using the Stanislavski Method actor training techniques to help me gain a more solid foundation in my classroom.

Trisha Capansky

The Declaration of Independence: A Discursive Composite with Revolutionary Effects

As is known by almost every American, the Declaration of Independence (DOI) is considered the most important document in U.S. history and is among the most heavily interpreted and fiercely discussed documents in modern history. Many scholars have been captivated by its political eloquence, but as Stephen Lucas points out, “there are surprisingly few sustained studies of the stylistic artistry of the Declaration.” While Lucas explores the DOI’s power by probing the discourse microscopically” as the level of the sentence, phrase, word, and syllable in convincing a polis that it is justified in its desire to break from its mother country, this presentation will perform an exploratory analysis at the macroscopic level that will contextualize the setting leading up to the Lucas paper. Precisely, it will focus on how the overall language and style of the DOI were results of rhetorical and technical communicative influence. Many scholars have acknowledged the possibility of the DOI being an exercise in 18-century logic, while others consider its language to be persuasive through rhetoric rather than by convincing through logical proof, but little has been done toward crossing the languages of rhetoric and technical writing as a possibility in the creation of its style and formation.

Betsy Cutler

Places and Trends: Rhetorical and Visual Waves in Composition

In my paper, I discuss Topsail Island, North Carolina in a rhetorical and visual manner. Images and interviews compliment the rhetorical analysis of the island—from its history to present time. Starting out with waves of the past, such as the military seizing of the island from 1946-1948, and enduring hurricanes such as Bertha and Fran in 1996, the island and its citizens make an excellent example of continuous resilience and constant molding—characteristics that composition students must be aware of in respect to their writing. Through Topsail Island’s rhetorical and visual waves, I show how text and images come together, forming an atmosphere that provides an energetic and interactive way for instructors to engage students in composition writing.

William Dever

Restoring the Universal: Roth’s use of Archetypes in his Zuckerman Trilogy

This paper seeks to illustrate one possible shift in interpretive literary measures by examining the works of one specific contemporary author. Phillip Roth has been referred to by some as the greatest living American writer. In his “Zuckerman Trilogy”: American Pastoral, I married a Communist, and The Human Stain, the semi-fictitious world of (author) Nathan Zuckerman is reflected in his story telling of the people he has known in his (fictitious) life. Roth’s Zuckerman presents an ambiguous commentary on both the human condition and cultural values that exist for him, and the characters he writes about. Through interpretation of the primary characters via Zuckerman’s eyes, an argument can be put forth that these are manifestation of classic literary archetypes, generating enough gravitas to facilitate the reader with an ability to identify with the primal aspects of the human condition, as well as render meaning that defies the relativity of the post-structuralism landscape. In essence, through these figures, as well as his input through literary devices in the novels, Roth’s message of universal meaning as an obtainable condition (in this case through the eyes of an aging writer) can be transposed onto the field of literary theory as well, which can be said with no uncertainty to be moving beyond deconstruction in the post-911 academic world as well as society.

In brief, Roth recreates some aspects of the “universal” in order to transcend a relative outlook on human and cultural ontology. This paper seeks to examine the possible shifting trends in literary interpretation that includes the post-structuralism tools, but shows that true meaning can exist in hierarchical forms that agree with Habermas' assessment of deconstruction as being to extreme and relativistic.

Brian Gogan

Terminological Trends: Rhythms of ‘Reciprocity’ and the Changing Tide of Composition Studies

The word ‘reciprocity’ has a rhythm that moves with the Composition Studies discipline. As the discipline focuses on new perspectives, innovative ideas, or the latest trends, the word ‘reciprocity’ assumes new meanings. According to Cynthia Haynes, the notion of ‘reciprocity,’ as it relates to Composition Studies, is “a sustained and durable notion of how momentum cradles us as we rock back and forth between event and language, beneath the rhythm of the moon and the tidal flow of writing—always, and already a reciprocity in which we participate with some Other rhythm not of our making” (“In Visible Texts” 67). For Haynes, ‘reciprocity’ signifies a regular, somewhat predictable movement; one in which the writer participates with an Other. However, Haynes’s words in 2007 appear to contradict Charles I. Schuster’s 1988 view that ‘reciprocity’ constitutes an “essential rhetorical glue” (“Review,” CCC 39.1: 91). For Schuster, the word ‘reciprocity’ functions as an adhesive that prevents movement by affixing reader, writer, and text. Disparate uses of the word ‘reciprocity’ by Compositionists, like Schuster and Haynes, occur frequently throughout the history of the Composition Studies discipline. This paper traces a few of the most disparate significations and asks: What are the different rhythms of ‘reciprocity’ in our discipline? When do these rhythms appear? When do these rhythms resurface? And, most importantly, how do the different rhythms of ‘reciprocity’ impact our scholarly discourse and our scholarly practice?

Karlie Herndon

Character Come to Life: The Kafkaesque and Yukio Mishima as an Incarnation of Franz Kafka’s Works

There has been a recent trend in pop culture, deeming anything that is strange, horrifying, or just plain weird as the “kafkaesque.” However, there are certain elements of Kafka’s writing that are not discernable in every horror movie or any “weird” book. Yukio Mishima, writing without having had any direct influence from Kafka’s work, embodies many of these characteristics in his writing, while also giving his characters the options that Kafka never allowed his own characters. In this way, Mishima acts as a sort of kafkaesque character incarnate, writing as one who sees all of these characteristics, but also giving his characters the things he most wants in his own life. Mishima’s writing is the perfect example of what Kafka’s characters would have written, had they been writers: the lack of a faceless authority, the fulfillment of sexual desires, the inclusion of tiny patches of color, and the ability to commit suicide are all privileges a kafkaesque character would have longed for, and subsequently found an outlet for in his or her writing. By examining these characteristics in both Kafka and what is truly an embodiment of the kafkaesque, the word kafkaesque will no longer be a catch-all for anything and everything strange.

Melinda Hollis

The Possibility of a Paradigm Shift: Charting Changes and Formations of New Approaches to U.S. Southern Literature

My presentation will address the way in which the boundaries that contained and marginalized one homogeneous set of paradigms for U.S. Southern literature have recently begun to shift, to melt, and perhaps even to fade, at least in the realms of some publications and university classrooms. The demarcation of literature produced in the Northeastern region of the United States as “American Literature”—which is defined as an exclusive category in spite of the existence of Canadian literature and literature from Central and South America, not to mention the other regions of the United States—parallels divisions that take place between Northern and Southern U.S. America as regions with “distinct” or categorically exclusive literature as well. I will discuss the interplay of “Southern” paradigms in several “non-Southern” texts, including Hugh MacLennan’s Two Solitudes (a Canadian novel) and William Dean Howells’ The Rise of Silas Lapham. My reading of these texts will serve to solidify the recent suggestions for a “new wave” of regional demarcation.

Sean Kelly

The Rise of Richard Wright's Black Superhero

While the first superhero did not appear until Jerry Siegel and Joel Schuster published “The Reign of the Superman” in 1932, black superheroes did not enter the frames of comic books until the 1960s. The major contributing factor for this discrepancy was the dominant cultural trend of reserving the heroic role in literary forms for white men. Although his characters do not wear elaborate costumes or bound over buildings in a single leap, Richard Wright breaks the color barrier through his super-heroic characters in Native Son and Rite of Passage. In doing so, he curbs the discriminatory trend up until the 1940's and moves forward with figures that prove more heroic (a super-heroic act in itself) than their white predecessors, which includes Siegel and Stackolee and the Flying Africans, as well as from his experience growing up in the rural South and surviving as an adult in northern urban settings to develop his superheroes. The exploration of the first black superhero creates much needed recognition of positive black images in Wright’s work and provides an opportunity to further investigate black superheroes before the 1960s. Additionally, the study examines how Wright’s formation of the black superhero lays the groundwork for the characters that arise in comics well after his death.

Daniel Lawson

Terminological Trends: Use of the Term “Identity” in Composition Studies

When William Coles made a distinction between the “literary self…construable from the way words fall on a page” from the “other self, the identity of a student” (12), he conflates the literary self with voice in the first construct, and in the second, self with identity. This was not unusual, considering the influence of expressivism in composition studies at this time. This is contrasted by James Berlin when he argues that there is “no universal, eternal, and authentic self that beneath all appearances is at one with all other selves” (489). Despite this, in Berlin’s estimation we still have a means of a acquiring a “sense” of identity.

These are just two examples of the often contradictory use of the term “Identity” in composition studies. The meaning of the term is both intended and understood differently depending upon prevalent trends in the discipline.

In this session, I will discuss how the term “Identity” has evolved in composition studies: how it was once seen as synonymous with terms such as “self” or “voice,” and has been complicated as poststructural and postmodern thought has influenced the discipline. This examination is primarily hermeneutical—that is, it seeks to examine both the explicit and implicit arguments posited in the uses of the term, the implications of those arguments, and how these arguments are reflective of the discipline’s current turn toward civic discourse and engagement, as well as the problematic nature of the academy in defining and legitimating identities.

Berlin, James. “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Classroom.” Teaching Composition: Background Readings.

Johnson, T.R., and Morahan, Shirley, eds. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002. 53-72.

Coles Jr., William E. The Plural I: The Teaching of Writing. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1978.

Chad Martin

All Jesters’ Folly

This fictional short story details a critical period of the struggling Smith family. John Smith, the time-worn wise soldier and father questions his philosophies of how to live unhindered by the tactics of powerful, money-obsessed forces attempting to run the common citizen’s life. He refuses to blindly follow the trends that most people adhere to, and which perpetuate the focus of American society on greed. However, cutting against the grain has its penalties, and his maturing son soon sees him as a crazed extremist who doesn’t want what is best for his family. Having experienced a traumatizing divorce, John struggles to find common ground with his son, and mend the rift between both him and his ex-wife before his commitment to beating “the system” makes him a broken casualty of it.

Karl McKimpson

Wise Wives

Katherina’s speech on the obedience of wives in 5.2 of The Taming of the Shrew has long caused confusion among scholars because of its problematic message of submission from a figure repeatedly characterized for her resistance to submission. Various speculations up to this point have seen Kate’s swift about-turn as evidence of the plays farcical nature; a brutal, physical, abuse by Petruchio, an ironic epilogue to the taming action, and the playful irregularities of game between Petruchio and Kate. In understanding this troublesome scene, I believe a historical analogue can be found in the similar actions of Katherine Parr before her husband Henry VIII. Examining Parr’s situation reveals that perhaps what we are seeing in Kate is not only wisdom, but a shrewd political awareness on the part of Shakespeare as a public playwright.

Justine Mikaloff

For Her Majesty’s Worship: Paralleled Love Triangles in Malory’s “Tale of Sir Tristram”

Eugene Vinaver asserts that Malory’s Le Morte Darthur is not one large work, as other scholars contend. It is instead intended to be read as a series of unconnected tales that simply happen to be a part of the Arthurian legend cycle: “Malory’s romances are as separate as the various novels of a modern author; that the romances may be taken in any or no particular order; and that they have no cumulative effect” (qtd. in Brewer, 41). However, Malory’s narrative is structured in such a way that the so-called fragments blend into one another, hinting that the Morte is not a series of fragments but a complexly interwoven whole. In particular, Malory gives the female characters in his magnum opus ample room to manipulate circumstances – this is especially true of Queen Guinevere, who enjoys a powerful central role, making her a key to understanding the text itself.

In “The Tale of Sir Tristram,” Malory draws his narrative loop close, as the characters of Guinevere and Isode parallel one another through their illicit affairs with Launcelot and Tristram. Isode’s relationship with Tristram even goes so far as to provide a foreshadowing of Guinevere’s role in the end of Camelot. The two queens, both enjoying a great deal of power over their lovers, provide alternate versions of the same story. When Launcelot stumbles into relations with Elayne of Ascolat, Guinevere ultimately ignores her own advice to Isode – to remember that her lover will return to her with more affection than before. Since “The Tale of Sir Tristram” presents the beginnings of Guinevere’s irrational jealousy, I propose that understanding Queen Guinevere’s function in this section of Malory’s narrative is essential to understanding the destruction of Camelot.

Daniel Parsons

In Philosophy, it is a widely accepted notion that Ludwig Wittgenstein’s contribution borders on epoch making. Wittgenstein’s ideas have impacted Literary Theory, but the influence is largely a peripheral one, wherein Wittgenstein’s ideas are used to comment upon and develop a variety of literary trends (including structuralism, post-structuralism, queer-theory, and cultural studies). It is among poets that Wittgenstein’s influence is most blatant. Wittgensteinian implication for poetry began with the publication of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in 1921. Literary scholars initially resisted what was set forth in the Tractatus. Wittgenstein’s ideas first encountered this resistance among poets and literary scholars who balked at his notion that the world reduced certain atomic facts that could be pictured in language, and that outside of these facts was mere speculation that cannot be “said.” Poets were quick to realize that this imperative, if followed, would leave poetry mute, since they often deal in the liminal spaces that seem to extend beyond the limits of language and the world. F.R. Leavis notoriously pointed out Wittgenstein’s lack of literary training, while William Empson wrote in his poem “This Last Pain” that Wittgenstein “had not dreamt” of poetry’s potential for mystical apperception. During the Late Modern period, Wittgenstein is referenced by name in several poems, and encounters similar resistance. Two particular examples that illustrate this trend are Randall Jarrell’s “Conversations with the Devil”, and poem “201” of John Berryman’s The Dream Songs. These early references to Wittgenstein express a resistance to his philosophical program that focuses on the notion that the world divides into sets of facts, and nothing more relevant can be said than linguistic expressions of these “cases.”

By examining the initial reception of Wittgenstein’s work, it helps contextualize the poetic events that have added impetus the various critical “waves” of Wittgensteinian influence. Wittgensteinian poetics surged in the 1980s (especially among L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets). Contemporary poets often use Wittgenstein via mimetic re-presentation of the ostensible aesthetic qualities of his philosophical work. I will conclude this paper with a brief discussion of these later aesthetics, with reference to a poem entitled “Remarks on Color” by C. D. Wright, and a poem entitled “Autobiography” by Michael Palmer. By doing so I can show how later poets have moved from an aesthetics of resistance to an aesthetics of use that conceives of the poem as a language-game that sets about to clarify or extend certain limits of language. This will help chart, in terms of the two significant horizons or reception, the various amplitudes of the Wittgensteinian trend.

Jessica L. Puzzo

Contradictions, Madness, and Denial: Rationalizing Madness in Poe's "The Black Cat"

This paper investigates the nameless narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “The Black Cat,” as a delusional man suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. By examining his delusions of persecution and disorganized thinking as a direct characteristic of his mental disorder, this paper will explain the narrator’s blatant contradictions, confusion, and denial through the diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. Assessment of the narrator’s paranoid schizophrenia will also support the narrator’s unmistakable unreliability, unravel the mystery of his bizarre hatred for his once beloved cat, and explain the common question of his motive for the murder of his wife.

Jessica L. Puzzo and David Hall Bowman

Roads Converging: Approaching Differences in Subject Tutoring and Writing Centers

The University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW), like many other institutions, has a learning center which provides students with academic assistance in the form of tutoring. At UNCW, this learning center is officially known as the University Learning Center (ULC) and is divided into Writing, Learning, and Math Services. While the goals of these are similar, the approaches and techniques taken differ. This paper will critically explore the tutoring which occurs through the Writing Services along side the tutoring of the Learning Services at UNCW, in order to assess ways in which each tutoring center may positively influence the other, both specifically for UNCW, and more extensively for tutoring centers in general.

Amy Reed

Terminological Trends: The Concept of “Tacit Knowledge” in Composition Studies

Composition Studies’ use of the term “tacit knowledge” comes from scientist turned philosopher Michael Polanyi’s work. Polanyi’s definition of tacit knowledge relies on a somewhat radical definition of knowledge. He denies that “knowing” means being able to specify that which you know (133). Instead, knowledge may be “unspecifiable” (133). In other words, we can know more than we can tell. Polanyi differentiates between tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge. He writes, “While tacit knowledge can be possessed by itself, explicit knowledge must rely on being tacitly understood and applied. Hence all knowledge is either tacit or rooted in tacit knowledge. A wholly explicit knowledge is unthinkable” (144).

In this presentation, I will explore the uptake of the term “tacit knowledge” into Composition Studies. I argue that the term usually goes undefined in the literature and is rarely used as Polanyi intended it. For example, there are multiple researchers in Composition Studies who intend to study tacit knowledge about writing, assuming that they can make this knowledge explicit and help students to become better writers. I argue that this trend to make the implicit explicit is a misinterpretation of Polanyi’s conception of tacit knowledge. Polanyi argued tacit knowledge, by definition, was that which could not be made explicit. Thus, I will focus on correcting this misinterpretation and determining where the conversation about tacit knowledge can be moved forward in the field.

Grete M. Scott

Terminological Trends: Tracing the Term Reflection through Twenty Years of Composition Studies Scholarship

This paper explores the increasing popularity and changing nature of the term reflection in composition studies over the last twenty years.

Sharon Pianko’s 1979 “Reflection: A Critical Component of the Composing Process” was one of the first pieces in College Composition and Communication devoted to the term reflection. In 2001, Pat Belanoff was already asking why reflection was such a “hot topic.” My paper traces the term reflection through Donald Schön’s attempts to put forth a “new epistemology of practice ,” the response from education scholars like Donald Mayfield, and finally, in the mid-1990s, replies from composition scholars such as George Hillocks, Louise Wetherbee Phelps, Kathleen Blake Yancey, and Robert Yagelski. The culmination, though certainly not the end, of these initial thoughts was the 1997 NCTE conference dedicated to to the concept reflection.

“One of the consequences of a concept’s popularity,” writes Stephen Brookfield, “is an increased malleability in its meaning .” This is certainly true for reflection. In my paper, I trace various definitions of the word reflection with particular attention to how the concept has changed over the years, including discussions of reflection as a solitary activity, a communal endeavor, a teaching tool, a teacher-training tool, and an assessment device. I also consider what composition scholars have said about why we reflect, how we reflect, and what happens when we reflect. Finally, I offer two ideas for further research.

Educating The Reflective Practitioner, xi

Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher, 7

Jeremy Smyczek

That Dog Won’t Hunt: Voyage of the Beagle and Darwin’s Rhetoric of Renunciation

In his introductory note to the 1909 Harvard Classics edition of Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, editor Charles Eliot describes the young naturalist’s travelogue as “a picture of disinterested zeal” in the quest for scientific discovery. He uses “disinterested” in the same sense that Darwin repeatedly uses it himself, increasingly obscure in the modern vernacular: impartial, unbiased, and objective. But a careful reading of Darwin’s depiction reveals a perhaps unconscious attempt by the author—embodied in the putting aside of his “worldly things” in the form of guns and hunting—to project an image of impartiality very much at odds with the historical Darwin himself. In doing so, Darwin lends his chapter to the old (and still extant) story of the scientist as a man divorced from petty narcissisms and wholly absorbed in the study of nature—essentially, a being who is not quite human.

This essay, following the lead of Jung, Joseph Campbell, and Northrop Frye, examines Darwin’s narrative from the perspective of archetypal criticism. It argues that Darwin’s heroic mythicization of his journey, as imagined in Voyage of the Beagle and then re-imagined in his Autobiography, employs the archetype that I shall call the renunciant—the hero who is transformed through asceticism. I further argue that rhetorical elements of the scientist-renunciant which Darwin introduces remain in common currency in the popular scientific literature today, marking Voyage as a trend-setting piece of scientific prose.

Tom Souders

“Her Head Between his Hands”: Sexist Possession in Swann in Love and “The Dead”

Often in literature, the male characters who exhibit the most sexist behavior are the most insecure in their masculine identities. When something happens to subvert a sexist character’s masculinity, a course of events leading to that character’s ultimate breakdown is often set. It is no exception with Gabriel in James Joyce’s “The Dead” and Swann in Marcel Proust’s Swann in Love. Both of these characters are blatant sexists and both attempt to assert control and mastery over their female counterparts. This desire to possess another human being is what leads to the total unraveling of both male characters. In this paper, I examine the way that Gabriel and Swann bring about their own demise, illuminating similarities and subtle differences in their paths that have heretofore gone unexamined in a single study. In doing so, I hope to raise questions about depictions of sexism in modern texts and how to study male characters in general.

Joseph Telegen

Adventures in Not Reading Heart of Darkness

English graduate student Joseph Telegen will critique current trends in literary academia in a deeply personal essay. Specifically discussed will be his efforts to embrace Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in the academy following Chinua Achebe’s critical transformation of the work, entitled “Images of Africa.” Telegen’s narrative will travel backward through time to explain the circumstances that landed him in graduate school, from his desire to please his rigid father to his half-hearted stabs at pithy remarks, designed to land him in a prestigious doctoral program. In between he will encounter two influential teachers, one who inspires him to become a literary academic and one who almost causes him to quit.

The story will show Telegen’s remorse at his embrace of the “black and white” mentality present in academic programs supposedly opposed to such thinking (he calls this “an epic irony”). Through this attempt at self-discovery, it is hoped that a new direction for English graduate programs can also be uncovered, that of a rededication to (as Telegen calls it) “the damn book itself.”

Joseph Telegen

Riding Shotgun: How Teaching my Imaginary Child to Drive Yielded New Insights on Composition Processes

Since Donald Murray’s groundbreaking essay entitled “Teach Writing as a Process, Not Product”, the focus of composition programs has shifted to answering Murray’s call. English graduate student Joseph Telegen hopes to join the discussion of how best to achieve this end in his essay. He will illustrate how our understanding of each of the writing processes (the plural is intentional) can be enhanced by drawing a comparison to the oddities of driver’s education.

A discussion of each of the four processes (Telegen expands Murray’s three-part plan of prewriting, writing, and rewriting into four parts by adding the “non-scholastic” preparatory steps that a student writer must take before beginning) follows, in which Telegen draws analogies between composition and his own experiences as a student driver.

Employing composition theorists James Berlin, Linda Brodkey, Peter Elbow, and Nancy Sommers along with Murray and never abandoning his own experiences, Telegen will argue that “composition teachers stand to be most effective if their students believe that their teachers are riding shotgun…but pulling for the student to be able to find their own voices and ultimately take the car out solo.”

John Paul Walter

Old Practices and New Literacies: Composing with Words and Images

In Embodied Literacies: Imageword and a Poetics of Teaching, Kristie Fleckenstein argues that we need a conception of literacy that encompasses both image and word together, not as binary pair but as a “double dialectic,” as a “double vision of literacy as image and word” (4). While Fleckenstein’s argument for a new conception of literacy is rooted in the visual turn of composition studies, rhetorical studies, and cultural studies, it also harkens back to the much older tradition of medieval monastic rhetoric and the Ciceronian art of memory. In monastic rhetoric, Mary Carruthers argues, words and images worked together to form one unified cognitive “picture” which both creates and represents meaning. These cognitive images, according to Carruthers, are both the process and the product of monastic rhetoric, and their purpose was to function as a machine for thought, as a machina memorialis.

While I do not wish to suggest that we should return to the practice of monastic rhetoric, I do believe that it, as a fully developed compositional craft, has much to offer us as a model for reimagining literacy as double dialectic of word and image. To this end, in this presentation I will explore how these “old practices” can help us develop “new literacies” for the digital age.

Aimee Wilson

The Fall of Mr. Duffy: Paradise Lost and “A Painful Case”

This conference asks the question, “what is the impetus for change and what are the forces that act to resist that change?” James Joyce’s “A Painful Case” depicts a man who stares change in the face and, for better or worse, resists its lure. Mr. Duffy is presented with a choice: maintain an isolated, mechanized life, or follow passion into a lifestyle that is more connected, spontaneous and sensuous. The path he ultimately chooses – isolation and mechanization – makes him a character that bears comparison with John Milton’s Biblical Adam from Paradise Lost. In effect, James Duffy experiences a reverse fall from grace. In Milton’s version, Adam and Eve’s fall brings them into lustful, carnal desire, whereas the fall of Duffy brings him away from it. The Biblical connections continue; the train Duffy watches at the end of the story is easily read as phallic, yet this symbol can also be read as the snake in the Garden of Eden. Furthermore, both Adam and Duffy are brought to their respective crossroads by a woman, and it is the woman’s sexuality that compels a decision. This essay explores these decisions between passion and religion, and the forces that bring about Adam’s change and Mr. Duffy’s resistance to it.

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