Questioning Collection
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Transcript of Questioning Collection
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7/29/2019 Questioning Collection
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Interrogating the Ethics of Composition as Collection
in the First-Year Writing Classroom
Questioning
Collection
Will Kurlinkus
The Ohio State University
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The collection of pack ratswithout seriality, without
relation to one another or to the context of acquisition
Susan Stewart
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Rapid growth in knowledge not only
makes products obsolete, but also
means that human capital depreciates
quickly. Constantly subject to
depreciation, workers must expect to
continually retool their skills or riskhaving nothing of value to market to
employers.When living post-
industrial lives people constantly
move along a continuum between
skilled and unskilled. The position is
never stable.Tony Scott, Writing Work,
Technology, and Pedagogy in the
Era of Late Capitalism
Late Capitalist Collection Exigencies
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2010 Conference on College Composition
and Communication Call for Proposals
Whetherits taking the old and making it fresh and new or
taking the current and giving it a different spin, to remix a thing
is to try and make it better. In our 61st year, after decades of
innovative teaching and cutting-edge scholarship, the CCCC
remix provides us with a way to revisit, rethink, revise, and
renew our vision for the future of our field. The remix is not
only about knowing what works but also being forward thinking
enough to imagine new combinations and collaborations.
Keeping the elements of the remix in mind, I encourage you to
look closely at our field and figure out the spaces where we
can make new connections, the spaces where we can flip
something new. (CCCC)
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Benjamin
s Flaneur
Levi-
Strausss
Bricoleur
Romantic
Collection
Romantic
Authorship
Creative
Commons
Cultural
Appropriation
Models of Composition as Collection
Collection
Gathering of
Souvenirs
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Invention as Wonder
A collection of interesting, powerfulstatements.Sound-bite apercus
that sound good by themselves but
can also become workable bits in a
larger structure.A compelling
genre with which to re-arrange
textual materialsboth original andappropriatedin order to have
those materials speak the students
own voice and concerns Comp
Theorist Geoffrey Sirc
Materials are unoriginal, then,chosen on the basis of exoticism
and strong interest (Sirc).
Taking an art stance on the
everyday (Sirc).
Duchamps The Bride Stripped Bare by her
Bachelors, Even
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Questioning Wonder
WalterBenjamins Flaneur: the privileged
wanderer of the 19th Century Paris
arcades. This elite observer has the time
to roam the city, reveling in commodity
culture and the innocent lives of the crowdwhile always retaining a critical distance
from it:
He becomes deeply involved with them,
only to relegate them to oblivion with a
single glance of contempt. There issomething compelling about the
ambivalence where he cautiously admits
to it (Benjamin).
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One dilettante, a prince of his profession
Thinks Black Belt is a mine of finest ore,
Pure gold and bronze and copper to explore,
Desires, enamored of his own observation,To write it up, a nice romantic story,
Of leopards loitering along the stereo,
And jungle maidens, sensuous and sweet,
Crowning the Black belt in their sable glory.From Claude McKays Black Belt Slummers
Collection as Slumming?
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TheGatheringofSouvenirs
The whole dissolves into the parts.
Metonymic
Diachronic
The souvenir involves displacement of
attention to the past. The souvenir isnot simply an object appearing out of
context, an object from the past
incongruously surviving in the present;;
rather, its function is to envelop the
present within the past.
Two types of souvenir:1. Souvenirs of external sights
2. Souvenirs of individual experience
From Susan Stewarts On Longing
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TheCollection
The collection seeks a form of
self-enclosure which is possible
because of its ahistoricism.
Asynchronous
Metaphorical
The collection replaces historywith classification.
Once the object is completely
severed from its origin, it is
possible to generate a new
series, to start again within a
context that is framed by the
selectivity of the collector.
The ultimate term in the series
that marks the collection is the
self, the articulation of the
collectors own identity.
From Susan Stewarts On Longing
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We must teach the maintenance of
the original contextcurrationrather than appropriation.
We must teach our students to
interrogate what drove them to
collect what they didwhat drives
their wonderand how that wonderreframes the objects they collect.
If identity politics is an attempt to
thematize the other in terms of its
similarities to the self, I am
interested here in constructing anethical alterity politics that considers
identity as beholden and responsive
first and foremost to the other
Jeffrey Nealon
LiteraciesofWonder
Screenshot from the Currators Code
a site that is a good first
step towards practices and attitudes of digitalattribution.
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QuestioningWonder
Thinking about composition as collection
should also always involve thinking about thelists of interests and identifications that propel
our students to collect certain
objects/data/experiences and not others.
Collectors like the Grimms, who ostensibly
collected folk culture as a rebellion againsthigh art and the Enlightenment, didnt consider
every piece of culture or person interesting;
the collection had to contain only the certain
type of pure representation the collectors
sought. Thus, The people are not the mob of
the streets, who never sing or compose but
shriek and mutilate. The people, the folk,
were not then, the non-exotic lower classes of
the city because they didnt match the
collectors ideal search exigence.
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The Freedom of the Commons
Lawrence LessigsFree Cultures:Cultures that leave a great deal open
for others to build upon.
If it is truly impossible to escape the
influence of the mass media, we should
be able to respond to it in anyproductive (and responsible) way we
see fit, shifting our relationship from a
passive reception model to one where
we produce.
The bricoleurdoesnt collect his
repertoire in order to merely solve one
task (like the completion of a final
paper); he learns to use each element
of the repertoire adaptively for multiple
tasks. This type of adaptable repertoire
is invaluable, I think, to teach our
students.
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Questioning the Commons
What pieces of culture are up forgrabs in a model of composition that
touts the cultural commons? And
whom are we trying to help by
grabbing them?
Remix Culture sometimes creates a
false share or be greedy dichotomy
and a command to share.
We like to take new examples but not
new theory and new ways of
readingdiscovering interesting
content in the name of our fieldsaway from the literacies that were
traditionally used to engage that
content.
We need new models of citation and
attribution because in our current
system representing collective
authorshi is ver ver ver hard.
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Questioning the Commons
Not everyone has equalaccess to the commons:
Individual creators are
privileged even as they build
on knowledge, act from the
past, and worked frombiased (not neutral)
technologies. Should we
perpetuate the logic that
race, gender, and class
arent part of the digital
commons?
Kimberly Christen
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Conclusions
Collection is a social and politicalact; there are no mere disembodiedfacts, but choices.JohndanJohnson-Eilola.
Which engines drive our wonder?
What is the difference betweencollecting,curating, andappropriating?
What role should both pluralisticandsingularmodels of authorship playin our classrooms?
What role does our writing play in aknowledge but also commodityeconomy and how are we helping orharming our subjects?