As a writer and reader with varied interests in philosophy, sustainability, climate change, popular culture, and ethics, coming to study rhetoric and composition sounds like a natural move. Through my studies in this program, I’ve come to develop and refine my ability to think, read, and write critically towards higher degrees of fluidity and competence. As a beginner having only relatively written little, the voice I occupy in work from my earlier classes is aspirational—a “trying on” of academic discourse—as David Bartholomae would put it. Toward completion of my degree, I feel capable, my writing faculties well in hand. I look forward to the opportunity to build upon the work I’ve done thus far, that I might be able to develop some of these ideas into something actionable and useful for others.
As my understandings of rhetoric, composition studies, and literacy have evolved, I’ve developed my own understandings of what it means to think critically and of what rhetoric entails.
Rhetoric, in contrast its public concepts as mere empty persuasion, takes on the meaning of the intentional engagement and employment of language; rhetoric(s) include the modes and mediums by which one communicates ideas. In addition to medium and mode, a consideration of rhetoric, then, also embodies an awareness of and engagement with the entire rhetorical situation including ethos, logos, pathos, kairos, biases, and audience. Rhetorics are, therefore, critical interpretive lenses to be used to establish a writer’s authority, tone, voice, identity, and positionality in the light of any given issue, cause, or conversation. Critical thinking refers to a holistic approach of inquiry and understanding, based on interrogation, research, analysis, close reading, discussion, and interpretation of a text or the issues explored within the text—text being broadly defined as a piece of communication.
In terms of the historical underpinnings of rhetoric and power, in English 3050: The History of Rhetoric and Technology with Dr. Beth Burmester, I learned how the 15th century text the Malleus Maleficarum functioned as a form of propaganda created by men to persecute women. That text created inescapable logical traps that discriminated against women, guaranteeing their punishment. This line of patriarchal discourse has moved forward to the current moment in my study of feminist rhetoric in digital spaces and backward to the masculine forms of discourse established by the Greeks. In Liz Lane’s “Feminist Rhetoric in the Digital Sphere: Digital Interventions & the Subversion of Gendered Cultural Scripts,” Lane points out the patriarchal heritage of rhetoric, going back to the time of Plato and Aristotle, where the sociopolitical climate was exclusive to males. In those times, women had no voice and faced male subjugation. In spite of the largely masculine history of rhetoric, the work of Lane and other women rhetors are reclaiming and remediating rhetoric in meaningful ways that open channels for the voices of the oppressed or otherwise silenced populations, contemporarily in digital spaces. In the same introduction class, Neal Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death functioned as a rhetorical appeal to consider what kinds of media compete for my conscious attention put me on the path towards questioning my own relationship with technology, an exploration which would carry over into subsequent classes.
During Fall 2014 in English 3090: Expository Writing: Writing about Material Culture with Dr. Robin Wharton, I was introduced to material culture studies and scholars Walter Benjamin and Russell Belk, theorists whose work does not address the topic of rhetoric head-on, but whose ideas have informed how I approach critical thinking and rhetoric as a lens. While Belk’s work concerns the meanings of possession and materialism and Benjamin’s work dealt with philosophy and culture, these writers led me to consider the rhetorical situation of objects and the complex relationship between humans and objects. My final essay from that course represents critical thinking in the form of an expanded awareness of the rhetorical situation and the ability to bring together divergent forms of research to form the body of a piece of scholarship. My project on the iPhone considers the sociopolitical implications of smartphone manufacturing and the psychological effects of technology use. I drew on investigative journalism, the popular play Ruined, and the works of Benjamin and Belk to explore critical issues that a consideration of the iPhone raises.
In considering rhetorical situation and looking at terminology, I’ve applied and demonstrated critical thinking skills. Much of the work I’ve undertaken in studying rhetoric has been to endeavor to examine words—their meanings, uses, implications, and the structures they support. In English 3140: Editing for Publication with Donald Gammill, I rewrote an essay originally from my 2011 Introduction to Ethics course at Georgia Perimeter. The initial essay was an attempt to apply a Marxist critique of commodity and consumption in context. The final product was a reconsideration of that concept in the light of becoming a rhetorician, with consideration to audience, purpose, and context. “The entire rhetorical situation of words like sustainable and organic opens a window of inquiry into the larger issues at hand of consumption, climate, and of industry and capitalism.” Excerpted here, this line is dealing with how ideological capitalism coopts language, individual words as subjects in an act of interpellation.
My study of critical theory in English 3090: Expository Writing with Dr. Wharton and English 3100: Composition Studies with Dr. Harker has added depth to my understanding of how composition is informed by divergent backgrounds and critical lenses. Gaining a better understanding of some of these theorists, namely Althusser, Marx, Clifford, and Benjamin has enriched my approach to analysis. Understanding how philosophy and theory come to bear for the teaching of writing is something I’m still endeavoring to understand. Personally, I’m very interested in how the idea of mindfulness somehow underlies a consideration of critical thinking and composition. In 3100, I researched composition and contemplative studies, the application of mindful techniques and a holistic approach to education for my final project. Currently, I’m researching and writing essays that will reframe essays in composition pedagogy and critical tutoring essays as artifacts of contemplative studies and how we might benefit from such classification by specifically targeting the contemplative moves that at play in each piece of scholarship. Namely, I will examine how contemplative considerations of essays concerning expressive discourse, gender identity, race, and ability imply a use of mindful awareness in their pedagogical approaches.
Over the course of taking English 3100: Composition Studies and English 8175: Literacy: Past, Present, and Future with Dr. Harker, my personal relationship to literacy began to take shape and evolve from a simple binary: literacy is actually a much more complicated and nuanced idea. For my final project in the graduate level seminar, I wrote a paper called “Literacy Narratives of the Incarcerated: Critical Challenges to the Literacy Myth.” In this paper, I looked at some of the systemic political and socioeconomic underpinnings of the justice system and also examined how literacy narratives as critical literacy could function to destabilize Harvey J. Graff’s “literacy myth” apparatus. While the paper didn’t look at the social justice function of literacy, wherein the incarcerated actually employ literacy practices in pragmatic ways to challenge their imprisonment or its conditions, the paper sought to situate literacy on more of a personal and existential level, arguing that literacy has a kind of internal, empowering effect on a person’s identity and daily experience of life, contributing to an understanding of how society and ideologies mediate the individual experience. Another key figure in Literacy Studies that I find particularly interesting and useful to my understanding of the field is Deborah Brandt—specifically, her work concerning literacy sponsors is pertinent to my research and writing about literacy in prisons. The school-to-prison pipeline is one of the most problematic concepts when considering literacy sponsorship. Prisons act as literacy sponsors and the way literacy is discussed in governmental prison literature situates the prison as a sponsor of the skills-based literacy concept. My understanding of literacy has deveoloped beyond the skills metaphor and aligns with the notions of Ira Shor:
“[L]iteracy is understood as social action through language use that develops us as agents inside a larger culture, while critical literacy is understood as ‘learning to read and write as part of the process of becoming conscious of one’s experience as historically constructed within specific power relations(Anderson and Irvine, 82)’” (Shor 2).
I stand by Shor’s amalgam of definitions that I used in that paper. I see that literacy, rather than as only skill or binary, does also function as a catalyst of agency. Also considering the dominant binary of literate/illiterate, the works of David Barton, Graff, and Mike Rose have helped me gain insight into the problematic stigma that such a binary produces and sustains. Barton’s insinuation that literacy is a complex, ecological system immediately complicates that binary. Rose’s book, The Mind at Work, Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker, goes to great lengths to elucidate the integrity and intelligence of working-class Americans whose educational experiences have been limited. While society’s dominant opinion of such “blue-collar” workers might view them as having low levels of literacy or, in some cases, as illiterate, Rose paints a portrait of these people as highly intelligent and nuanced in their skills. Rose, like Scribner and Cole before him, complicates the popular conception of literacy as a binary idea that links the acquisition of alphabetic literacy and level of intelligence synonymously.
In terms of future plans, graduate school is on my horizons. I feel that my experiences as an undergraduate studying rhetoric and composition have given me a strong foundation for conducting the kind of scholarship that completing an advanced degree requires. Because I find myself confronted with more questions than solutions, I do not see the end of this program as the end of my inquiry into the critical social, economic, and political issues that have come to light in my reading, writing, and research.
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