Old friends (like people I’ve known for 15 or 20 years) are visiting me this weekend, so blogging — while I’ll attempt to keep it daily — may be sparse. I’m helping one of them to overhaul the old version and set up the new version of his Hogmalion venture, so check it out in a couple days, once he’s got it like he wants it: fun stuff.
Anyway: so this’ll be a slim entry; something I’ll try to bang out before starting the coals on the grill. (I do have something in mind for tomorrow’s Friday Non-Dissertational that I’ll see if I can get together in time.) I had terrifically helpful meetings with Charlie and Donna this week, both of whom suggested that I was well on my way towards cooking this mess down into a prospectus, based on the Another Summary stuff.
Charlie helped me reach a new perspective on framing the project of the dissertation. I might ask: is the discourse around class more hidden in the sub-discipline of computers and composition than it is in composition in general? If I can demonstrate that it is, can I then argue that technology is the cause of such a circumstance? Can I establish the discourse around technology as one believable cause for the increased occlusion of class in computers and composition? My gut instinct here is that Andrew Feenberg and some of the recent work of Italian autonomist Marxists (following Negri) may help me do some sophisticated work in attempting to answer the second question, but Donna suggests that it may be enough of a project for the dissertation simply to set up an initial, tentative answer and then declare, “Directions for future research.”
Charlie notes that if I follow such a course — discourse of composition versus discourse of computers and composition — it might help me to set 1982 as the cutoff date for both disciplines, since it’s the year that the journal Computers and Composition was established, and roughly the time that the process model of writing was completely reorienting writing instruction. I might then structure my dissertation by arguing:
1. Here’s how we talk and don’t talk about class in composition studies.
2. Here’s how we talk and don’t talk about class in computers and composition.
3. Here are the differences in degree and kind between 1 & 2.
4. Here’s why technology makes the difference, or makes no difference.
5. Here’s how the discourse in both disciplines might change.
Furthermore, Donna pointed out that my recent work with Seitz may help to understand the entire project of critical pedagogy, as it’s become practically a dominant paradigm in composition, as trading one set of class blinders for another.
Anyway. I gotta get those coals on. More tomorrow.
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