Rejected and Accepted in Texas

I’m kinda disappointed, and kinda frustrated: I got word in the mail today that the panel proposal two colleagues and I submitted for CCCC 2004 in San Antonio was declined. It was an excellent proposal, I thought; we put substantial work into composing it, ran it by other people, and revised numerous times, but no dice. Basically, each of us was going to take a different angle on how the ways compositionists talk about class are incoherent and actually hinder rather than help remedy the problems class creates for composition pedagogy, in the hopes that such a panel presentation would provide a much-needed antidote to the myopic reliance on solipsistic authenticity claims as a foundation for so-called theorizing about class often seen in panel discussions on the topic — usually in panel discussions somehow invoking the term “working class”.

So I figure the best thing to do is to try and sublimate this spleen into something for publication. The thing is, I’m feeling sufficiently grumpy right now that I can’t really imagine whatever I write going beyond opposing Lindquist’s occupationally-based use of the term “class” to Ohmann’s Marxist use to Moran’s wealth-based use to Crowley’s culture-based use to Bloom’s values-based use to Shor’s perpetually stale playing of the authenticity card, and then asking why none of them even cite Weber, much less Giddens or Bourdieu or Veblen or the Lynds or Mills or the Census. (Which all seems to me like further evidence of comp’s instrumental intellectual arrogance: take whatever theories you feel like applying, and don’t worry about the foundations upon which they rest. That said, I’ll also note that feminist and queer theory as they’ve played out in composition seem to largely avoid such arrogance.) In any case, such spleen wouldn’t make for a very good essay, so I’ll do my best to not worry about the rejection thing. Dang it.

On the good side, the single-presentation proposal I banged out in 40 minutes for RSA 2004 in Austin did get accepted. I’m happy, but a little puzzled: the not-so-great proposal gets accepted, but the good one doesn’t? What gives? I’m definitely planning on going (I’ll be presenting at 9:45 on May 31; they’ve put me in a panel on “Electronic Communication and Public Discourse” with folks from RPI, WSU, and UC Boulder), but going means I’m probably not going to CCCC, since travel money in a time of budget cuts is hard to find and I don’t think I can swing out of pocket air fare and hotel money to visit Texas twice in three months. (For a while, I was under the misapprehension that the conferences were somehow miraculously back-to-back and 70 miles away from each other and so it’d only be one round trip plane ticket, but I was misreading “May” for “March”. Duh.)

If you’re interested, here’s the proposal that did get accepted. I’m really into the topic — I’m thinking Hardt & Negri will definitely make it into the mix — but I’m also pretty happy the proposal got accepted, ’cause I wasn’t sure it would.

Empire and the Dissipation of Public Discourse: Some Lessons from Tacitus for the World Wide Web

Composition has long used the classical rhetorical tradition as a measure against which to examine contemporary rhetorical practice and pedagogy. This paper will employ an analysis of the Dialogus de Oratoribus of Cornelius Tacitus, a politician, historian, and rhetor of the early Roman empire (and contemporary of Quintilian), as a starting point from which to investigate some of Tacitus’s topics — particularly the relationships between audience and agency — in the context of present-day public discourse and the World Wide Web.

Tacitus contends in the Dialogus that rhetoric in his time had increased in technical sophistication and broadened its audience while losing much of its political agency. While avoiding the fallacy of drawing direct comparisons between imperial Rome and our contemporary culture, the paper will explore to what extent the emerging discourse of the World Wide Web is affected by similar phenomena, and will work towards the conclusion that the Web has evolved into a medium more suited to staking out set positions than to negotiation and persuasion, and has thereby begun to marginalize its own rhetoric. For this reason, Tacitus’s skepticism concerning the power of oratory may serve us quite well as a cautionary perspective, and may point us towards a solution that Tacitus saw much need but little hope for in imperial Rome: an ethics of public discourse.