Down to Business

I’ve been procrastinating long enough, and really need to get down to business here. Basically, I’ve got the penultimate draft of a prospectus ready to go and waiting on comments from a few peers before I make final edits and send it to the committee for signatures; after that, it’s into, well, actual dissertation work. Which is pretty scary, and why I’ve been dawdling: the dissertation will be the biggest thing I’ve ever done (with the still-incomplete management of my mom’s estate a close second), and I’ve got all sorts of anxieties about not being able to do it properly, which is why you haven’t seen much lately about class or economics or computers.

Obviously, that’s gotta change.

The purpose of Chapter One is to lay out the exigency for the dissertation; to say, “This is why this work is necessary.” To do so, I need to lay out four things: the discourse of instrumentality in technology, the discourse of instrumentality in composition, the discourses of economics and class in composition, and the connections between the discourses of economics and the discourses of instrumental technology.

Instrumentality in technology will demand a look again at the work of Manuel Castells, Mark C. Taylor, and Andrew Feenberg. Instrumentality in composition will demand a look at the review archives of CCC and Computers and Composition, as well as institutional histories; so, too, for the discourses of economics and class in composition. The last thing will be the most difficult, and will require some careful selection from the work of Marx, as well as a re-visitation of Greg Mankiw’s Econ 101 primer, and perhaps a look at some other contemporary foundational economic texts, as well — none of the libraries around here have Foundations of Economics: A Beginner’s Companion, so I’ve ordered a copy from Amazon; are there other useful economic texts folks might recommend? In any case: I need to get this moving, so I’ll say one month — thirty days — to have a draft of Chapter One done.

Hold me to it. Really. It’s a lot easier for me to let myself down than it is for me to let you down; that’s part of the reason I do this stuff publicly. And I’m grateful for the help.