The Rhetoric of Cool: Composition Studies and New Media PDF
Preview The Rhetoric of Cool: Composition Studies and New Media
C O O L THE RHETORIC OF C O O L Composition Studies and New Media JEFF RICE FOREWORD BY GREGORY L. ULMER The Rhetoric of Cool The Rhetoric of Cool Composition Studies and New Media Jeff Rice With a Foreword by Gregory L. Ulmer Southern Illinois University Press / Carbondale Copyright © 2007 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 10 09 08 07 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rice, Jeff (Jeff R.) The rhetoric of cool : composition studies and new media / Jeff Rice. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8093-2752-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8093-2752-X (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. English language—Rhetoric—Computer-assisted instruction. 2. English language—Rhetoric—Study and teaching. 3. Cool (The English word) 4. Communication— Philosophy. 5. Language and culture. 6. Interactive multimedia. I. Title. PE1404.R5127 2006 808´.0420285—dc22 2006032031 Printed on recycled paper. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Informa- tion Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. ∞ To Jenny Comes the darn An My L’il Sun-Flowa Will rise in the yeast again, “Dollin” Contents Foreword: Elementary Cool ix Gregory L. Ulmer Acknowledgments xv Introduction 1 1. The Story of Composition Studies and Cool 11 2. Chora 30 3. Appropriation 47 4. Juxtaposition 73 5. Commutation 93 6. Nonlinearity 111 7. Imagery 133 Notes 161 Works Cited and Consulted 169 Index 181 Foreword: Elementary Cool Gregory L. Ulmer To understand where The Rhetoric of Cool is coming from, it may be help- ful to know where Jeff Rice came from, if only to provide reassurance that his convictions developed “honestly,” so to speak. Some of the assump- tions guiding the argument of Cool may be made explicit by describing an intellectual climate that Rice experienced during his graduate studies at the University of Florida. There are multiple dynamics in progress at any graduate program, but the one Rice picked up on was associated with the Networked Writing Environment (NWE), which opened in 1994. The NWE began as a gift of UNIX servers and work stations from IBM, enough to supply five classrooms. The university refurbished a building and provided several staff lines, and, most surprisingly, the administration decided that the facility would be used for writing instruction. Rice took graduate seminars in the NWE, working with the Website as the medium of study, and taught his own general education writing courses there as well. Part of the excitement of those early years, coinciding with the emergence of the Internet as a public institution, and the growth of the World Wide Web as a popular medium of everyday life, was that nobody knew exactly what this technology could do (the capabilities were and are in continuous transformation), and there was no established wisdom about how it could be put to work in the service of humanities teaching, research, and service. The approach taken by Florida’s English Department, and specifically by the writing program (first under the direction of Carolyn Smith, and then Sid Dobrin), was that “computers and writing” are relevant to everyone in the discipline, not just those working with composition or with media studies. The practicum was taught in the NWE so that teaching with technology could be part of every Teaching Assistant’s training, related both to pedagogy and to research in the TA’s area of specialization. Meanwhile, under President Lombardi, the university pushed toward an ever more wired campus, includ- ing requirements that all students own computers, with specific capabilities set by each college, and a long-term investment to upgrade classrooms and ix
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