(DOWNLOAD) "Thaiss, Chris, And Terry Myers Zawacki. Engaged Writers and Dynamic Disciplines: Research on the Academic Writing Life" by Writing Program Administration " Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Thaiss, Chris, And Terry Myers Zawacki. Engaged Writers and Dynamic Disciplines: Research on the Academic Writing Life
- Author : Writing Program Administration
- Release Date : January 22, 2008
- Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 102 KB
Description
Marshall McLuhan once declared that "it's misleading to suppose there's any basic difference between education and entertainment" (3). Such a distinction, he says, "merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking into the matter" (3). The entertainment industry helps produce meaning, shape desire, and direct social practices; it educates, wields power, and serves political ends. No doubt, politics entertains too: presidential candidates make appearances on late night television talk shows and answer questions like "do you wear boxers or briefs" just as much, sometimes more, than they answer questions like "what is our exit strategy from Iraq?" While politicians engage in dialogue with citizen/viewers, such exchanges are choreographed to niche markets and packaged as entertainment rather than political deliberation, teaching us that the line between rhetoric and poetics, between production and interpretation, between dialogue and diatribe, is more blurred than either the literary or rhetorical canons would suggest. Yet the recent anxieties among rhetoricians, in communication and in composition both, over rhetorical and cultural theories that stray from the central mission of textual (re)production tend to miss McLuhan's rather basic point--the world of globalization has indeed imploded upon itself and the disciplinary boundaries that thrived in the industrial era of education simply cannot sustain themselves under the critique of an increasingly interdisciplinary world. Opposed to such disciplinary gatekeeping, I contend that writing programs, particularly the growing number of undergraduate majors and concentrations, take this sociocultural and historical context into consideration rather than working to train students exclusively in the discrete tasks of workplace writing. In an interdisciplinary world, writing programs need to interact with the rhetorical functions of politics and entertainment as they emerge in both public and private spaces. For me and the curriculum I will discuss later, this means continually working at the intersections of rhetorical humanism and cultural studies in order to arrive at a writing program that matches the diversity of persuasive symbolism comprising the social and historical world we inhabit. Taking up this subject, this essay outlines the theoretical linkages I see between rhetoric and cultural studies as humanist pursuits that converge at the site of textual interpretation and production, and conjectures that critics of this practice might be more troubled by the thought of using rhetoric to transform the world than they are over disciplinary purity. I use Georgia Southern University's Writing and Culture Area concentration as a model to illustrate how this confluence between rhetoric and cultural studies can be translated into a fully developed undergraduate writing program with its foundation in the liberal, rather than mechanical, arts. Arguing against hitching writing to the practical needs of the university and the workplace, I end with a call to develop more writing programs based on such humanist foundations.
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