Introdusion

// INTRODUSION

"Despite the limits of language, most of what we consider knowledge comes from the representation of the world and events in texts...The recognition that different statements representing knowledge circulate in the different groups does not mean all representations are equal, but it focuses out attention on the procedures and criteria by which these representations enter a communicative network and are evaluated, held accountable, and established as credible...recognition of this concept provides a path to a more detailed understanding of how things reach the status of truth within different communities and the criteria by which truth is held."

-Naming What We Know (2015) p. 39

"Hypertext and hypermedia are taken to be exemplary concrete actualizations of poststructuralist theories of language and text, providing decentered symbolic spaces in which language is mobile rather than fixed and where readerly collaboration rather than authorial control is the dominant factor in the making of meaning."

-Literary Culture in a World Transformed (2001) p.11

"What forces--social, political, and literary--are implicated in the crystallization of the novel as dominant form during the long 19th century? How is the process of canonical legitimization in turn implicated in the creation of a problematic British nationalism? Inquiry into these problems can result in a better understanding of the connection between realism and the construction, in the height of Victorian religiosity, of a newly imagined British community based upon secular morality."

-from my statement of purpose

One of my favorite works of literary criticism is Wayne Booth's classic tome The Rhetoric of Fiction. In the book, new chapters begin with several thematically related epigraphs, usually from novels, and usually in tension with one another. The thematic epigraph, unleashed upon the world one fine Chicago day, is what Charles Bazerman would term a "speech act," a textual object that impacts other textual objects, in this case my blog. It originates in and floats around a what Bakhtin calls the "dialogically agitated and tension-filled alien world" (NATC 1074). My encounter and exploration of this speech act has allowed me to colonize it and repurpose it here. It is precisely these concepts of exploration and colonization that are foundational to my larger argument of knowledge creation that I develop in each space of this site.

But to return to the epigraphs. They were chosen because each deals with the question of what texts can do. Indeed, The Rhetoric of Fiction takes up this problem in depth, but to what extent English departments are still concerned or interested in this question is not clear to me. In A Rhetoric of Literate Action Bazerman alludes to English departments' preoccupation with representation over action. I do see what Bazerman is saying here. I have seen countless articles titled "Representations of X in Y" and so on, but has English truly washed its hands of action-oriented rhetorical analyses? I don't think so. It just is taking different forms, and not labeled explicitly as rhetoric. Hypertexts create readerly enagement, and thus meaning. Novels create imagined communities. Literate action is still very much alive in English studies today. But what does any of this have to do with what I am trying to do with this site?

The ideas I brought with me into Theory and Practice I (my prior knowledge and interest in Wayne Booth and the 19th century) determined the ways in which I explored and acquired knowledge in that course. Certain theorists who challenged or supported my ideas were incorporated into my existing framework, actively changing it. I then carried this framework into Theory and Practice II, where my interest in how texts do things found further development in my reading of current writing theory. In each of these scenarios, there was an environment in place that promoted this type of personal engagement with the content. The knowledge I've tried to generate with this site is a direct result of these environments. The site is fully grounded in meaningful activity systems, which I identify and re-work as spheres of discourse. Lastly, I've tried to push myself out of my comfort zone by working solely within a digital medium to create a hypertextual object that would tap into reader motivation in an attempt to recreate for the reader an environment that promotes personal engagement with content.

The result is by far my most socially aware speech act to date.