This photo, for me, symbolically represents the central idea of Brooke’s Lingua Fracta: a modern reconceptualization of something classical/ancient.
Collin Gifford Brooke’s project in Lingua Fracta: Towards a Rhetoric of New Media (2009) is to reexamine the five canons of classical rhetoric in light of new media (the digital, the interactive), placing the reader’s focus on interface rather than isolated textual objects. These canons are invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. As someone with a background in speech communication, I appreciated it when Brooke tells us in Chapter Two that “[t]he canons map loosely across the writing process or more accurately the speaking process. It is not difficult to imagine the canons being taught to ancient rhetors as the stages one must undertake to produce an oration” (p. 30). My students often get a “wow” look on their faces when I share with them that they are taking a course that has been taught for over 2,000 years. Brooke puts it succinctly: “One must come up with ideas [invention], put them in a particular order [arrangement], figure out how to express them [style], memorize the text that results [memory], and finally deliver it [delivery]” (p.30). Of these, Brooke writes that “[i]f there is one canon that would seem to be the least useful for a rhetoric grounded in the printed page, it would be memory” (p. 31). He, of course, mentions the urtext for this view, Plato’s Phaedrus. He also brings up Christina Haas’s Writing Technology (1996), a text briefly discussed by both Shipka and Mueller. Haas observed that when we write by hand, we remember more than if we type out the same text on a word processor. When writing on a computer, one is able to cut and paste, meaning that one does not have to think out everything as carefully beforehand. Memory is also affected by the need to print out earlier versions of our work, as well as what part of our work the screen “lets” us see at one time. For Brooke, “she demonstrates that writing calls on us to practice that canon in different ways” (p. 32). Moreover, “in Plato’s estimation . . . the delivery of a written text is more accurately perceived as a text devoid of the various qualities of oral delivery . . .” (p. 33). One way memory and delivery have been technologized, if you will, can be seen in the phenomenon of the politician’s teleprompter. Not only does this machine help politicians remember what to say, but it gives them directions for delivering their speeches: “applause line, pause here,” “repeat this line,” “smile/laugh here,” “raise voice in anger,” etc.
Brooke also reimagines the canons using the metaphor of ecology. If this sounds to you like media ecology (a term coined by Marshall McLuhan and further developed by Neil Postman), that is because Brooke draws his inspiration from this very interesting, interdisciplinary field. For Brooke, “[e]cologies are vast, hybrid systems of intertwined elements, systems where small changes can have unforeseen consequences that ripple far beyond their immediate implication” (p. 28). The title of the book is a “puncept,” Gregory Ulmer’s neologism for “a play on words that provokes us to think through a set of terms in more detail” (p. xiv). Like Derek Mueller, Brooke is not enamored of close reading (here represented by the New Criticism movement in literary studies). Incidentally, Brooke was Mueller’s doctoral advisor at Syracuse University. Brooke’s Lingua Fracta (2009) was published the same year Mueller completed his dissertation—the title of which is “Clouds, Graphs, and Maps: Distant Reading and Disciplinary Imagination.” (This information is available via a Google Scholar search.) Brooke’s view of interface reminded me a little of Jody Shipka’s thoughts on process versus product in Toward a Composition Made Whole (2011). “A turn toward the interface as our unit of analysis,” Brooke writes, “would be an acknowledgement that it is not necessary that these processes culminate in products (which can then be decoupled from the contexts of their production), but rather that what we think of as products (books, articles, essays) are but special, stabilized instances of an ongoing process conducted at the level of interface” (p. 25). Brooke begins by discussing an essay published in the online journal Kairos called “Hypertext is Dead?”. This piece is an example of a text that resists two ways of approaching texts in literary studies: (1) the kind of close reading mentioned above which Brooke simply refers to later as “criticism”; and (2) an approach inspired by Continental philosophy (as opposed to analytic philosophy), that one might think of as Theory with a capital “T.” The first approach focuses on the text without regard for the author’s biography or historical time period. The second seems to look at everything but the text itself: author’s biography, historical time period, ethics, epistemology, socioeconomic concerns, questions surrounding identity, and so forth (see pp. 7-11).
I’ll be discussing hypertext more in my next weblog post, but I’d like to conclude by pointing out something in Brooke’s book regarding Maxine Hairston. In a brief section of Lingua Fracta having to do with whether or not rhetoric and composition will, at some point in the future, “achieve some sort of institutional autonomy or separation from English studies more broadly (e.g., in the case of free-standing writing programs) . . .,” he mentions Hairston’s article “The Winds of Change” as her well-known, controversial 1985 CCCC Chair’s address (p. 8). This is an error. “The Winds of Change,” published in CCC in 1982, is about Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions applied to the teaching of writing. Brooke was thinking of “Breaking Our Bonds and Reaffirming Our Connections.”
Digital WRTC 