English 642: Computers and Composition

The three articles this week all address the same subject: the shape of the contemporary essay. Selfe rings some familiar tones when she describes expanding the range of what counts are writing, but Sirc and Johnson-Eilola take it a step further. Both make compelling arguments for a more radical reassessment of what an essay is. Instead of arguing just for an expanded range of tools, they argue (in different ways) that the unified text of yore is on the wane (Sirc; Johnson-Eilola) and that it has been replaced by the aggregation of smaller pieces of text. Johnson-Eilola is clear about the status of the linear text: it hasn’t gone away and isn’t likely to. Instead, it’s being gradually marginalized. And, while there is much about Sirc’s article that seems obscure to me, I fully agree with his statement that there’s “something increasingly untenable about the integrated coherence of college essayist prose, in which the easy falseness of a unified resolution gets prized over the richer, more difficult, de facto text the world presents itself as” (123).

While I agree with the point that both Sirc and Johnson-Eilola are making, there’s something about Sirc’s analogy of composition and the box-logic of the artist Joseph Cornell and the brilliant polymath Walter Benjamin that doesn’t sit well with me. These men collected objects as a result of their passion for collecting; I’m not sure that we would have similar results if we asked our students to become collectors. There is also a romantic, nostalgia for the past that seems incompatible with the materiality of composition classrooms. The box-logic that he describes, though, resonates with Johnson-Eilola’s description of symbolic-analytic writing (Johnson-Eilola 201). Both writers turn their attention away from this traditional form of writing and toward emerging forms of writing, a move away from a final, finished product and toward “a notion of the textual form as short, amorphous, concrete, simply-structured” (Sirc 124).

Johnson-Eilola positions his argument within a contemporary legal framework as well as a clear description of contemporary forms of writing. He has persuaded me, against my will, that the basic form of writing has changed. He begins his essay noting that the postmodern turn is complete; authors are no longer omnipotent; texts have been decentralized (199). At the same time, however, we continue to “teach writing much as we have long taught it: the “creative production of original words in linear streams” (200). As his header indicates, Johnson-Eilola is interested in “redefining composition: database and essay” (200). His idea is intriguing: in an increasingly fractured postmodern world, it makes perfect sense that the text itself--something that was once considered a unified whole--has become a database, reducible to the level of the word for payment purposes.

Johnson-Eilola provides two methods for “understanding textuality”: the symbolic-analytic, a job that requires people to sort and manipulate already existing pieces of writing for reformulation and redistribution. This is, at least in part, what we do in English (201). Here, he tells us that traditional “writing” will continue to be important, but it’s becoming ever less central. The second method is articulation theory, adapted from Stuart Hall (201). In brief, articulation theory claims that meaning is socially constructed. The text is given meaning by the community of users who receive it, and that meaning is not always the same for every receiver. Thus, text is inherently unstable, on the move, and ripe for rearticulation.

Johnson-Eilola then asks a question that is central to his text: “What conditions enable the emergence of a new form of textuality, one that founds itself on fragments and circulation rather than authorial voice?” (202). Has this new form of textuality emerged in the 9 years since the publication of this article? What does this form of textuality offer us? 

Johnson-Eilola moves on to “the separation we . . . have constructed between ‘writing’ and ‘compilation’” (205). I can’t argue that he’s wrong. Following the logic of postmodern theory, all meanings are contingent and socially constructed. The outline of his argument suggests that in order for students to successfully understand text, they should understand text as a compilation. That’s what they’ll need in 21st century literacies.

In the next section of his argument, Johnson-Eilola examines the lawsuit between Bender and West Publishing. In this case, Bender sued West Publishing because West Publishing was claiming copyright ownership over annotations and numbering systems. This was important because West’s database provided the industry standard for law citation. Bender won the case, but Johnson-Eilola sites it as an example of the increasingly fragmented nature of text (205-07).

Johnson-Eilola then returns to articulation theory and semiotics, reminding us that within a postmodern framework nothing is genuinely creative or original (207). Thus, there can be no distinction such as the one made by the judges in the Bender case. The point, Johnson-Eilola writes, and in response to my question, above, is that the concept of text is “changing, whether we like it or not” (207).

Johnson-Eilola then turns to “recent cases involving the use of coursepacks” as well as the Database Antipiracy Act and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (208). These cases demonstrate that “texts no longer function as discrete objects, but as contingent, fragmented objects in circulation, as elements within constantly configured and shifting networks” (208). As for the coursepacks, students now must pay copyright fees that were, in the past, not applicable. The emphasis on what’s valued in the fair use doctrine has shifted. This is another sign if the increasing fragmentation of the text. Now, even small pieces of text, reproduced for educational purposes, are subject to fees. This is another example of the level to which texts have been fragmented.

The intent of the DMCA is similar: the “supporters of these bills are contesting . . . the division between ‘creative’ works like a novel and ‘non-creative’ works like databases” (209). In the digital age, non-creative works like databases become intellectual property. The creators of databases want to make sure that they can protect the content and structure of their intellectual property. Texts, then, are becoming “modular collections of information rather than unified, coherent creative wholes” (209). The final cultural change that Johnson-Eilola describes is about linking, a debate that seems largely to have disappeared. This does not suggest to me a move away from fragmentation, however, in light of the assaults on Youtube by Viacom and others.

Then, Johnson-Eilola describes approaches to writing that he thinks are relevant in this context. All of the blogs I read follow the form that he describes. Brownstoner uses a lot of its screen space to compile other material. Even much of the original material is in response to items that have been compiled. One of the regular features, though (Past and Present), written by Montrose Morris, contains pieces of extended symbolic-analytic texts in the traditional sense. As Johnson-Eilola notes, this kind of text isn’t going anywhere. It’s just that it’s less and less important, as Brownstoner seems to demonstrate. The assignments he suggests (not at the end of the chapter, but in the text itself), challenging “ourselves to investigate the permeable boundaries of the concept of ‘text’ or ‘essay,’ [they] decided to write an essay that included almost no ‘original’ text or linear thread” (221), do reflect the postmodern values that he describes and that he clearly demonstrates are in play. To what extent do we proceed in this direction, and to what extent do we remain loyal to linear prose? Do we have a choice?