Multimedia and RhetComp Apologetics
One of the most striking aspects of my arrival at Florida State University was a kind of speech I heard Michael Neal, the Rhetoric and Composition director, give to varied groups of graduate “English majors”—creative writers, literary scholars, and rhetoricians—several times during my first month there. It always began along these lines: “Hi, I’m Michael Neal, the RhetComp director. I know those of you in other specialties might not think RhetComp is very important, or even have heard of us, but…” Although my brief encounters with composition pedagogy had alluded to some controversy, I had never imagined an academic introducing himself to other academics with such a disclaimer. As I’ve settled into graduate school and begun to explore Rhetoric and Composition in more depth, I’ve come to understand Michael’s introduction not as a form of self-disparagement but as a reaction to narratives of place and purpose that have been with our discipline since its inception.
In The Origins of Composition Studies in the American College, 1875–1925, John Brererton reports that just a few years after their inception in the 1870s, composition courses were already being criticized for “not making a difference in studentwriting, for being expensive in terms of a teacher's time and energy, and for distracting faculty efforts from more important things.” I couldn’t help but laugh when I read those words. I heard in them the echo of Blake Smith’s January 2023 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, in which he indignantly asserts that students who visit college writing centers, traditionally run by composition scholars, “ought to demonstrate a guaranteed minimum level of writing ability, leaving instructors in other courses free to focus on teaching their discipline-specific content without having to explain, yet again, the purpose of topic sentences.” More than a century on, composition is surrounded by the same narratives. The teaching of writing, we are told, is busywork—a simple skill to be acquired, not one that serious scholars should concern themselves with. And yet somehow we have spent nearly 150 years failing to pass along this skill and prepare students for “real work”.
In many ways, we’ve internalized this criticism and come to direct it at our own efforts in teaching, composing, and rhetorical analysis. Kathleen Blake Yancey argues that the traditional “neo-Platonian” model of composition instruction through individual relationships with the student “is doomed”, and has been for 100 years. Similarly, Alexander Reid posits that the “traditional humanistic paradigms” at the foundation of rhetoric are no longer suitable for the post-industrial age. In both cases, they offer digital rhetorics as the solution. For Yancey, digital rhetorics manifest as a multimodal composition curriculum which supplants writing for the instructor with writing for the “real world” in a variety of digital genres. For Reid, the exploration of digital rhetorics allows for a speculative rhetoric that privileges our relationships with nonhumans over purely human perspectives. In so doing, he argues, it can address concerns of the digital age that humanism isn’t equipped to deal with and restore the relevance of the English department. Both speak to RhetComp’s urge to discard our humanistic roots in favor of computational, algorithmic methods that we hope will win us recognition as a “real” discipline. Otherwise, we worry about being seen as anti-science or, in Yancey’s words, “as irrelevant as faculty professing in Latin.”
On the other hand, there are figures like Douglas Eyman, who sees digital rhetorics as an analytical method firmly rooted in public, dynamic, interactive conceptions of classical humanist rhetorics. A digital rhetoric framed in terms of computation and scientific/mathematical analysis, he argues, would reduce rhetoricians to technicians applying technique to a representation of discourse that doesn’t come close to the complexity of the real world. As Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes argue, much thought is required to bring multimodal, digital composition into the world of rhetoric without forcing it into the mold of traditional textual analysis. In the process, I would add, we turn ourselves into mere tool-users, applying universal principles of writing to some object.
While I disagree with Eyman—I think there can be a place for computational analytics in rhetoric—I’m also reluctant to cosign Reid’s dismissal of our roots. It seems to me that these tensions are driven by a constant quest for visibility, to justify our presence alongside what is relevant, impactful, and highly visible elsewhere. I find myself wondering if it’s possible to make peace with our relative invisibility—to say “We’re RhetComp, and you probably haven’t heard of us because we’re so deeply embedded in everything you do that it’s hard to see us. Let us show you how to recognize the context, considerations, and possibilities driving the way you communicate, so that you can decide how a text ‘works’ and what it needs to do next.” In other words, we could claim our mundanity and humanistic origins proudly, positioning ourselves as a conduit by which people can both come to understand individual artifacts and composing processes and learn apply that knowledge to the wider world. I’m sure someone else has proposed it before me, but I’m curious how the individual perspectives embedded in multimodal compositions have been considered by theorists so far.
