The Rhetoric of Cool: Composition Studies and New Media

206 Pages·2007·1.143 MB·English

by  Jeff Rice, Gregory L Ulmer

C O O L
THE RHETORIC OF
C O O L
Composition Studies
and New Media
JEFF RICE
FOREWORD BY GREGORY L. ULMER
The Rhetoric of Cool

The
Rhetoric
of Cool
Composition Studies and New Media

Jeff Rice
With a Foreword by Gregory L. Ulmer
Southern Illinois University Press / Carbondale
Copyright © 2007 by the Board of Trustees,
Southern Illinois University
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
10 09 08 07 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rice, Jeff (Jeff R.)
The rhetoric of cool : composition studies and new media
/ Jeff Rice.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8093-2752-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8093-2752-X (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. English language—Rhetoric—Computer-assisted
instruction. 2. English language—Rhetoric—Study and
teaching. 3. Cool (The English word) 4. Communication—
Philosophy. 5. Language and culture. 6. Interactive
multimedia. I. Title.
PE1404.R5127 2006
808´.0420285—dc22 2006032031
Printed on recycled paper.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum
requirements of American National Standard for Informa-
tion Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. ∞
To Jenny
Comes the darn
An My L’il
Sun-Flowa
Will rise in the yeast again,
“Dollin”

Contents
Foreword: Elementary Cool ix
Gregory L. Ulmer
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction 1
1. The Story of Composition Studies and Cool 11
2. Chora 30
3. Appropriation 47
4. Juxtaposition 73
5. Commutation 93
6. Nonlinearity 111
7. Imagery 133
Notes 161
Works Cited and Consulted 169
Index 181

Foreword: Elementary Cool
Gregory L. Ulmer
To understand where The Rhetoric of Cool is coming from, it may be help-
ful to know where Jeff Rice came from, if only to provide reassurance
that his convictions developed “honestly,” so to speak. Some of the assump-
tions guiding the argument of Cool may be made explicit by describing an
intellectual climate that Rice experienced during his graduate studies at the
University of Florida. There are multiple dynamics in progress at any graduate
program, but the one Rice picked up on was associated with the Networked
Writing Environment (NWE), which opened in 1994. The NWE began as
a gift of UNIX servers and work stations from IBM, enough to supply five
classrooms. The university refurbished a building and provided several staff
lines, and, most surprisingly, the administration decided that the facility
would be used for writing instruction. Rice took graduate seminars in the
NWE, working with the Website as the medium of study, and taught his own
general education writing courses there as well.
Part of the excitement of those early years, coinciding with the emergence
of the Internet as a public institution, and the growth of the World Wide
Web as a popular medium of everyday life, was that nobody knew exactly
what this technology could do (the capabilities were and are in continuous
transformation), and there was no established wisdom about how it could
be put to work in the service of humanities teaching, research, and service.
The approach taken by Florida’s English Department, and specifically by the
writing program (first under the direction of Carolyn Smith, and then Sid
Dobrin), was that “computers and writing” are relevant to everyone in the
discipline, not just those working with composition or with media studies.
The practicum was taught in the NWE so that teaching with technology could
be part of every Teaching Assistant’s training, related both to pedagogy and
to research in the TA’s area of specialization. Meanwhile, under President
Lombardi, the university pushed toward an ever more wired campus, includ-
ing requirements that all students own computers, with specific capabilities
set by each college, and a long-term investment to upgrade classrooms and
ix