in the act of mediation” (Bolter & Grusin, 2000, p. 14).
Activity: By the end of a composition course most students have become somewhat experienced in directing audience attention to the flaws of an opposing side’s argument. Confessional rhetoric, however, asks writers to do something much more frightening: direct the audience’s attention at the constructedness, mediation, and limitations of the writer’s own argument and guide the reader in a participatory experience that allows them to understand and rewrite the rules and goals of that experience.
This final activity, then, asks students to take an essay they’ve already composed and somehow make it confess its own constructedness. To prompt my students’ imaginations, we think of messages that are designed to do this in the real world: a director’s commentary on a film, a musician’s blog kept while recording an album, Joseph Williams’s infamous meta-stylistic “The Phenomenology or Error.” Together, we examine how each of these confessionally-styled pieces draws readers’ attentions to some points of constructedness while eliding others. How each confession paints a picture of the author, process, and materiality that supports a certain view and argument.
Students then begin to make their own previously written papers confess their materialities through a variety of methods. Some choose to play on the footnote by equipping their essays with “making of flaps” which can be lifted to reveal authorial commentary on how their own piece subverts or conforms to their argument. Others use a different font to indicate a running self-critiquing commentary. And some students make their papers interactive through elaborate fill-in-the-blank participation that asks the audience to consider how the student constructs and directs them.
Whatever the method, the key point is that students choose confessional techniques that develop their original argument and make the reader aware of how the student’s writing process impacts them. Such confessional writing teaches the student that self-awareness and analysis don’t have to occur only in the student’s head, they can be invaluable on the page as well.
Further Questions to Consider: How does an audience’s awareness of construction and mediation affect their reception of texts? Which audiences will automatically be critical of which texts? What limitations do you want to place on your audience’s exploration and analysis?
Notes
1.This paper assumes a current-traditional baseline of concise and transparent style when referring to “traditional” notions of style in order to engage with popular notions of style outside of the academy.
2.Though no theorist of new media I mention in this chapter makes such clear-cut ethical claims.
3.For further information on this false dichotomy see Winston Weathers’s discussion of “Grammar B” in his Grammars of Style: New Options in Composition (2010).
4.I hope, however, that this chapter and collection illustrate “style” and “content” are indivisible.
5.To see how Lanham does address the ethics of style see chapter eight of his Revising Prose (2007).
6.See Plato’s Gorgias and Phaedrus.
7.For a more negative view on Longinus and sublimity see Paul de Man’s “Hegel on the Sublime” (1982).
8.Indeed, Julius Caesar and many other Shakespearean tragedies might be investigated as models of Longinian ecstatic tragedy rather than Aristotelian cathartic ones.
9.One should note that the idea of agency in immediacy is infinitely complex. Are technologies designed to erase themselves? Do they simply have that effect without purposeful design? Or are users implicit in the act, causing technologies to erase themselves by not paying attention? All three answers are most likely simultaneously true and help bring insight to discussions of agency and style.
10.We all know how distracting it can be when automatic features like the red and green spelling- and grammar-check lines or “Clippy,” the talking paperclip, pop up when we are trying to compose in Microsoft Word. For more on hatred for Clippy, see Luke Swartz’s electronically available bachelor’s thesis, Why People Hate the Paperclip: Labels, Appearance, Behavior, and Social Responses to User Interface Agents (1998).
11.In fact, if one looks closely at popular nineteenth century American rhetoric handbooks (of authors like Day, Hill, and Genung) one sees sublime language (especially references to force, energy, and transport) being applied to the proto current-traditional pedagogy of perspicuity.
12.Though each of these points of attention, like each rhetorical appeal, is almost impossible to separate from one another and should be viewed more as a network of effects.
13.Indeed such an artificial natural style is deeply connected to the history of kairos in the rhetorical tradition and can be viewed in Gorgias’s “The Defense of Palamedes;” Aristotle’s claim that “A writer must disguise his art and give the impression of speaking naturally and not artificially,” in On Rhetoric (1991, 3.2); and in Cicero’s statement, “The main object of the orator was that he should both appear himself, to those before whom he was pleading, to be such a man as he would desire to seem … and that the hearts of his hearers should be touched in such a fashion as the orator would have them touched” (De Oratore, 1.19).
14.Similarly, we might recall how Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s claim to have written “Kubla Khan” while dreaming makes the mind of the poet seem all the greater.
15.Regarding the convergence of selectivity, manipulation, nostalgia, and digital metaphor, one might question: Where do these metaphors come from? On whose nostalgias are they based? If every act of collective memory and nostalgia is also an act of selective memory and amelioration of the past, whose oppressed and suppressed experiences are being recalled or elided in these metaphors?
16.For further reading on the sprezzaturic design of digital interfaces see Cynthia and Richard Selfe’s Politics of the Interface: Power and Its Exercise in Electronic Contact Zones, 2010).
17.Though, a history of yellow and stunt journalism might disrupt this narrative.
18.Such confessions, however, do not seem to mollify opposing critics, as liberals will still critique O’Reilly and conservatives will still critique Stewart. In addition, Stewart has an even stronger confessional defense in his constant claims that The Daily Show is “the fake news” despite the fact that perhaps a large number of viewers get their only “news” from the show.
19.Though labeling new media conceptions of hypermediacy as “confessional” may be somewhat troubling because few, if any, of the authors I discuss conceive of their ideologies along an ethical continuum, I think the benefits of drawing a comparison between confessional rhetoric and hypermediation outweigh the risk of misinterpretation.
20.Accessed for free online at: http://www.technorhetoric.net/13.2/topoi/delagrange/index.html.
21.See John Schilb’s Rhetorical Refusals as well as Schroeder, Fox, and Bizzell’s collection Alt Dis: Alternative Discourses in the Academy (2007) for examples of scholars who agree that writers need the ability to resist the style of the majority.
22.Though Williams’s other work on style is richly theoretical, his style manual, Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace, like those of other stylistic mavericks (I’m thinking of Lanham’s “paramedic method,” here) falls slightly short of the plurality he suggests in his more academic pieces. Indeed, the “grace” of the subtitle refers more to concision than anything else. But maybe such condensing is simply necessary to create a pragmatic manual. For a more complex analysis of the pros and cons of Wiliams’s (and
