Thesis Project (Wysocki citations)

Once upon a time, I thought that this may be a research blog. Bah! But in that spirit, I thought I'd provide a few annotated citations that I'm focusing on for a seminar paper on new media, which will serve as an entry point into the actual writing of my thesis focusing on the work of Anne Frances Wysocki and new media studies.

What I especially appreciate about Wysocki (who spent a good deal of time in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan at Soumi, now Finlandia, and Michigan Tech), is her focus on advocacy and rhetorical awareness in the composition classroom, and that all of her theory is applied to the classroom. Theory and pedagogy are one.

Wysocki, Anne Frances. “awaywithwords: On the possibilities in unavailable designs.” Computers and Composition 22 (2005): 55-62.

Wysocki examines in this article why the materials we use acquire the social and historical restraints they have, particularly those used for communication. She argues that, “to ask after the constraints as we teach or compose can help us understand how material choices in producing communications articulate to social practices we may not otherwise wish to reproduce” (56). She questions whether we’ve read her title as “a way with words,” or “away with words,” and considers visual spaces as they’ve changed where reading becomes more public and less in silence.

Wysocki, Anne Frances. “Impossibly distinct: On form/content and word/image in two pieces of computer-based interactive multimedia.” Computers and Composition 18 (2001): 137-162.

Wysocki explains that much of what is written to assist students with writing or analyzing visual aspects of texts “assumes that those visual aspects work as form or theme or emotion or assistance to memory,” making the visual separate from but supporting the text (137). This article argues that “idea” and “assertion” do the work of “content and “information,” and teachers need to expand and modify the ways we conceive visual aspects of texts when we teach.

Wysocki, Anne Frances. “It is Not Only Ours.” College Composition and Communication 59.2 (2007): 282-288.

In the “Re-Visions” feature of CCC, Wysocki reappraises Joseph Janangelo’s “Joseph Cornell and the Artistry of Composing Persuasive Hypertexts,” first published in the February 1998 issue of CCC. Wysocki examines the ways in which hypertext have become naturalized and argues that there are “other compositional logics besides the academic that are worth exploring as people in the classes we teach come of age in times of variegating texts,” and that our ethics serve as a proper guide as we move away from “our academia” (284).

Wysocki, Anne Frances. “Opening New Media to Writing: Openings and Justifications.” Writing New Media: Theory and applications for expanding the teaching of composition. Anne Frances Wysocki, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Cynthia Selfe, and Geoffrey Sirc. Eds. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2004. 1-42.

Wysocki outlines five openings she sees for her teaching practices in this article, which is the first chapter of the book:

1. The need, in writing about new media in general, for the material thinking of people who teach writing
2. A need to focus on the specific materiality of the texts we give each other
3. A need to define “new media tests” in terms of their materialities
4. A need for production of new media texts in writing classrooms
5. A need for strategies of generous reading (3)

These openings serve as “ground and introduction” for the chapters that follow, which include a second chapter by Wysocki, “The Sticky Embrace of Beauty: On Some Formal Problems in Teaching about the Visual Aspects of Texts.”

Wysocki, Anne Frances. “The Sticky Embrace of Beauty: On Some Formal Problems in Teaching about the Visual Aspects of Texts.” Writing New Media: Theory and applications for expanding the teaching of composition. Anne Frances Wysocki, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Cynthia Selfe, and Geoffrey Sirc. Eds. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2004. 147-198.

In the opening of this chapter, Wysocki shows us a page from The New Yorker that she finds beautiful, but upsetting. The issue at hand centers on an advertisement for a book of photographs from The Kinsey Institute, and the ad features a naked woman standing sideways in high leather boots. Wysocki’s primary argument in this chapter is that “approaches many of us now use for teaching the visual aspects of texts are incomplete and, in fact, may work against helping students acquire critical and thoughtful agency with the visual, precisely because these approaches cannot account for a lot of what’s going on” in, for example, this magazine ad (149). Wysocki’s article argues the existence of these shortcomings, turns to eighteenth-century definitions of beauty and aesthetics, and attempts to “better understand how to support students (and myself) be generously and questioningly reciprocal in our designings” (149).

Wysocki, Anne Frances and Julia I. Jasken. “What Should be an Unforgettable Face.” Computers and Composition 21.1 (2004): 29-48.

In this article, Wysocki and Jasken look at the history of interface development and how we have come to a limited focus on the computer screen. They suggest that we see how the design of what is on screen shapes the actions and thinking we can do while engaged with interfaces (29). They reference articles from Computers and Composition dating back to the 1980s, and offer strategies for teachers to help students “develop reflexive and more generous interfaces” (29).

Wysocki, Anne Frances and Dennis A. Lynch. compose/design/advocate: a rhetoric for integrating the written, visual, and oral. New York: Longman Press, 2006.

In the opening of Lynch and Wysocki’s first-year composition textbook, compose/design/advocate: a rhetoric for integrating the written, visual, and oral, they describe the text as “an approach to communication intended to help you determine the most effective strategies, arrangements, and media to use in different contexts” (iii). The book aims to provide students with “systematic” approaches for analyzing situations that require different documents or presentations. The authors note that, seeing communication as key to developing relationships among people, and “careful communication as being central to active and engaged citizenship,” the text focuses on civic advocacy (iii). The three sections are titled, “Designing compositions rhetorically,” “Producing compositions,” and “analyzing the compositions of others,” with assignments woven into each section but also compiled at the end of the textbook.

Wysocki, Anne Frances. “Seriously Visible.” Mary E. Hocks and Michelle Kendrick. Eds. Eloquent Images. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003. 37-59.

In this book chapter, Wysocki challenges the “old and not uncriticized news that visual documents ought not to be taken seriously” which is “still very much present and repeated” by applying counterexamples of visual documents and hypertexts that do and do not support active and engaged relationships with texts (37). While hypertexts do not automatically make active readers, Wysocki argues, visual documents are not best suited for children and the illiterate.