Essayistic vs. Network literacy: What’s at Stake for Hesse? for Us?
Laura and Ellen provide the class an exercise in Sircian conversation: ruptured, fragmented, rapid-fire, narrativeless–but chock full of ideas. It’s got “bang.”
Laura and Ellen provide the class an exercise in Sircian conversation: ruptured, fragmented, rapid-fire, narrativeless–but chock full of ideas. It’s got “bang.”
September 30th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
I suppose the best place to begin responding to your podcast is with one of the last questions you pose: is some quality lost in the “easier responses” of net writing? How do I assess the quality of this response, your response, this podcast? You certainly make the listener work harder (and I’m not referring to the sound quality); I can’t follow your logic, come to your claim and evaluate how well you defended it. On the other hand, the quality of the thinking within the collage hasn’t been diminished, that is, you pose interesting questions and make some provocative claims. And so it–the podcast–is suggestive rather than authoritative. I certainly wouldn’t want all of my literacy activity to be so Sircian; I, in fact, do crave the contingent resting places of Hesse’s essays, and sometimes I even want an old fashioned, modernist thesis to understand and then push back against (if I disagree). That isn’t necessarily what I, as a professor now, need a podcast to do at the beginning of class, however. There suggestiveness has its place, which means net literacy is as rhetorical as essayistic literacy. We think about the audience’s needs, the text’s needs, the writer’s needs and the context in which the text will appear. Nothing too new about that.
I’m curious about the making of this for you–was it easier? and how so? less time? less intellectual energy? less imaginative energy? or more of all of these?
Check.