Book Review

Melanie Lee—Book Review
792E Computers & Composition Pedagogy
Dr. Albert Rouzie
October 21, 2008

Rouzie Hits, He Scores! Serio-Ludic Points in At Play in the Fields of Writing

Albert Rouzie’s At Play in the Fields of Writing: A Serio-Ludic Rhetoric makes a valuable contribution to English studies and language arts. It provides an important resource for faculty interested in connections between writing process pedagogy, rhetorical theory, computer-mediated communication (CMC), new media technologies, and multimodal literacies.

I say this not only because I am a student in Dr. Rouzie’s graduate Computers & Composition Pedagogy course at the same time that I am reading his book and composing this review. Or because my partner, David, a professor of English for 20-something years, has read and praised it. Or because I agree with Dr. Rouzie’s claim that opportunities to play in English studies opens spaces for fruitful, curative (re)vision of relationships between rhetoric and poetic, work and play, verbal and visual, self and others. Or because I believe that “relationship[s] between texts and the dramatic effects of visual and aural media” (128) deserve attention. I say this because the book cleverly demonstrates the metacognitive, reflexive, subversive, “serio-ludic” qualities it suggests that faculty consider adopting.

In addition to drawing upon theory from Bakhtin to Wysocki and discussing his experience with collaborative, new media projects Dr. Rouzie himself co-composed, At Play in the Fields of Writing metacognitively analyzes data gathered from eight, junior-level 1994-95 University of Texas at Austin Computers and Writing courses through consistent awareness of its material and theoretical influences. It reflexively generates an experiential, rhetorical theory to bridge ideological polarities that divide and diminish composition and English studies. And it illustrates “serio-ludic” theory through lighthearted, instructive moments, such as Dr. Rouzie’s description of his transition “from stodgy” to “somewhat playful writing instructor” in the computer-mediated classroom as “the funky chicken doing the swim to stay afloat” (5).

For example, the book’s title plays with words, combining serious intentions with playful approaches to composing, teaching, and learning with new media in effort to bridge “the work/play gap” (Rouzie 22). In it we find not only the invention of a new word describing a new rhetorical theory, but an allusion to field games that doubles as a metaphor for English studies that involve diverse areas of writing study.

The book itself explores the following questions:

• “What does playful discourse and composition accomplish?”
• “What is good, interesting, and productive about it?”
• “Why should composition instructors be interested in play and what should they do with it? How can instructors prepare for play?”
• “What kinds of playful discourse are most valuable and why?”
• “How does play figure in emergent forms of literacy?”
• “What is the relationship between play and the composing process?” (Rouzie 21-22)

Part of a New Dimensions in Computers and Composition series edited by Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe, At Play in the Fields of Writing features a green and red spiraly swirling cover design that bleeds bottom and left into the spine and out of which white font announces its title, author, editors. In this way it resembles many scholarly books in English studies. The book’s solid theoretical groundings are social constructivist in nature; its arguments rest upon relationships between individuals and their work, individuals and groups in learning communities, and how work (and play) are categorized, defined, and valued in western culture. Chapters begin with epigraphs and contain subtitles that transition between key ideas. The text’s linear form is disrupted by plentiful notes, signaled by superscript numbers within chapters that correspond to information at the end of each chapter. These superscripts act like hyperlinks, inviting readers to leave the place they appear, jump ahead to read additional information, and then return to the text. This is not unusual.

However, At Play in the Fields of Rhetoric breaks English studies tradition by including numerous figures: images accompany most chapters, adding visual depth to verbal scope. Figures range from verbal excerpts of InterChange transcripts to screen shots of student projects in HyperCard that include line art, illustrations, photographs, heads, subheads, short textual blurbs, icons, hyperlinked text (and, we are told, sound)--compositions uniting aural, visual, and verbal elements in the spirit of playful experimentation. The book also breaks tradition by privileging a dialectic that values play as part of, rather than separated from, work, especially the work of writing. The result, as I hope my chapter summary below shows, is a pleasurable reading experience, especially for those who enjoy disrupting traditional mores, full of examples and ideas for creating opportunities for spontaneous, “serio-ludic” discourse.

Chapter 1, “Play, Pleasure, and Writing Instruction,” conceptualizes serio-ludic discourse, discusses its performative nature, and suggests its unifying potential for English and composition studies. This chapter also outlines the book’s remaining chapters and discusses two student projects, “How Do Women Get represented? Through Words and Body Parts” and “The Sants Home Page” as examples of serio-ludic discourse that “(dis)orient the reader to a different reading experience” (Rouzie 159). Serio-ludic discourse, characterized by its dramatic or enigmatic opening, metacommunicative signal, and conversion of language into symbolic action, particularly in computer-mediated communication (CMC), integrates the aural and the visual with the verbal and requires audience interaction. CMC offers an ideal environment for creating serio-ludic discourse since it offers composers multidimensional tools that enable multilayered, new media essays to be experienced, rather than static print media to be merely read.

Chapter 2, “Healing the Work/Play Split: A Serio-Ludic Rhetoric for English Composition Studies,” theorizes the origins of western culture’s work / play bifurcation, argues that play is a powerful component of personal growth and social rejuvenation, and offers serio-ludic rhetoric as a bridge over the work/play gap, embodied in English studies by the rhetoric/poetic split. This chapter considers computer-based and non-computer-based environments that are conducive to play and asserts that serio-ludic literacy can emerge in either. It argues that some forms of play, such as thoughtfully designed video games, cultivate considerable critical thinking skills and facilitate social awareness in a pleasurable learning context, embodying a kind of ready-made serio-ludic tool, and that these deserve educators’ careful attention.

Chapter 3, “Conversation and Carrying-on: Play, Conflict, and Serio-Ludic Discourse in Synchronous Computer Conferencing,” investigates selected segments of serio-ludic discourse in Deadalus InterChange transcripts. It encourages instructors to engage students in regular synchronous conferencing and follow-up analysis of transcripts, paying special attention to conflict, intersections of gender and communication, power negotiations, and playfulness. This chapter suggests that collaborating in synchronous environments creates necessary and productive spaces for play in work. In addition to discussing productive examples of synchronous conferencing, it also discusses less productive examples and offers playful approaches to focus and redirect students. Dr. Rouzie calls for instructors to become critical users of these technologies in order to make pedagogically effective decisions regarding how and what kinds of computer technologies are used in their academic programs.

Chapter 4, “Play in Hypertext Theory and Practice,” explores the dramatic and transformative qualities of play within the realm of hypertext, details Dr. Rouzie’s experiences collaboratively composing two hypertext compositions, This Is Not a Texbook and Hypertext Ear, under postmodern theoretical influences and examines and analyzes graduate student hypertext compositions, including the mysterious postmodern “experience” of Zaum Gagdet, (129). Hypertext’s associative, dramatic, interactive, polyphonic, multimodal character makes it an ideal choice for serio-ludic composition. This chapter considers hypertext theory in concert with serio-ludic theory and discusses the grammatical constructs and rhetorical consequences of HyperCard, StorySpace, and World Wide Web. Web authoring, with its comparative complexity and limitless material choices, requires a more directed and purposeful approach to serio-ludically aware composition than composing in HyperCard or StorySpace. Rouzie notes that “the challenge . . . is getting students to work both with and against the grammar of the Web” (153).

Chapter 5, “The Composition of Dramatic Experience: The Play Element in Student Electronic Projects,” analyzes selected serio-ludic, HyperCard, MOO, and Web hypertext student compositions from eight sections of the computers and writing course and emphasizes the need for an examination-based or experience-grounded way of composing and “reading” these compositions. The idea of play figures prominently in the creation of these projects and constitutes an important rhetorical element. Goals for the assignment were to increase students’ awareness of computer technology’s “cultural and social effects,” to apply rhetorical strategies and create “effective written composition,” to gain experience with collaborative composing and hypertext software (Rouzie 162). Hypertext composition requires authors to consider “the reader’s role in experiencing the document” (Rouzie 160). This chapter notes how interactivity changes the process and the product, claiming that Burke’s dramatistic theory figures prominently in the performative nature of hypertext composing. Examples of student projects discussed include “The Land of Animation,” “The New Bit,” “Anatomy of a Flame War,” “The Next Step in Education,” and “The Village Square.”

Chapter 6, “Conclusion: The Changing Fields of Writing,” notes that postsecondary faculty and other workplace professionals are positioned at a “critical crossroads” to decide “what values we will pursue, what choices we will make to lead us into which directions” (Rouzie 193). This chapter considers how serio-ludic rhetoric impacts English studies and departmental culture, rhetoric and composition, computers and the “fields of writing” and offer 11 suggestions for putting serio-ludic pedagogy into practice and avoiding pitfalls. It stresses that time and experience are necessary for faculty to learn how to use the quickly-changing array of computer technology available to them for multi-modal composing, and this lack of time is a critical obstacle to effective computers and composition pedagogy.
Rouzie observes that “College English instructors are currently so overworked that they don’t have the time needed to become comfortable with computer-based teaching, much less to explore how play can be used to enrich composition and communication” (192). Nevertheless, Rouzie claims, college writing instructors “cannot afford to ignore the visual and reject the expanded sense of writing as authoring (or composing)” that new media fosters, and in this new concept of composing, defining, and experiencing text, play interfaces most appropriately (195). How to evaluate these shapeshifting, serio-ludic, new media rhetorical expressions without institutionalizing (and thus terminating their spontaneous impulses) presents a special challenge for faculty and students negotiating their playspaces in the fields of writing with new media.

This last point is where I offer my humble critique. It would be immensely helpful to have included examples of how Dr. Rouzie evaluated his students’ new media compositions, perhaps including a list that resembles the 11 suggestions for putting serio-ludic pedagogy into practice or an evaluative rubric of some kind. As an instructor eager to learn and be comfortable enough with new media technologies to integrate them successfully into my own teaching, and anxious to design pedagogically effective and challenging assignments, it is at the evaluative junction, that I become most anxious, in part, because I recognize that I am struggling against outdated English department competencies that privilege traditional, essayistic writing modes. My sense is that evaluating these new media compositions would disrupt these norms and perhaps lighten my grading load—but I want Dr. Rouzie to tell me how.

In spite of this, At Play in the Fields of Writing: A Serio-Ludic Rhetoric is a home run. I would highly recommend this book to colleagues interested in broadening their teaching repertoire and having fun in the process ☺.