Hi--please see my new (and hopefully) improved Literacy Studies proposal--down to 530 words

This presentation questions traditional definitions of literacy, interpretations of images, and the values they depend upon and calls for multivalent approaches to teaching rhetoric and composition that enact gender equity, a SpiderWeb Rhetoric.

James Berlin claims that “literacy has always and everywhere been the center of the educational enterprise” (1), but that literacy requires “a particular kind of rhetoric—a way of speaking and writing” that fluctuates with context (Berlin 3-4). Traditional ideas of literacy have, according to J. Elspeth Stuckey, reinforced social class structures and perpetuated power differentials that maintain a culture of inequality (Stuckey 59). Western literacy privileges logos at the expense of the image. The rhetorics used to produce and consume it have perpetuated what Anne Francis Wysocki calls “universal thought” (162): a masculine perspective that devalues Others. It is political. It is powerful in its abstract, taken for granted, and nearly undetectable prejudice, embedded in cultural framework. The concrete and visual, traditionally coded as feminine, has long been devalued or displaced by the abstract and verbal, traditionally coded as masculine, particularly in academic realms. Yet the idea of literacy, as it applies to the teaching of rhetoric and composition, is expanding beyond traditional gender- and value-laden Western definitions, crossing verbal lines to validate visual competencies and acknowledge Othered perspectives. The centrality of image in communication is, as Gunther Kress notes, “’challenging the dominance of writing’” (qtd. in Wysocki 1).

But textbooks, curricula, and English department competencies, along with my experience teaching college composition courses, suggest that most writing instruction that happens today still enacts traditional literacy definitions and reproduces certain unquestioned values. These values replicate particular structures that split form and content and value the verbal over the visual. My doctoral program in rhetoric and composition exemplifies this paradigm. I am required to read volumes of words, even, ironically, words about images. Rarely do they include visuals. Rarely am I asked to contemplate or compose visually. The monovalent verbal retains academic hierarchy over the multivalent visual in the rhetoric and composition realm.

But if we accept Susan Romano’s assertion that literacy acquisition in the new media college classroom depends upon a kind of shape-shifting, upon “the idea of invented, multiple selves” (249), and Wysocki’s arguments that “formal approaches to the visual” are neither “neutral” nor “universal” (Wysocki 158), do we disempower ourselves by maintaining literacy’s univocality while denying its politicality? Can one voice teach multi-vocality? Is it naïve to believe we can demonstrate multivalent concepts through univocal rhetoric?

Wysocki notes that a new sensual aesthetic grounded in “reciprocal relationships” is needed to replace literacy’s form and content split with views of form as integrated with content (170). I argue that multi-modal rhetoric and composition classrooms require a multi-sensual, multivalent rhetoric—what I call a SpiderWeb Rhetoric—that disrupts (masculine) verbal order through integration of the (feminine) visual and (Othered) aural. SpiderWeb Rhetoric, spun from new media threads that extend radially in all directions, attempts to connect diverse points of view. It restores the study of rhetoric to composition, balancing ethos, logos, and pathos through images, words, and sounds. It enacts egalitarian ideology, joining form and content through multi-sensual experience. I will demonstrate SpiderWeb Rhetoric through a PowerPoint presentation, the materiality of which supports my claim.