Geoffrey Sirc: "What is Composition . . .?" After Duchamp
(Notes Toward a General Teleintertext)" (10)
| "Composition after Duchamp is idea-generative, not product-oriented. As data-interaction, its only directive: Take whatever data is recorded (call them, perhaps, these ‘having become’) and from them make a tracing." (195) |
In this article, Sirc sees Duchamp’s artwork as an entryway to understanding the hold modernism has on the composition classroom. From Duchamp can be gained a different way in which “alternative technologies can change fundamental compositional questions” (180).
Juxtaposing Bartholomae to Duchamp provides us with differing views of the function and definition of creativity and writing—for Bartholomae, “composition never explores the possible, just possible versions of the preferred” (194). Using Duchamp as a model opens up the definition of what can be called writing as well as what types of writing are taught. Instead of focusing on preferred genres and subjects, everyday materials are used: the trick is to shape this everyday material into conceptually unique and striking form.
Sirc argues that Duchamp sought art that did not discriminate—“a virtual museum-without-walls, a public salon open to anyone” (181). The self-publishing aspect of the Internet has the potential to meet this ideal. Web-documents are not necessarily important or even correct in a traditional way, but because they are available, they are chosen and read.
To illustrate this point, Sirc has his students read various materials, most notably gangsta rap as well as responses to this type of discourse. They then create their own rap and responses. He does this in order to “expand the classroom materially, allowing students a more immediate entrée into the cultural flow of words and ideas” (186).
Above all, Sirc wants writing to include forms of writing that are still being created, ones that are not “perfected, conventionalized, ritualized” (194). Writings such as these would be valued not because of their form or organization, but because of their ability to function in the electronic discourse setting they were intended for. This writing would “expose itself, announce itself, appear as writing. Writing stripped bare. Writing that wows me, dazzles me” (204).
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