On a practical note: What we do in academia we do for a variety of reasons. We publish books to...
  • add to the intellectual conversation
  • see our name in lights
  • fill a gap, a need
  • conform to our institutional requirements
  • provide another look at something
  • get tenure
  • achieve legitimacy
  • make money
 I’m sure the authors in this collection (and in any collection) could add volumes to this list. I should note up front that I really enjoyed this collection. But I should also note up front that I did get a bit ... frustrated? Because I kept wanting MORE. More Visual. More texture. More freedom for me to move around, create my own text (and I DID read it “hypertextually,” or at least out of order ... and I read the MOOs first! I was drawn to the play first (“The play’s the thing!”). Yet I must commend the authors on their play within the fields of scholarship; in the Introduction, the editors model their form (and, in part, their “feel”) on the writing of Wittenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. As one of my co-authors notes wisely, play, laughter, and co(s)mic forces can, indeed, be scholarly, philosophical, and legitimate.
     Kathleen Yancey and Michael Spooner’s collective persona, Myka Vielstimmig, capture this wise play. The voice in this piece is amazing; even without the topographical cues, I would hear these speakers, and in fact, would be likely to assume more than two (and, if we are, in fact, a composit—their editor’s word—of all we have experienced, this two-author collaborative is, in fact, many voices--Vielstimmig is German for “many-voiced”). This chapter, perhaps more than any other, explores where, exactly, collaboration and electronic dialogue fits into the academy. “Perhaps *this*—text-as-drama—is a convergence between rhetoric and poetic” (129). They maintain intertextually that “its form is exploratory, disruptive, digressive, and playful” (129). They claim it represents (our) process of composing. And it is edited, proofread, altered to fit into a slightly altered, disruptive, digressive, playful essay. Yet they do maintain a consistency in their play, in that, while “different” than the traditional essay, it maintains much of the same discursive/dialogic underpinnings. In their argument for a “hybrid textuality that brings rhetoric and poetic together,” the authors fall back on that pillar of academia: the argument. One could find claims and warrants in this (hyper)text; yet it also contains reflective rumination that normally occurs only at the reading, and not as part of the text. Increasingly multidimensional.
     Yet it is still, to use Doherty’s phrase, somewhat “academ-icky.” Not that there's anything wrong with that. What's it really all about?

-beckster