An Overview
A traditional composition textbook can be described as a family recipe for writing "papers" (thesis-driven explorations of topics organized by mode or topic). Position papers that draw on and synthesize evidence of various kinds foreground logical analysis as a way of sharpening one's judgments about "the issues" (the topoi) and perfecting one's ethos as an educated person (as someone who is immune to rashness, anger, giddiness, vernacular, funk, etc.).
Critiques of this ("current traditional") writing pedagogy (Berlin 1996 Bizzell 1992) have drawn attention to the detached ethos of the academic writer and the objective methods of argument analysis as exclusionary and elitist discursive formations. At least in the critique of this pedagogy – in theory – the way to reform, to non-exclusionary writing pedagogies – is clear: we substitute a "constructivist" approach to language for the "instrumental" approach to language that mystifies authority and elides the cultural and historical dimensions of the writer's meaning-making. How this postmodern distrust of foundational authority and the self-motivated writer translates into assignments and classroom practice has been a major issue for critical pedagogy and postmodern rhetoricians. A particularly difficult question for teachers concerned to acknowledge and thwart the more hegemonic aspects of schooling has been how to respect students' cultural histories and complex subject positions (their desires, ambitions, etc.) while also engaging them with concepts and assignments that would possibly call those histories/subjectivities to account. If a central issue in composition studies in the 1980's and early 1990's was how are power relations constituted through literacy practices and why should teachers/critics resist them?, the central question of the late 90's has been: why should students resist the dominant ideologies? Joe Hardin (2001) suggests that there is no "one-size-fits-all" answer. Students must first write about their cultural locations viz a viz "the other," must first dialogue with actual others about the stakes of their commitments and comforts (and aversions and anxieties) to particular cultural situations before the "problem-posing" stage of liberatory education can begin (68). Before students can decide whether to "resist," to act in ways that curtail or thwart the usual privileges accorded to those with literacy and all that it brings with it. It could be said that the postmodern pedagogue and the real estate agent have a slogan in common: location, location, location. Only after students have mapped their locations can they actively consider questions of their relations, their obligations.
Gregory Ulmer's Internet Invention assembles a writing regimen by which students might map some of their subject positions in the influential discourses/institutions of our time. Instead of instructing students "to turn the information found in libraries into knowledge organized as arguments on paper" (xii) – the disciplinary focus of most traditional, print-based rhetorics – Ulmer's book is a primer on writing theory and poetics for students willing to trace the contours of their subjectivities. Ulmer does not annex poetics (a theory of how imagery and other figurative devices shape readers' experiences of a text) to rhetoric (rhetorica utens – how to persuade others) but rather presents poetics as a heuristical device for mapping our experiences of home, work, play, etc. For Ulmer, "image-reasoning" – thinking through or with pictorial and verbal images – is as crucial as the rational linkage of claim to support for understanding why people take the positions, or make the decisions, that they do.
Internet Invention asks us to consider how writing, particularly writing on the Web, serves as an alternative space for composing the "self" in its various connections to the world. Ulmer suggests that the way we act through symbols in the electronic medium is via the figurative inferences we register, capture and (re)deploy from popular media and institutions. The Internet, according to Ulmer (and he echoes Bolter and Porter), is a "medium of learning [that] puts us in a new relation to writing" (1), but only when the linking of words/images within lexia and between various lexia and Web pages is conceived beyond the pale of reason as defined by Plato, Aristotle, and the whole "apparatus of method" we have inherited from Western philosophy and science. "To write with images," Ulmer contends, "requires an understanding of the atmosphere and aura evoked by things, just as to write with concepts requires knowing the meanings of terms" (56).
