open | situating Cool | pedagogical apparatus | coda
Situating Cool within Composition Pedagogy and Theory
These questions not only crop up when considering this book but also exist within some of the most fascinating research going on in computers and writing studies:
- In their English Journal article, Ernest Morrell and Jeffrey M.R. Duncan-Andrade (2002) describe a curriculum they have developed where students analyze AND create hip-hop songs/poems “as a post-industrial art form right along side other historical periods and poems so that the students would be able to use a period and genre of poetry they were familiar with as a lens with which to examine the other literary works and also to encourage the students to reevaluate the manner in which they view elements of their popular culture” (90). Morrell and Duncan-Andrade insist that “hip-hop music should stand on its own merit in the academy and be a worthy subject of study in its own right rather than necessarily leading to something more ‘acceptable’ like a Shakespeare text” (89-90).
- Geoff Sirc’s Composition as a Happening (2002) is also informed by the idea of sampling/collage. Sirc mixes music and writing as compositions. He swings back to the composing processes of dadaists (Duchamp) and splatter, action painters (Pollock). Sirc writes, “If a Happening or Duchamp’s Large Glass or a Rauschenberg combine-painting or a Beuy’s multiple or a Koos sculpture are typical examples of avant-garde art, we might think of synchronous/asynchronous conversation transcripts, Story-space hypertexts, Web pages, emails, or even informal drafts as species of avant-garde composition” (2002, 19). Rice’s book, then, is a textbook for teaching/learning composition as a species of the avant-garde.
- Gregory Ulmer’s Teletheory (2003), especially his “Derrida at the Little Bighorn: A Fragment,” as well as his own textbook Internet Invention also exist within/behind/around Rice’s Cool. Yet Rice’s Cool is not only about the Internet, but about coolness and writing. The Internet just happens to be the media, the mode of the moment, but that too could fade and being cool would still be being cool.
How ‘bout that?
Them's the beans.
