Computers, Writing, Rhetoric and Literature

1. One of the challenges facing students as they begin studies at the university or college is to become sufficiently acquainted with the major issues, writers and vocabularies of various discourses so that they can understand the discussions of a discipline and thus begin to engage the world of ideas in some active way. Perhaps at one time or another each of us as teachers have witnessed students groping through the labyrinth of academic discourse trying to understand this intellectual world he or she has entered. For a few of my students during the 1993-4 year, encountering the ideas of the academy caused them to question ideas and values in which they once felt quite secure. One student suggested that coming to terms with these "new-to-him" ideas sometimes had caused a sense of isolation from the community he'd grown-up with, that even though he was among his people, he sometimes felt quite isolated from them. In this sense the isolation of the student is not unlike the isolation experienced by the magistrate in J. M. Coetzee's formidable novel Waiting for the Barbarians : for years the magistrate has governed an outlying region of an unnamed colonial frontier, living among the indigenous peoples but not living with them. He governed, if not generously, then at least without malice, if not judiciously, then without retribution. He was comfortable in his role as magistrate and the indigenous peoples of the area had learned to adapt to him, to his behaviors and to his ways of seeing. However, with the arrival of Colonel Joll at the beginning of the novel, all this begins to change: not only is the magistrate's position and authority undercut, he is also forced to begin viewing himself and his world in radically different ways.
   
   
2. From the first lines of the novel the reader notices the author's conscientious concern for exploring this notion of vision. From the opening paragraph I cite the following paragraph:
   
   

   I have never seen anything like it: too little discs of glass suspended in front of his eyes. But he is not blind." The discs are dark, they look opaque from the outside, but he can see through them. He tells me they are a new invention. 'They protect one's eyes against the glare of the sun,' he says. 'You would find them useful out here in the desert. They save one from squinting all the time. One has fewer headaches. Look.' He touches the corners of his eyes lightly. 'No wrinkles.' He replaces the glasses. It is true. He has the skin of a younger man. 'At home everyone wears them.' (1)

3. With Colonel Joll's arrival the magistrate is increasingly rejected and dejected until he is beaten and brutalized almost to death in view of the people he once governed. Gradually the magistrate begins to see what he had not been able or willing to "see" before: the peoples he had long governed, but had never known. He begins to see the social injustices as well as the personal tragedies caused by a cruel colonial regime. Thus, the reader witnesses the transformation of a small town magistrate. In Coetzee's novel the transformation experienced by the magistrate is hinted at and foreshadowed with numerous passages such as: "So this is what it is like to see" and "beyond the eye's reach." Repeatedly Coetzee uses sight-verbs like "staring" and "gazing", as well as others phrases associated with the act of seeing, including references to others' eyes ("so his eyes speak to me, glowing with excitement") or the limited quality of one's vision in a poorly-lighted room ("if I strain my eyes I can make out a dark shape, a man sitting against the wall or curled up in sleep").
   
   
4. At this point I hope my message is fairly obvious: that upon entering the university many of our students face difficult challenges not unlike those experienced by the magistrate. I would suggest that, like the magistrate, students learning new discourses sometimes feel not only isolated from their traditional communities, but even "brutalized" by the unfamiliar rhetorics of the academy. Of course in no way am I advocating a pedagogy of brutality, that our students should be beaten until they too "learn to see" our way of thinking. Rather, I am trying to suggest that for some students learning to view life through different discursive lenses may have a brutal sting to it as we present ideas that challenge their comfort zones of normative thinking.
   
   
5. At regular intervals during April of 1994, I sat on the union terrace of The University of Texas at Austin with P. H. (Piet) Roodt, a professor of Afrikaans literature and his wife Riekie vacationing here from the University of Pretoria. As we discussed Afrikaans literature of the 1920s and 30s, Piet paused a moment to think of the name of the U. S. president "just before [F. D.] Roosevelt." Having taken a bachelor's in history, I double-clicked on the "mouse" in my mind to launch the "turbogopher" of my intellectual database to retrieve the name of . . . then, before I could state his name, Riekie declared with obvious delight, "Herbert Hoover." I was stunned and not a little bit surprised that this woman who lived half a world away could cite such details about American political history with such facility. Her ability to recall Hoover's name has caused me to wonder just how many of us in the United States, if we were placed in a similar position regarding South African history, could call up enough information of South African history to retrieve even the name of the Prime Minister who served before the now famous former president F. W. de Klerk? (The answer is P. W. Botha.) Admittedly, one might argue that because South Africa has not been a major player on the world stage until their recent shift toward democracy, that there has been little reason to know much, if anything about South Africa. However, as Robert F. Kennedy cleverly revealed in a speech in Johannesburg in the 1960s, the United States and the Republic of South Africa, while being distant geographically, share a remarkably similar racial and social history.
   
   
6. In his speech, Senator Kennedy exploited the ambiguity of the moment to trace the history of a land whose de jure political rhetoric argues for the equal rights of all peoples, but whose de facto policies and attitudes have enslaved and oppressed many of its minorities. To the audience Kennedy's speech surely must have seemed like a thundering condemnation of South Africa's policies of apartheid. However, with a truculent rhetorical tease, Senator Kennedy cleverly revealed that he was, "of course", talking about the history of the United States. Kennedy's point was that historically South Africa and the United States have much in common. With so much in common, the historic elections in South Africa in April of 1994 seemed a timely invitation for students in my rhetoric and writing class to try to "see" some of the struggles South Africans have long faced in the negating shadow of Apartheid. Consequently I organized my first- year writing course around several rhetorical issues then current in South Africa. My premise was not only that learning about nations like South Africa has value for us as contributing citizens of a world community, but that researching such topics on the Internet provides both opportunities and rewards for such attempts, rewards that facilitate the student's quest to "see" other cultures with new and interested understanding.
   
   
7. Additionally, I'd like to suggest that researching topics on the Internet is pedagogically sound because it facilitates what George Leonard terms "the achievement of moments of ecstasy:" moments in which students make powerful and personal "aha" connections. Like Leonard, I believe these moments occur as a result of a process W. R. Wees calls "discovery learning." Discovery learning "conveys the notion that 'whatever knowledge [students] gain they create themselves; whatever character they develop they create themselves' " (cited in Shneiderman 23). For my first-year rhetoric and composition course of Spring semester 1994, the historic elections in South Africa became an invitation to create knowledge by learning to see South Africa's problems anew through a process of self-determined exploration and computer research. Admittedly this process of self-determined exploration and research is not unique to the Internet. However, echoing George P. Landow's argument regarding the advantages of hypertext as an educative tool, I would argue that access to the Internet encourages not only self-paced instruction and exploration, but also allows students to experience texts and ideas "as part of network of navigable relations" thereby providing a "means of gaining quick and easy access to far wider range of background and contextual materials than [is] . . . possible with conventional educational technology" (126). By combining the advantages of self-paced education with quick access to a broad range of materials, the traditional dynamic of education — in which instructors are expected "to cause learning in students" — is appropriately reversed (Novak xii). Thus, instead of students as receivers of the knowledge gained by their instructors, they become both sythesizers and producers of knowledge. As John M. Slatin has rightly argued, the implications of this departure from traditional models of education "are enormous, both for the creative arts. . . and for education: as many theorists now agree, understanding comes about when the mind acts upon the material" (876).
   
   
8. Still, I was concerned that, unlike Riekie Roodt's unusual grasp of American history, American students lacked the background information necessary to make their research and reading of Internet materials as meaningful as possible. For example, while many American university students probably know something of the pre-election political and military battles between the rival parties of Nelson Mandela's ANC, and the Inkata Freedom Party led by Mangosotho Buthelezi, they probably assume that the ANC-Inkata rivalry has long existed. However, this assumption is wrong, and for a student I'll call David, reading comments posted in a newsgroup helped to correct his misunderstanding. Reading comments posted in clari.world.africa, last March (1994), David learned that at least one Zulu man played a very prominent role in the ANC. In this specific posting, the sender, a woman named Isabirye, cited the name of Chief Albert Lithuli, a Zulu who once served as President of the ANC. Because David knew nothing about Chief Lithuli, he began researching this issue further, searching both the Internet and the library. He soon learned that Albert Lithuli was elected eighth President of the ANC in December 1952. Importantly, David also learned that the same election brought a young Nelson Mandela to national prominence as ANC deputy President. Thus, forty-three years ago Nelson Mandela worked side by side with Zulu Chief Albert Lithuli to counter the injustices of Apartheid. Further research revealed that the connection between the two men goes even farther, for in fact both men have received the Nobel Peace Prize: Lithuli in 1961, and Mandela, with then South African President F. W. de Klerk, in 1993. To share his discoveries with the entire class, David posted this information in the class network mail program called Daedalus mail.
   
   
9. Importantly, learning about this historical connection between the ANC and Inkata yielded another valuable contribution to the class. This contribution came in the form of an interesting online InterChange in which I asked students to take this new information about the historical relationship between the ANC and Inkata and try to account for the contrasting rhetoric between Mandela and Buthelezi. Admittedly students struggled with this request, but in doing so they expressed a wide range of responses and interpretations. Early on, one student, who had missed several classes and was thus noticeably behind others in the class in terms of readings and discussions, declared with zealous confidence that Mandela's interest in Buthelezi was nothing more than a clever "play for votes and [international] attention." Others, however, took a different view. For them, Mandela's consistent attempts to involve Inkata in the election process was more accurately explained by what they believed was a sense of trust and comraderie with the Zulu people resulting from years of service with Chief Lithuli.
   
   
10. The important point here is not whether students interpret "correctly." Rather, it is that students learn to enter the dialogue of South African issues. I would argue that entering the dialogue of any issue requires access to a wide range of information, which involves contrasting interpretations of those issues. Without these contrasting perspectives, students, like the one mentioned above who distrusted Mandela's motives, may continue trapped in what Foucault calls a "game of truth." I stress here the notion of being "trapped" because as Kurt Spellmeyer notes, without the corrective lens of multiple views on an issue, students may never become active "players in a game of truth." Becoming active players in such a game requires that students learn "to think differently" (715). In Foucaultian terms, students need to experience archaeological history: that is, they need to experience seeing peoples and cultures and histories with eyes different than their own. Richard Harlan notes that:
    
    

    whereas the orthodox history of human thought is a history of different worlds that have been seen by human eyes, 'archaeological history is a history of the different worlds that human eyes have seen. Foucault's achievement is to give us, for a moment, those different eyes, and have us realize, for a moment, how natural and obvious a different world can seem through them. (106)

11. Thus by learning to see differently, students will be learning to think differently and thus play a different game of truth. In terms of the electronic classroom, one of the valuable benefits of the Internet is its ability to facilitate student attempts to play these games of truth by providing timely access to otherwise obscured ideas, interpretations and information, and thereby facilitating student attempts to enter the dialogue.
    
    
12. What I'm trying to suggest is that the process whereby students enter the debates of new-to-them discourses, in this case the debates of South Africa, is a bit like trying for the first time a complex and sophisticated "connect the dot" drawing. Now>

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    Transfer interrupted!