Computers, Writing, Rhetoric and Literature
Susan Romano
University of Texas at Austin
Writerly Readers: Close
Readings Of Close Relationships
- Computer-mediated writing, they say, reduces the distance between
writers and readers, and this phenomenon is billed as one of the unique, positive
features of the new writing technologies (e.g., Bolter 148-149). Put plainly,
readers and writers on line will get closer together. Although I understand this
statement as allusion to reader response theory and the associated discourse on
negotiated meanings, I am transfixed by the indeterminacy of "reduced distance"
and "closeness," terms that retain shadows of the human agents involved in
literate performances. These terms insinuate a familial coziness of the sort
that telephone companies capitalize on. They have erotic potential. Touting
closeness implies somehow that our old distinctions and distances between readers
and writers are unfortunate and perhaps even socially harmful. It implies that
getting closer enables, even automatizes, mutual understanding. My curiosity
about what it means for readers and writers to "get closer" has been the
generative spark for this essay, which urges closer looks at representations of
reader-writer relationships.
Practicing Hypertext
Morris is skating so fast we can't see him.
Morris's Disappearing Bag: A Christmas Story
- It is said that the historical urge to fuse writing with reading
comes to fruition in hypertext, where an ideal Barthean writerly-reader is
produced twice over, first, cognitively, when private mindscapes wash over
published ones, and second, materially, when new writing is fastened on to old.
Whether exploratory (the first method) or constructive (the second method),
hypertext celebrates activity--of mind and of fingers--and reviles passivity.
Certainly many would disagree that all action is better than any stillness or
that any writing is preferable to all reading; still our model calls for action
upon action --interaction, we call it, or linking--and the effect is
counter-hierarchical because each forthcoming word overturns its predecessor or
each new chunk of text dilutes the host to which it links. Indeed it is this
cancellation of hierarchy in virtual spaces that many celebrate.
-
Hypertext tends to homogenize and dehistoricize human relationships. Hypertext
architecture prettifies boundaries with prefabricated bridges (links) to fit all
cases, while the customizing tools useful to some rhetorics--those that fit the
argument to the particular case--are set aside. The word "seamless," a
hypermason's descriptor for good cyber-brickwork, describes the appearance
achieved when the hard work involved in bridging gaps and the uncomfortable
motives for and consequences of difference are no longer visible.
- By
allowing only limited entry into another text, by permitting only the lightest
touch by reader on writing (the button, the highlight), hypertext skirts social
dynamics. Webbed textgrowths proliferate with only small, perfunctory regard for
the other. When text is laid beside text and two authors, lion and lamb, are
hooked gently together in a mode of noninterference, where and how will the dark
fallacy we know as separate-but-equal surface? When differences are generically
figured and not negotiated, when resolution of incompatibilities requires only
the encoding of a link, when differences are blurred by hyperproduction,
hyperspeed, and a frightening doublet of infinite preservability and easy
disposability, why and how should we go about reading and writing the
intricacies, particularities, and politics of differences?
Action and speech go on between men [sic], as they are directed
toward them, and they retain their agent-revealing capacity even if their content
is exclusively "objective," concerned with the matters of the world of things in
which men move, which physically lies between them and out of what arise their
specific objective, wordly interests. These interests constitute, in the word's
most literal significance, something which, which lies between people and
therefore can relate and bind them together. Most action and speech is concerned
with this in-between, which varies with each group of people, so that most words
and deeds are about some worldly objective reality in addition to being a
disclosure of the acting and speaking agent. Since this disclosure of the
subject is an integral part of all, even the most "objective" of intercourse, the
physical, worldy in-between along with its interests is overlaid and, as it were,
overgrown with an altogether different in-between which consists of deeds and
words and owes its origin exclusively to men's acting and speaking one another.
This second, subjective in-between is not tangible, since there are no tangible
objects into which it could solidify; the process of acting and speaking can
leave behind no such results and end products. But for all its intangibility,
this in-between is no less real than the world of things we visibly have in
common. We call this reality the "web" of human relationships, indicating by the
metaphor its somewhat intangible quality.
Hannah Arendt, The Human
Condition, 182-83.
Representing Writerly Readers:
Filmic Scenes
-
In Stephen
King and Robert Reiner's filmic version of the bloody thriller Misery, romance
writer Paul Sheldon is rescued from sure death in a blizzard by Colorado mountain
resident Annie Wilkes. Annie just turns out to be his "number one fan"--an avid
and active reader of Paul's romances. When reader Annie discovers that writer
Paul has killed off the heroine in his latest manuscript, already in publication,
she takes matters into her own writerly-readerly hands and demands the right to
intervene. In effect--she wants ownership and authorship of the text; she wants
a hand in her heroine's fate. She wants to blur the boundaries between reader
and writer by collaborating and coauthoring.
-
Now Paul Sheldon is a
modernist author (we know this because he uses a typewriter) and has no intention
of complying. But Annie Wilkes is persuasive. Faced with author resistance, she
finds voice in physical force and develops their collaboration by locking Paul
up, strapping his body to a bed, injecting him with tranquilizers, and breaking
his ankles. (She also provides paper and a typewriter.)
-
The
sufferings of this captive writer are matched eventually by those he inflicts
upon his aspiring coauthor. In the climactic sequence, Paul Sheldon burns the
manuscript that Annie Wilkes had forced from him, and, with symbolic flair,
gouges her writerly-readerly eyes out with his thumbs, smashes the typewriter
into her face, and bashes her over the head with a rhinoceros statuette.
Representing Writerly Readers:
The Scene of Postsecondary Writing
Instruction
- Turn now to the bucolic educational setting where college
writing teachers skillfully manage potentially explosive relationships. The
refrain "reading, writing, and 'rithmetic" poses a sequential model in which
reading precedes writing and both skills are topped off by a different type of
symbol manipulation called mathematics. It is a model occasionally and partially
grounded in historical practice. Seventeenth-century English school children,
for example, learned to read before learning to write, and many joined the
workforce without ever taking the second step (Darnton 154). In a remotely
parallel situation, students arrive in first -year composition classes often
having read much more than they have written. Typically writing teachers are
dissatisfied with how students read, and typically teachers hasten to teach
critical reading skills. "Critical" means reading with an Annie Wilkes eye to
intervention and to the occupation of some niche the writer has left untended and
poorly fortified. Reading assignments are designed to cause sufficient
dissonance in student world views that student readers will overwrite what they
read. In other words, writing teachers teach readership as an aggressive and
appropriative squattership and tend to assign combinations of texts that shatter
the illusion of seamlessness. Writing teachers actively develop Annie Wilkesian
behaviors.
- David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky in Ways of Reading
articulate carefully this philosophy of literacy education in their introduction
for teachers of college composition using their text:
Our students .
. . felt powerless in the face of serious writing . . . [So] we chose essays .
. . that leave some work for a reader to do. . . . We avoided the short
set-pieces you find in many anthologies . . . (vi)
And in
the introduction for students, they explain that
[r]eading involves a
fair measure of push and shove. You make your mark on a book and it makes its
mark on you. (1)
- When the author and director of Misery
animated Bartholomae and Petrosky's push-pull metaphor with characters Sheldon and
Wilkes, they encode what Bartholome and Petrosky neglect but which is central to
the teaching of composition: acknowledgment of the extra-textual social
relationships between readers and writers in contact. Paul Sheldon is a
published, white, male writer, and Annie Wilkes a white, working class, female
reader. Although the subsequent demonization of Annie (she is a pathological
killer in guise of caregiver) may diminish for film viewers her readerly rights
to coauthorship, the lesson should not be lost: reading and writing behaviors
are much about pre-existing power relationships.
- So it is no
contradiction that in the writing classroom we teach appropriation of text with
one hand and ownership of text with the other. First we require of students an
aggressive critical reading practice--of published texts. Then we require of
them "investment" in their own work and the "expenditure" of energy via
invention, arrangement, revision, and styling in a society where monetary
metaphors are strongly associated with ownership. Then, assuming that student
text ownership is of a different order from the ownership of published authors,
we advocate and practice a gentle, nonappropriative, supportive reading--peer to
peer, teacher to student. The interrogative reading practice is set aside in
deference to the gentler, extra-textual relationships prevailing in classroom
communities. Teaching literacy in the college classroom is then not so much
technology dependent as relationship sensitive.
[Writerly Readers][Differing with Virginia][Biblio]