Centrality of Style, The. Группа авторов
a naturally critical audience?
2. Manipulate Your Teacher through Constructing Yourself
Style: Sprezzatura, Leaked Constructedness, and Apparent Mediation
Goals: Learn to control presentation of self, the subtle use of style, how to adapt to the opinions of an audience, and how materiality affects image of the author.
Activity: Many times in the composition classroom (including in my first activity) students are asked to suspend their belief and imagine that they are writing to a “real” rhetorical audience other than their teacher. This activity asks for just the opposite. In this activity I want my students to manipulate me and to do it without my knowledge.
In order to encourage a pluralistic notion of style, students must experiment with simultaneous rhetorical purposes and numerous selves surrounding those purposes. One of the biggest questions I want my students to ask in a style-as-manipulation environment is, “How do I want my audience to react to me?” An easy response like, “I want my audience to be convinced,” is not enough. Thus, in this activity, in addition to their original argument/purpose, I ask my students to choose from a list of (or come up with their own) odd sprezzaturic goals such as: make me think you’re cool; make me disgusted by your composition process; make me pity you; make me want to be a member of your family; make me think you’re pompous but lovable.
The more weirdly complex the achievement of the secondary ethos goal, the more fun my students have and the higher the grade they will receive. But, the subtle manipulation of attention towards the author is key here; if I realize where the student is trying to lead me, the effect won’t work as well. Thus, a student attempting the “disgusted by your composition process” prompt (and this is an extreme example), wouldn’t overtly describe the composition process but might spread just enough peanut butter on the edges of his or her pages for me to notice and be disgusted on the third page turn. A student attempting the “member of your family” prompt might include several subtle and specific familial metaphors or anecdotes, creating familial subtext.
I ask my students to write their sprezzaturic goal at the bottom of the last page so I can’t read it until I’ve finished the paper. If they’ve succeeded at manipulating my view of them, they generally will get a few extra points though I don’t punish them if they fail.
The purpose of this activity is the ambition that encircles sprezzatura, the manipulation of the audience through the presentation of self. It also imparts the idea that every stylistic choice (whether linguistic or material) affects an audience’s reception of message and perception of author. Ultimately, this activity attempts to push students beyond the idea that the best style hides the author.
Further Questions to Consider: How does a writer (especially a student writer) encourage an audience to analyze and take seriously the subtle use of language? When does authorial adaptation begin to alter an author’s original goals? When is it appropriate to reveal subjectivity and authorial presence (through sprezzatura or confession), and when is such a revealing distracting?
3. Making an Essay Confess Itself
Style: Confession, Hypermediation, and the Continuum of Felt Agency
Goals: Learn to encourage active participation and analysis by an audience, highlight the constructedness of a text, enlighten an audience rather than persuade, help an audience to “take pleasure in the act of mediation” (Bolter & Grusin, 2000, p. 14).
Activity: By the end of a composition course most students have become somewhat experienced in directing audience attention to the flaws of an opposing side’s argument. Confessional rhetoric, however, asks writers to do something much more frightening: direct the audience’s attention at the constructedness, mediation, and limitations of the writer’s own argument and guide the reader in a participatory experience that allows them to understand and rewrite the rules and goals of that experience.
This final activity, then, asks students to take an essay they’ve already composed and somehow make it confess its own constructedness. To prompt my students’ imaginations, we think of messages that are designed to do this in the real world: a director’s commentary on a film, a musician’s blog kept while recording an album, Joseph Williams’s infamous meta-stylistic “The Phenomenology or Error.” Together, we examine how each of these confessionally-styled pieces draws readers’ attentions to some points of constructedness while eliding others. How each confession paints a picture of the author, process, and materiality that supports a certain view and argument.
Students then begin to make their own previously written papers confess their materialities through a variety of methods. Some choose to play on the footnote by equipping their essays with “making of flaps” which can be lifted to reveal authorial commentary on how their own piece subverts or conforms to their argument. Others use a different font to indicate a running self-critiquing commentary. And some students make their papers interactive through elaborate fill-in-the-blank participation that asks the audience to consider how the student constructs and directs them.
Whatever the method, the key point is that students choose confessional techniques that develop their original argument and make the reader aware of how the student’s writing process impacts them. Such confessional writing teaches the student that self-awareness and analysis don’t have to occur only in the student’s head, they can be invaluable on the page as well.
Further Questions to Consider: How does an audience’s awareness of construction and mediation affect their reception of texts? Which audiences will automatically be critical of which texts? What limitations do you want to place on your audience’s exploration and analysis?
Notes
1.This paper assumes a current-traditional baseline of concise and transparent style when referring to “traditional” notions of style in order to engage with popular notions of style outside of the academy.
2.Though no theorist of new media I mention in this chapter makes such clear-cut ethical claims.
3.For further information on this false dichotomy see Winston Weathers’s discussion of “Grammar B” in his Grammars of Style: New Options in Composition (2010).
4.I hope, however, that this chapter and collection illustrate “style” and “content” are indivisible.
5.To see how Lanham does address the ethics of style see chapter eight of his Revising Prose (2007).
6.See Plato’s Gorgias and Phaedrus.
7.For a more negative view on Longinus and sublimity see Paul de Man’s “Hegel on the Sublime” (1982).
8.Indeed, Julius Caesar and many other Shakespearean tragedies might be investigated as models of Longinian ecstatic tragedy rather than Aristotelian cathartic ones.
9.One should note that the idea of agency in immediacy is infinitely complex. Are technologies designed to erase themselves? Do they simply have that effect without purposeful design? Or are users implicit in the act, causing technologies to erase themselves by not paying attention? All three answers are most likely simultaneously true and help bring insight to discussions of agency and style.
10.We all know how distracting it can be when automatic features like the red and green spelling- and grammar-check lines or “Clippy,” the talking paperclip, pop up when we are trying to compose in Microsoft Word. For more on hatred for Clippy, see Luke Swartz’s electronically available bachelor’s thesis, Why People Hate the Paperclip: Labels, Appearance, Behavior, and Social Responses to User Interface Agents (1998).
11.In fact, if one looks closely at popular nineteenth century American rhetoric handbooks (of authors like Day, Hill, and Genung) one sees sublime language (especially references to force, energy, and transport) being applied to the proto current-traditional pedagogy of perspicuity.
12.Though each of these points of attention, like each rhetorical appeal, is almost impossible to separate from one another and should be viewed more as a network of effects.
13.Indeed such an artificial natural style is deeply connected to the history of kairos in the