Weekly 5 Exploratory: Mapping Discourse, Culture, Ideology
For your Weekly 5 Exploratory, to align with our discussion of “cultural dis/identification,” I would like to ask you to conduct a multilayered analysis of one (1) of these instances of discourse for expressions of “culture” (including its absences and presences), and then to visually represent your analysis in some form, before critically assessing both tasks:
- JFK's "Ich bin Ein Berliner" speech, delivered 26 June 1963, Berlin (audio here for fun)
- "Preface" to Freidrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, transl. Zimmern (Gutenberg edition)
- Bella Abzug's Plenary Speech at the Fourth World Conference on Women, delivered September 1995 in Beijing
- Adam Banks's "Funk, Flight, and Freedom": 2015 CCCC Chair's Address, delivered 19 March 2015, Tampa [select any 5 pages for your analysis]
Working Teams
I will suggest the following work teams:
- Angela, Kamila, Michael
- Jessi, Mandy
- Amanda, Katelyn
- Parisa, Rob
The Multilayered Discourse Analysis
Generally speaking, a multilayered discourse analysis hinges on the assumption that expressions of language -- spoken or written -- contain transtextual, contextual, and intratextual information, where transtextual is the least concrete or observable (i.e., ideologies and mentalities and topoi) and intratextual is the most concrete or observable (i.e., speech acts, tropes, metaphors, lexicon). You are free to discover your own multilayered approach based on our readings for this week, or based on other approaches we have studied this term -- one that attends equally to several layers or spheres of information, from most concrete to most abstract.
So long as you are examining your text for multiple layers or spheres, you may feel free to analyze for what you want, and you may feel free to label the different parts of your analysis however you want in order to argue for the presence or absence of "culture." In other words, please be cognizant of how you think the discourse is working to deliver "culture" as you observe it.
The Visual Representation
I will ask you to create some kind of visual representation of your analysis, using any means available to you to give us the most comprehensive picture of what you found, how those findings can be organized, and why those findings might be significant. Although “mapping” is the operative term above, you might consider this Exploratory a kind of curation project, where “curation” involves examining the principles underlying our arrangement and valuation of rhetorical practices. This means that your options for visualization are many.
For example, you might conduct something like a traditional text mining analysis, which usually results in something like color gradiants, thematic domination, semantic clustering, or venn diagrams, among other things. You might consider network diagramming, something we see used broadly in the Writing Studies Tree, or more specifically in Jonathan Goodwin’s Co-Citation Graph of theory journals, which was inspired by Kieran Healy's Philosophy Citation Network, which was actually inspired by Neal Caren's network of Sociology Citations, and etc. ad nauseum. You might even take "mapping" literally and incorporate results from Pinterest or some other media onto a Google maps page, develop a cartogram, or do something else that is wholly web-based!
You have options! I only ask that you please not settle on a word cloud, as that will not show a sufficiently multilayered relationship.
Please upload your completed visualization to Canvas by the beginning of class time on Thursday, November 3, and bring a hard or digital copy to class for our discussion (just in case).
The Critical Blog Post
For your follow-up critical blog post (which you will do individually), please reflect on the mapping assignment and how some aspect of the task illumined/complicated/addressed/extended your reading of our texts for this week.
This exploratory may be the most critically demanding in terms of what and how to reflect! Do try to let the readings speak to and through your work so that we can make sense of how such work belongs on our journey towards rhetorical theory and practice (if it does?). What can/should we understand about cultural dis/identification? What can't we understand?
As always, this critical blog post can be reflective but should be formal. It should be a minimum of 2-3 well developed paragraphs in length (a couple of screens), and my great desire is to see you engage expertly with both task and texts, at times speaking through or alongside what we read, and speaking with some insight about what we read (citing where necessary and embedding links where relevant). As your post will be intertextual, I'll ask you to use MLA or Chicago-style parenthetical citations where needed, and to be clear that we know which articles/authors you are referencing.
You will post directly to our course blog, so what you write will become the temporary landing page. Be sure to define terms and unpack assumptions for us, using your posts as occasions to teach. Because the blog is somewhat performative, I'll ask you to title your posts creatively (or insightfully). Feel free to compose your post as a response to someone else’s, if you see an interesting conversation starting on the blog.
Enjoy the task, yet again!
The Critical Blog Post
For your follow-up critical blog post (which you will do individually), please reflect on the mapping assignment and how some aspect of the task illumined/complicated/addressed/extended your reading of our texts for this week.
This exploratory may be the most critically demanding in terms of what and how to reflect! Do try to let the readings speak to and through your work so that we can make sense of how such work belongs on our journey towards rhetorical theory and practice (if it does?). What can/should we understand about cultural dis/identification? What can't we understand?
As always, this critical blog post can be reflective but should be formal. It should be a minimum of 2-3 well developed paragraphs in length (a couple of screens), and my great desire is to see you engage expertly with both task and texts, at times speaking through or alongside what we read, and speaking with some insight about what we read (citing where necessary and embedding links where relevant). As your post will be intertextual, I'll ask you to use MLA or Chicago-style parenthetical citations where needed, and to be clear that we know which articles/authors you are referencing.
You will post directly to our course blog, so what you write will become the temporary landing page. Be sure to define terms and unpack assumptions for us, using your posts as occasions to teach. Because the blog is somewhat performative, I'll ask you to title your posts creatively (or insightfully). Feel free to compose your post as a response to someone else’s, if you see an interesting conversation starting on the blog.
Enjoy the task, yet again!
