Flotsam and Jetsam: The Story of Chaos

Can I get two things off my chest?

1. I will never abandon the idea that students should learn how to write an essay in the composition classroom.

2. Are these authors ever going to explain why they do funky things with the text? Sirc’s font changes and marginal neglect were obviously done for a purpose—but it’s oblivious to my information-only oriented mind why.

For once, I found a reading that made sense, that I reacted both positively and negatively to, and thought about implementing in a future class: Geoffrey Sirc’s “Box-Logic.”

First, let me reveal my support for this idea.

· Duchamp’s Green Box of chaos in which “it was up to the reader to shuffle these cards as he or she pleased” create possibilities for creativity and a new kind of meaning-making (112).

· “Text as box = author as collector” seems a little fourth-grade art project, but the idea that students “work with lived texts of desire” makes me feel feverish again (117). If it brings passion back into the classroom, bring it on. Imagine students passionately working on this project, remembering it, and remembering the lesson it taught. It may not be the creation of an essay, but—as Matt reminded me last week—we also teach rhetoric. Capturing “a mood or vision” and “renewing existence” are a bit whimsically put, but think of the off-shoot lessons, free writes, and smaller assignments you could pair with the making of a box…communicating effectively requires skills that do not HAVE to be taught with words (121).

· Even if collecting objects in a box disgusts you, Sirc offers Thomas C. Buell’s “Notes on Keeping a Journal” to show other possibilities (125). Asking students to create their place in time creates a multitude of options. Think of the prompts you could give them and the critical thinking on current issues it would foster.

GAH. I get as giddy as Sirc does. But not to the point where I think this will make my classroom “the poignant mix of poverty and desire, laced with an aesthetic of the cool” (118). There’s too many hipsters in this town to make this idea..erm…unique.

Now. Here are my stick-in-the-mud thoughts (I want English folk to have paper-cut-on-the-hand as their idiom!):

· What if students are not passionate about this idea? What is to stop them from throwing together scraps in their dorm room the day the project is due?

· That said, carrying around a shoebox or any other box IS fourth-grade crafts level.

· As with all new media, I wonder how evaluation will occur. Although grading essays is subjective, at least we have rubrics. When composing turns into art, how is it fair to judge?

· There is no way an entire composition and rhetoric class should be entirely based on the box. When Sirc says one of the goals of his classroom is “to show [his] students how their compositional future is assured if they can take an art stance to the everyday, suffusing the materiality of daily life with an aesthetic,” I almost died a little bit. There is no way this lesson will transfer into every other discipline—think doctors, office workers, or plumbers. No. It’s loony.

· The example of Greg’s email is all I needed to convince me a traditional composition class should still be implemented in some way. He has a voice and stories to tell; I get it. But I am aware that my class might be the only writing course a student takes in college. It is therefore my duty to do what I can to prepare them for college writing and writing outside of academia. Greg’s lack of punctuation and grammar issues would hold him back in the so-called “real world.” Whimsy aside, there are bigger fish to fry in some cases. (Bigger books to bind? I will write a coffee table book called English Major Idioms.)

Don’t judge me for my love of this idea. There is a fear that I will become like Cornell, with boxes full of junk and “treasures” that will land me on hoarders someday.

I used to call it sentimentality. Now I’ll call it ART!