After a brief hiatus, I am back with my final reading notes of the semester. Finishing the course with Rickert made a lot of sense. Ambient Rhetoric brought together a lot of the theories and concepts we have discussed from the semester and also connected well with the other course I’m taking this semester, Classical…
Writing Instructor & Scholar
Tag: Reading Notes
ENG 894 Reading Notes: Neurobiology (Week 12)
I really enjoyed this week’s text mostly just because it was so out of my element and I like learning new things. Though a lot of the specific science isn’t very helpful for me in terms of my scholarly interests, one salient concept for me was the implications of neurogenesis. In the video they mentioned…
ENGL 894 Reading Notes: Ecology (Week 11)
With our readings for this week I found myself thinking about connections to Spinuzzi and Latour, and ultimately my interest was in how humans were portrayed as part of ecosystems in the readings. I was really struck by an early passage from Spellman in which he provides a passage he believes helps explain ecology. He…
894 Reading Notes: Ecology of the Mind and Affordances (Week 10)
This week’s readings had me going “hmmm” and “yes!” The “hmmm” was my primary reaction to Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of the Mind. Bateson’s text really challenged me, showing me the complexity of concepts that seem simple like “difference.” Ultimately what I took to be the most important concepts from his chapter was…
894 Reading Notes: Latour/ANT (Week 8)
I decided on a different approach for this week’s reading notes because I felt like terminology was so important for understanding Latour’s theory. Thus, I have decided to define what I see as major terms for this theory using quotes from Reassembling the Social. Intermediary: “what transports meaning or force without transformation: defining its inputs…
894 Reading Notes: Hypertext & ANT (Week 7)
As I was planning my readings notes for this week, I decided to start looking for images for inspiration to determine what to focus on since my thoughts were pretty scattered. When I typed in “hypertext” into an image search, I came across this image: What struck me when I first saw it was that…
894 Reading Notes: CHAT (Week 6)
In “Re-situating and Re-mediating the Canons: A Cultural-Historical Remapping of Rhetorical Activity” Prior et al. describe their project of resituating the rhetorical canon using cultural-historical activity theory as “fundamentally rhizomatic” (23). Thus, I have deemed it appropriate to have a rather rhizomatic post myself, with various offshoots of ideas/ notions that occurred to me as…
894 Reading Notes: Spinuzzi’s Genre Tracing (Week 5)
My notes this week will be a bit sparse because life happened this week, but I wanted to take some time to reflect on this week’s reading because I really liked it Spinuzzi’s Tracing Genres Through Organizations. Spinuzzi’s notion of changing the frame of the conversation in system design of one of workers as victims…
894 Reading Notes: Genre Theory (Week 4)
I really enjoyed our readings for this week on genre theory as they helped me to begin to draw connections to my previous thoughts on genre, our discussions of rhetorical situation and Foucault’s archaeological method. Caroline Miller and Charles Bazerman both emphasize that genre is more than form or a set of requirements that must…
Reading Notes: Foucault (Week 3)
While reading The Archaeology of Knowledge, I was particularly attuned to Foucault’s use of the term archaeology, since that seemed to be the central metaphor of the methodology. If I’m honest with myself, my first association with archaeology is probably Indiana Jones. From these movies, we get a view of archaeology as the project of trying…
