Now that I’ve read “Visualizing English: Recognizing the Hybrid Literacy of Visual and Verbal Authorship on the Web,” I’m left wondering if my blog’s title and purpose is interesting enough for anyone to pursue reading it, and more importantly interact with it. Should I have named it “globtacular” for it to be taken seriously? You, my fellow classmates, would all probably read it in either case, since it is one of Dr Rhodes’ expectations, yet I wonder if anyone else will stumble upon this glob by chance and make a contribution. My guess is that it won’t pop up on any search engines. (If you are not my classmate and have read this much, could you just say “It happened. This blog popped up on my search for something”?
If the right person does come across this thing, it might gain some interest I suppose if I take the time to make it of interest, to seduce like with word foreplay. Perhaps after I pass the comprehensive exam, I’ll take more time to nurture it, to grow with it. The idea of blogging suddenly has my interest.
Now back to the article. It points to the essential balance between words and images to have a good web page and more importantly, I think, is that the words and images should communicate, talk to each other; images should not simply “illustrate” the words, “but […] invoke the spirit of mutually illuminating dialogue” (32). It makes me think of the handouts I write, for my high school students, where I stick clip art on—the handouts, not the students. The clip art, I think, connects with the activity. They aren’t usually illustrations, but I never thought about using it, clip art, so that it would interact and talk to the words. I can see why that is desirable, of course, as I have done that. But could there not be an appropriate occasion for an image to merely illustrate the words on the page? Hmmm. I guess depending on the way you might look at it, even in children’s books, the images that illustrate the words on the page talk to the story. I’m beginning to think our author, Craig Stroupe, is wasting a lot of ink and, more importantly, energy. I’ve said this before about other great authors and later ate my words, so who knows. Nevertheless for now, I would hate to assume it must be so just because a great rhetorician says it is. If I do, once I do, another great rhetorician is bound to come along with what seems equally plausible. I’ve allowed that to happen to me as well. Is a sentence with an appositive phrases not as good as one without?
Stroupe makes use of Peter Elbow’s metaphor of cooking with complimentary or even conflicting words is nice. Certain words simmering and interacting making the result rich with flavor—what more to say? It seems that cooking with a combination of words and images is being used as support for Stroupe’s point, or perhaps Stroupe is building on Elbow’s idea—yes.
Elbow’s metaphor “Growing,” or “‘trying to help words grow,’ through a recursive and self-interrogational process” is puzzling (19). The way I see this is that growing must be similar to repetition, where one or more words are repeated as the ideas grow. If this is so, Elbow must be building on ancient rhetoric.
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2 comments:
I think your reaction to the "Visualizing English" article helps explain my concern with these articles. They seem to profess egalitarian ideals - allowing the voiceless a voice through technology; however, competition abounds in the technological world because if you do not perform adequate "word foreplay" to "seduce" an audience, you lose as an author/communicator. How is this more egalitarian? lol
Re: Lemke's "Literacies Are Legion"--
Lemke is apparently interested in sounds, which could be based on just the title and the alliteration in the first sentence, “Literacies are legion.” I bet if I went to Lemke’s webpage, I’d find more than images and typed words. This author will certainly have sounds emerging from behind the screen. I’m also guessing that the sounds don’t just sound like what is written or seen but also communicate with what is on the screen—dialogically interactive. Early on Lemke discusses “vocal sounds” and “voice-annotated documents and images” in his essay about metamedia literacy (71).
Lemke makes the interesting point that “Literacies are themselves technologies” (71). Because literacy is not a new idea, the knowledge that literacy or literacies are technologies is too often is overlooked, besides when we are reminded of the advancements of the printed word and moving from non-standard spellings to listing correct spellings in dictionaries and even Scrabble books, for example. What would the world be like if we did not have any of these technologies and the ability to communicate ideas? As Lemke states. Literacies have given “us the keys to using broader technologies” (71). Again, I don’t always believe our experts. How can Lemke say “literacies are legion” and still go on to say that “there must always be a visual or vocal realization of linguistic signs that also carries nonlinguistic meaning” (italics added)(72)? He must be able to comprehend that there might be some genius who is both deaf and blind and also “literate.” If "literate" is a words, an adjective, describing one who is “1. Able to read and write. 2. Knowledgeable; well-read. [or] 3. Well written”—as defined in The American Heritage Dictionary 3rd ed., it seems to me that to read could mean to interpret, even read something that is not merely written or typed on pages. A deaf and blind person is able to interpret several unseen or unheard things, even if not words. Could feeling something be a text for a blind and deaf person? Could interpreting something by feeling with the hands be reading? To be “well-read” could mean to be able to interpret things in many more ways than interpreting written or typed literature. Or am I wasting my own ink in this disputation? I’ve heard that the other senses of the deaf and blind are heightened because of their lack of sight and sound. Excuse me for nit-picking at Lemke’s ideas, but as I always say, always, I am always weary of people who always use absolutes. Interestingly enough, Lemke does not see that he contradicts himself as he later discusses that “We cannot get by anymore thinking that there is just one thing called literacy" even though he limits literacy within the realms of sight and sound (73). Is it that his use of absolutes makes it easier for him to make his statements stronger? If our answer is yes, and if we also agree with Stroupe in his “Visualizing English” when he says “What is easy is never literate,” then it must follow that Lemke's use of absolutes to make his argument easier restricts his words from becoming something that one who is literate the ability to read it, whether he or she is deaf or blind or not (20).
Lemke also says “Literacies are always social,” and I more or less know this or—should I say—knew this (73). I question this idea only because it is from someone who is so sure he is right that he does not even humor us with the possibility of being wrong. Thinking this through--Of course we know that we gained literacy socially, from learning from others, from somewhere. We could not have learnt it without having interacted. Okay, I can move on—Lemke is right. I just had to think this out. Because this is my journal, I can do that.
There is so much more to say about this essay, but I am out of time for now.
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