bomphiologia

As I was reading the entries for the most recent Teaching Carnival, I felt a jolt of excitement that has been missing from most of my reading this semester. Prepping for comps means delving into The Classics. Of course, many of my classics aren’t typically recognized as such. Sherry Turkle’s Life on the Screen and Allucquère Rosanne Stone’s The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age are important to my research but they ain’t ending up in ED Hirsch’s compendia of cultural literacy any time soon. What with revisiting older CMC texts, classics of rhet theory (so much Plato!), and modern classics of comp theory (my copy of Errors and Expectations just came yesterday), I haven’t really spent much time reading what’s actually being written about Internet discourse.

Of late, I’ve been feeling a little down about this whole PhD thing. I feel like I’m going to graduate with the ability to talk about the roots of my field but not anything happening since push technology was the hot new thing. I understand the need to root my knowledge, and I’ve actually valued being forced to read texts that I wouldn’t normally pick up and read on my own (I’m looking at you Edmund Burke), but it’s frustrating to look at the 2008 index of Computers and Composition and realize that I’ve made time to read absolutely nothing. Grr. So as yet another not-as-productive-as-I’d-liked Spring Break draws to a close, I make this promise to myself: I will read at least two articles per week that are a) not on my lists and b) in my area. I’ll share what I read each week and hopefully visitors will suggest additional readings. As I go, I’ll try and annotate the items I read, both for my use and for future generations of tech nerds.

Sound good? Let’s see if I keep to it.

Filed under: Uncategorized by alan

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