Critical Application: Stitching Birkerts

Critical Application: Stitching Birkerts into our thinking and writing.

Birkerts concludes The Gutenberg Elegies focusing on an opposition between “the solitary self” and “the collective.” For Birkerts, a true self is solitary and a true sense of self exists only in solitude; this condition of selfhood is cultivated best through the pages and linear lines of books. Birkerts sets against this condition of solitary selfhood the “condition of connectedness” that he associates with what he terms “the ever-expanding electronic web.” “They are not only extensions of the senses,” he argues about the technological improvements of the electronic age in his “Coda,” “they are extensions of the senses that put us in touch with the extended senses of others.”  In other words, the problem is not so much that we are, in the age of overwhelming information, overloading our senses by extending their range and reach; more troubling for Birkerts, we are extending ourselves and our senses into and among the extended senses of others. “Others” is the real pejorative term here (224).

This is where I disagree most strongly with Birkerts’ understanding of the “amniotic environment of impulses,” to use his telling metaphor of the web. I think Birkerts aptly characterizes the effect of this environment of impulses. He gets the technology right; the uncited echo of Marshall McLuhan’s defintion of technology as the “extensions of man” brings that home. We have, as McLuhan shows, always used technology to extend our senses–long before the age of electronic communication. Birkerts could be more precise in recognizing that such “extensions” would include the technologies of writing and print and bookmaking that informs the books that thus inform the selfhood he fears we are loosing. Books are part of an earlier hive of information and communication network. But no matter; he elsewhere in this book admits that his beloved book is, of course, a form of technology–even if that view is kept to a minimum. Birkerts gets not the technology wrong nor its implications (the extension of senses); he misses the point in fearing the connection to others. That is to say, I am troubled most by the “condition of connectedness” that Birkerts, it seems, forbids the act of reading. Why is connectedness the problem and solitariness the goal of our selfhood or of the creativity of reading and writing that informs it? Why must we think of creation in solitude?

Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein before it, suggests that Birkerts’ problem is to see connection as the problem…

My example of a critical application of Birkerts, stitching in, through paraphrase and direct quotation, a key idea from his conclusion to then set up the focus I will use to read Patchwork Girl: in effect, using Birkerts’ own terms and language (connectedness vs. solitariness) for my own thesis, though reversing his view, drawing distinctions.

It is worth noting that I have only recently discovered a thriving community of blogs out there that focus on books–passionate readers of books who blog about the books they are reading, want to read. A community of readers using the “condition of connectedness” of the web and blogging technology to extend their interest in book reading. What would Birkerts think? Here is a link to one such blog, So Many Books, which offers in its blogroll quite a list of book blogs. I look at this blog with interest in the social connections it makes between readers and books, through its “amniotic environment.” I am overwhelmed not by the electronic impulses, but by the reminder of the sheer number of books out there that we can, it seems, never catch up with and fully read.

On the Virtues of Preexisting Material, by Rick Prelinger: A recent article that takes up the problem of originality in the digital age, and proposes that we think instead of collage and patchwork. He speaks of orphaned works of creationg and quilts: the echoes of Frankenstein and Patchwork Girl are noticeable.

Workshop: Introductions

An infamous introduction:

“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents–except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”

–Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)

There is more than one way to do an effective introduction to an essay, just as there is more than one way to do a poor one. That’s lesson number one. Lesson number 2 is the focus for the workshop in class. A good way to improve upon the kinds of introductions (and related to these, the conclusions) you write is to think about writing more than one. Experiment with a different way of getting the reader into your essay, your argument, your narrative. Think of film as a relevant analogy: all films need to introduce and set up and even establish, so to speak, a thesis; but there are different ways to do it. And I would suggest, as with film, the way to find out how best to do the introduction is to have more than one to select from. Explore alternatives.

One basic way to introduce: begin generally and move toward your more specific focus and thesis statement. This establishes the context for the reader. The trick here is that you need to be careful not to be too general, too broad in your beginning. Context helps; generality hurts, distracts. For example, starting with sentences like this:

There are many films. Some are made from novels while others are not. Blade Runner is an example of a film. It is not made from a novel, but it can be viewed in relation to one….

A related danger is that in this introduction, you wander so far into generality, even when you think you are stating a thesis, it comes off as not specific. Something like: Blade Runner has lots of ideas that are also in Frankenstein (which, based on the last project, doesn’t directly answer the question given).

An antidote to being too general and vague is to start from the reverse position: challenge your reader directly with a close-up, something so specific it is not clear (yet) where the essay is going. Then back out to a middle-distance, where you state your focus and your thesis. In the case of an essay on Blade Runner, this would be to start in directly with an image or scene, then offer what the Graffs call ‘meta-commentary’: “What does this eyeball have to do with my focus?As I will argue in this essay, the eye…” I think of this as the ‘in media res’ approach: starting in the middle of the story, as it were, and using the specificity to focus your reader’s attention. This is also a way to borrow some rich, vivid imagery and language from your text and put it to work in your introduction, engage your reader with it.

Another option would be to do some combination of the two, the close-up and the distant/general view–to stay with film terminology, this is a tracking shot: where you follow a character into or out of a situation. This strategy provides context for the overall focus of your writing, but does so by also moving directly toward some specific points and questions. It locates your reader in the context of your argument before you get them to your specific statement of the argument. I found an example of this in a recent book review by Elizabeth Kolbert in ‘The New Yorker’ (a review of Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer).

Americans love animals. Forty-six million families in the United States own at least one dog, and thirty-eight million keep cats. Thirteen million maintain freshwater aquariums in which swim a total of more than a hundred and seventy million fish…[continues with several more sentences about pet-related expenses]

Americans also love to eat animals. This year, they will cook roughly twenty-seven billion pounds of beef, sliced from some thirty-five million cows. Additionally, they will consume roughly twenty-three billion pounds of pork… [more statistics]

How is it that Americans, so solicitious of the animals they keep as pets, are so indifferent toward the ones they cook for dinner? The answer cannot lie in the beasts themselves. Pigs, after all, are quite companionable, and dogs are said to be delicious. This inconsistency is the subject of Johanthan Safran Foer’s “Eating Animals.”

In addition to the structure of your introduction, you can and should also consider other poetic and rhetorical  issues–that is, your use of language to create and convey. Thus, consider being specific with your language; consider also using variation of your sentences, shifting from long to short delbierately. On that score, consider this example, the opening of a recent essay about Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch. Notice how the shift from longer to shorter sentences conveys the argument–that Rwanda has shifted, has changed. This rhetorical strategy (a matter of his style) thus also helps introduce his essay effectively. In this sense, he can show us what he is writing about.

When I began visiting Rwanda, in 1995, a year after the genocide, the country was still pretty well annihilated: blood-sodden and pillaged, with bands of orphans roaming the hills and women who’d been raped squatting in the ruins, its humanity betrayed, its infrastructure trashed, its economy gutted, its government improvised, a garrison state wtih soldiers everywhere, its court system vitiated, its prison crammed with murderers, with more murderers still at liberty–hunting survivors and being hunted in turn by revenge killers–and with the routed army and militias of the genocide and a million and a half of their followers camped on the borders, succored by the United Nations refugee agency, and vowing to return and finish the job. In the course of a hundred days, beginning on April 6, 1994, nearly a million people from the Tutsi minority had been massacred in the name of an ideology known as Hutu Power, and, between the memory of the slaughter and the fear that it would resume, Rwanda often felt like an impossible country. Nowadays, when Rwandans look back on the early years of aftermath, they say, “In the beginning.”

On the fifteenth anniversary of the genocide, Rwanda is one of the safest and the most orderly countries in Africa. Since 1994, per-capita gross domestic product has nearly tripled, even as the population has increased by nearly twenty-five per cent, to more than ten million. There is national health insurance, and a steadily improving education system. Tourism is a boom industry and a strong draw for foreign capital investment. In Kigali, the capital, whisk-broom-wielding women in frocks and gloves sweep the streets at dawn. Plastic bags are outlawed, to keep litter under control and to protect the environment. Broadband Internet service is widespread in the cities, and networks are being extended into the countryside. Cell phones work nearly everywhere. Traffic police enforce speed limits and the mandatory use of seat belts and motorbike helmets. Government officials are required to be at their desks by seven in the morning. It is the only government on earth in which the majority of parliamentarians are women. Soldiers are almost nowhere to be seen…. And Rwanda is the only nation where hundreds of thousands of people who took part in mass murder live intermingled at every level of society with the families of their victims.

First Project Follow Up

As part of my attempt to move us all away from a traditional model of  writing in schools (where you write only to the teacher, an audience of one; then throw away your thinking and work put into the essay, if not the essay itself, when you get it back), I plan to have us follow up each writing project in a couple ways.

1. I will be posting here some reflections on what I am seeing and noticing–strengths as well as some collective weaknesses we can add to our to-do lists. For this first time, I saw strengths throughout in how writers introduced the theses/focal points of their essays using a basic ‘template’ of some sort. To get right away to the ’so what’ and the ‘why you should care about this essay and my perspective on reading/writing.
   1. To consider just two examples (there were many more): Max effectively uses a version of the I used to think this/now I think this–complete with the template from the Graff’s (“Although my old self would disagree…”). I think it works very well and in fact allows him to be creative in his voice and style while still offering a clear thesis; Carolyn effectively uses Birkerts on the privacy of reading to set up and highlight her contrasting vision.
   2. One presentation (mechanics/punctuation) issue I saw frequently concerns run-on or fused sentences: basically, when a sentence has more than one sentence in it, incorrectly joined by a comma when it should be a period. This is one of the hangovers from the transition from oral to print: a sentence that in our head or in conversation can fit lots into it, but in print comes out sounding hurried, rushed, confusing. The page on run-on sentences at the Guide to Grammar and Writing is very good–includes strategies for repairing them and some self-quizzes. Take a look. This is a basic use of commas that you need to get control of so we can move on to some more complicated ways of putting commas (and other punctuation) to work for us in more stylistic ways.
2. A second way we will follow up on the projects you have completed: on the Wednesday following each project publication date (this Wednesday, for example), I will assign you to read through the essays of the writers from one of the writing groups. After reading, I will ask you to comment, briefly, directly on the writer’s blog (at the bottom of the essay posting). Your comment should respond to the following: Good writers are never fully satisfied; in the case of this class, each of the four projects could lead to something larger, different, hopefully stronger (namely, the final project in which one or more of these essays will be revised, expanded). If the writer were to go back to this essay at the end of the course, what might they do, where might they go further? What is here that you would encourage them to stay with, develop, build upon?
   1. You will be reading the writers from group #1
      1. 1.2.30 class: alex a., mike, tyler, kat cohen
      2. 1.30 class: cbevans., mallory, jcragle, claire

Thesis/Remediation

Conference reminder: I will be expecting each of you to meet with me for an individual conference (about your writing, your to-do list, the third project, questions from the reading) at some point before Friday April 3. You can stop by during my office hours or schedule a time to meet with me.

For the third writing project, ‘Remediated Wreading,’ we will continue to focus on developing and maintaing an effective and provocative thesis in our essays. With that in mind, you can go back to your second project and think now about how you might remediate the thesis–revise it, make it stronger, state it more clearly. One way to play with this: go to thesis builder and input the relevant information for your second essay; see what kind of thesis and essay structure it comes up with. It is a template, not the only way to construct a thesis–but for the purposes of learning, might be useful in highlighting some key components that might be missing from your thesis.

Another way to learn, to remediate, is to look at other, relevant models. Don’t forget to browse some of the essays from your peers (by way of the blogs). 

A third remediation we will be working on in the third project: how a new medium (film) takes up and ‘remediates’ an older medium (writing, print novel). The focus of the third project is to explain the ‘thesis’ (a key argument or idea or interest) that you see in the film you have chosen (its thesis about Frankenstein) and how the film, as a film (and not a book) shows/develops/elaborates that thesis.

thesis re-building tools

1]Mapping the thesis. To go back and re-vise the thesis as it is threaded (to see if it is threaded) through the essay. Re-sketch or outline the essay. Can do this in a list, outline form; if interested, you can play with this mindmap tool for a more visually oriented approach.

2]They Say / I Say template: Borrowed from Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein, a template or model for how to build a basic thesis or critical argument–recognizing that the basic academic argument makes explicit reference to what others say or conventionally think and then what you say in contrast or in response to complicate the traditiona view.

X tells a story about/argues _______ to make the point that ______. My own experience (in my view) with _______ yields a point that is similar/different/both similar and different. What I take away from my own experience with ________ is  _________. As a result, I conclude __________.

3]Thesis builder: a tool that offers a similar view for building a thesis based upon making your focus explicit and how that differs/relates to other views.

4]Screen-writing template? Details to come.