Post 2

Essentially, the primary argument from Digital Griots seems to be two-fold: "...it is the wide range of cultural practices, multiple literacies, rhetorical mastery, and knowledge of traditions that DJs in black traditions represent that make them griots, link them to other griotic figures, and offer a model for writing that thoroughly weaves together oral performance, print literacy, mastery, and interrogation of technologies, and technologies that can lead to a renewed vision for both composition and African American rhetoric" (13).

Thus, Banks advocates not only the reader's acknowledgement of the role of the DJ-as-griot, but also that this figure serves as a template for scholarly pursuits in the field of comp/rhet. This mantra continues to be championed throughout the text, weaving together an array of tactics to reinforce his argument including scholarly and primary sources, classroom syllabus and lesson plan breakdowns, as well as personal anecdotes from "in-the-trenches" experiences.

 

Chapter 5, was interesting because as a budding teacher, it was an advocacy for change in the classroom and the played-out tactics of teaching composition. It seems that because our culture is saturated with media and networking technologies that so many have access to, it makes little sense not to incorporate these practices, including those of the DJ-as-griot into a classroom setting. This chapter is a kind of call-to-arms to the scholar-as-teacher to overhaul methods of perhaps tried but now untrue teaching tactics in favor of progressive definitions, innovative syllabus framework and lesson plan execution, as well as an emphasis on technological attention that is in the tradition of the storyteller but links to present-day and future development. Hip-hop is just one avenue for this concept (158). Banks ends with a litany of elements needed to further engage students and communities, "...we need painstaking digital documentation and preservation of African American stories, sayings, oral histories, proverbs, toasts, jokes, and other oral texts across generations in order to have a fuller historical record preserved as we continue to develop new bodies of folklore. African American rhetoric 2.0 must build a strong focus on studying and changing the relationships that endure between race, ethnicity, culture, rhetoric, and technologized spaces" (164). 

However, I have to wonder as a white guy, where this fits for me? Do I have any business bringing a Jay-Z text into the classroom or teaching a hip hop themed course? I don't think so. Therefore, I was pressed to find application. The most valuable part of the text is perhaps then how the theory is put into practice in service of the community. The seminars outlined in the center of the text which includes a recollection of how the seminars came to exist and develop, moving writing samples from contributors, and even a course outline complete with texts and topics demonstrates a rare commitment to the notion of democratic education actually at work within a segment of an educator's community. This section is worthy of expansion into its own complete theoretical text as well as an addendum of writing prompts, sources, and suggested lesson plans.I can see how when teaching freshmen, or ESL students, or just students who are trying to confront their fears about writing "the Queen's English" it seems like they would respond nicely to have course outline such as the ones Banks presents.

 

 

Question: Do you see technology as a neutral tool that does what you want it to, or do you think that the tool has a lot embedded in it that seeks to direct or influence you?  If you’re a technology user, especially in a classroom, how much of the conversation in Digital Griots is ongoing in the spaces you inhabit?

DJ

In my ignorance & before reading the excerpt from Digital Griots, I had to look up the term griot.  In my online search, I came across a trailer for a movie titled Griot (a documentary about the collaborative efforts of two musicians from different cultures that met and found strong similarities in the music that each was creating), which included this text:  "a mind full of knowledge a word full of solution."  This simple phrase stuck with me as I read Banks’ intro and first few chapters.

Banks described the DJ as a modern manifestation of griot–storyteller, of an oral tradition, holding the community’s trust and telling stories that can be seen as “survival technologies” that demonstrate the resistance of a community to being coded out of a dominant society (22).  He described the DJ/griot as a “time binder” per Tom Hale in Griots and Griottes (23). He likened the practice of the DJ/griot to the practice of a digital, multimodal literacy:  "arranging, layering, sampling, and remixing . . ., keeping the culture, telling their stories and ours, binding time as they move the crowd and create and maintain community” (24), but also using verbal play in way that reflected the values of the community and helped to shape the moral character of their listeners (24, quoting Gilbert Williams’ work). It is a powerful theoretical, metaphorical reframing of literacy that does indeed seem to have potential as we develop notions of digital literacy, particularly for people that are marginalized in our real spaces and now in our cyberspaces.

It seems that the digital world bears the burdens of our real world prejudices as actors there import their biases, racisms, homophobias, misogyny into these new spaces, but Banks' book really reinforced for me both the value of reflecting and thinking critically about our behavior and the great potential for a digital literacy to affect how those spaces are ultimately built.  This hasn’t happened yet; it is happening now.  I think this is in part something that fascinated me about Banks’ emphasis on the quality of the griot that is nonlinear, unbound by time.  Such a metaphor as this allows us to simultaneously consider traditional binaries such as resistance/oppression, self/community and tradition/future.  Thinking back to the words that struck me in the movie trailer, it seems to me that this is how words full of solution become actual solutions to inequality, denial of access, denial of recognition and self.  As Banks more eloquently states it:

helps us to imagine both social resistance and affirmation, helps us to link divergent and sometimes competing narratives without flattening their differences, and helps us to keep cultures and technologies linked (30).

So, while thinking about what it means to be a modern day griot, to “imagine these Hip Hop principles as a blueprint for social resistance and affirmation: create sustaining narratives, accumulate them, layer, embellish, and transform them” (27), I began to wonder what are some examples of these practices is being used.  Further, how can we use this in terms of pedagogy?

Singing in the Reign of Copyright Law

The first part of Remix focuses on how we can regain today a culture of our past—amateur interactivity and creativity with expressive works, what Lessig characterizes as the Read-Write (“RW”) culture, meaning that the individual can do more than just read the content—the person can also “write” to it (28-29). Remix is one form of writing to content in which other people’s works are transformed in a new creation, but RW culture encompasses amateur or user interactivity with content more broadly.

Lessig uses the example of John Philip Sousa’s outcry against phonographs in 1906 as an example of our past culture that valued amateur engagement with creative works. Sousa believed that the ability of machines to play songs for people simply to listen to would dampen people’s singing of those songs and learning of music. As Sousa decried, “The child becomes indifferent to practice, for when music can be heard in the homes without the labor of study and close application, and without the slow process of acquiring a technique, it will be simply a question of time when the amateur disappears entirely” (26).

So what do kids singing songs have to do with remix today? According to Lessig, the connection is that, in both cases, “the RW creativity does not compete with or weaken the market for the creative work that gets remixed” or sung. Both activities of singing “the songs of the day” and remixing other people’s work involve acts of creativity for the person engaged in the endeavor that can complement the original work.

One might find it strange that the tech-savvy Lessig gives so much prominence to the old Sousa example throughout his book. To some, Sousa may sound like a Luddite, which Lessig is not. Lessig does not question the basic premise of Sousa’s attack against record players for allegedly dampening singing and the learning of music. The argument raises an empirical question that probably is unanswerable today for lack of data, but one might surmise that many people sang along with the record player (as they do today with the radio and karaoke machines) and with a greater number of songs at their disposal. And some people may have been inspired to become musicians or write music after listening to music played on the “infernal machines” that they might not have otherwise been able to hear. It is not so clear that Sousa himself would have embraced today’s remixing of music by DJs like Girl Talk.

Yet Lessig remixes the Sousa example. What Sousa feared was the amateur’s loss of active engagement with musical works: instead of singing or performing them, amateurs can just listen to them. That passive state of receiving content like an inert receptacle (read: couch potato) is what Lessig calls the Read-Only (“RO”) culture. People can only read the work, but not add to it. For much of the twentieth century, the technologies of content dissemination (phonograph, radio, tape recorder, TV, CD) really only allowed RO culture. In other words, the machines made people passive. But the Internet changed everything. It makes being passive passé.

Thus, the lesson of Sousa is still relevant today. As Lessig notes, “ironically for Mr. Sousa, [the] new infernal machines . . . will enable an RW culture again” and foster the kind of amateur interactivity with culture that Sousa lauded (33). Lessig picks up on a key part of Sousa’s testimony before Congress in which he said, “I have never known that it was unlawful to get together and sing” (32). The testimony was a not- so subtle rebuke of expansive views of the public performance right to reach even “singing in the streets” by the public (32). Even Sousa, a famous composer of copyrighted works, recognized the need for limits to copyright, so as not to stop such amateur activity and engagement.

In reading this section, I could not help but be reminded of the somewhat recent example of the  chorus of fifth graders from PS22 in Staten Island. Although the story of the PS22 chorus became famous after Lessig’s book, it is exactly what Lessig’s talking about.

The PS22 kids are led by Gregg Breinberg. Breinberg started teaching the kids pop songs, both oldies and recent hits. In 2006, he began posting on YouTube a few videos of the chorus’s rehearsals at school. He also blogged about the chorus on his own blog, with videos of the kids embedded. Then, at the end of 2008, the PS22 chorus had its “YouTube moment.” Gossip blogger Perez Hilton saw videos of the kids’ performances of Tori Amos’ songs and liked them so much he started blogging about them. Soon, Amos herself heard about them, and arranged to hear the chorus in person. Upon hearing the kids perform one of her songs live, Amos was so moved that she was brought to tears. Said Amos, “The fact that the children are so versatile—I didn’t expect this level of ability from a children’s choir and was really blown away, touched, thrilled and inspired all at once.” Stevie Nicks, of Fleetwood Mac, had a similar emotional experience hearing the kids perform her “Landslide” on video, as did Suzanne Vega in watching the chorus perform her “Language.” The accolades from the artists soon brought the kids huge media attention, appearances on Nightline and Good Morning America, and performances for New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and U.S. Senator Charles Schumer. If you recall, this phenomenon by the end of September 2009, the PS22 chorus videos generated over 9 million views on YouTube.

The sheer joy the kids’ singing has brought to people and even to the artists of the music themselves would lead one to believe that the kids’ activity is all legal under copyright law. The only problem: it’s not, or at least it’s not clear it is legal. Technically, the playing of the music video on YouTube and any performances to the public or at a public place would constitute public performances of the song, which would require permission (whether express or implied) from the copyright holders unless it is fair use. Creating copies of the video would also implicate the right to copy. Although there is a clear exemption for singing “in a classroom or similar place devoted to instruction” for learning’s sake, the publicly available videos of the kids’ singing on YouTube fall outside this classroom exemption.

My question for the class is: So is it fair use? How would Lessig have used this example if the book were written after these events?

Invention as a Social Act

Karen Burke LeFevre’s comprehensive work Invention as a Social Act establishes a continuum of perspectives on invention that describe influences on the writer and his or her invention processes. Perspectives on the continuum include the Platonic, the Internal Dialogic, the Collaborative, and the Collective. LeFevre notes that these positions represent “degrees of emphasis and overlapping views” rather than “adversarial and mutually exclusive camps” (49). I would argue that points on her continuum more specifically describe ways of understanding the inventor, specifically views of the autonomy or interdependence of the inventing writer.

LeFevre’s Platonic perspective describes the writer as working alone, reflectively searching within for the as-yet undiscovered truth. The Internal Dialogic perspective views invention as a conversation carried on with an imagined other self, bridging the gap to the external social world. The Collaborative perspective places invention outside the writer’s mind and situates it in genuine interaction between people, recognizing that both parties contribute to the invention process. Finally, the Collective perspective views society as the “locus of invention” and the inventor as product or even victim of abstract socio-cultural forces. These various perspectives resonate in theorists who discuss the role of audience in invention and in the theories that inform our electronic invention environments.

LeFevre’s ideas seem to fit in well with the postmodern challenging of the Romantic version of the genius inventor/author such as Bakhtinian idea of author as orchestrator of ideas and language. This metaphor emphasizes how authors exist in a realm that is saturated with texts, images, films, arguments, and narratives. In this realm the writer is rarely writing in a vacuum and is therefore not creating something entirely new and is instead working with the discursive sources at hand taking bits and pieces here and there to form a work.

The implications for writers, or scholars and researchers generally, seem significant. There is an implied need for a dramatic redefining, or rethinking of attitudes towards collaboration, both purposeful and unintentional – by this I am referring to our previous class readings and discussions about collaborations and how it is clear that it occurs often without the writer’s acknowledgement. Composition researchers could/should shift the attention from writer as sole creator to a broader definition that allows for the inevitable collaboration that she argues occurs for writers.  It also seems an organic fit for the classroom and therefore as teachers we need to be implementing this perspective into how we teach because it seems more accurate to what really happens as our students write.

Question:

How does, say, peer-review fit into the idea of collaboration/collective invention?

Pen 15

As I read Gilbert and Gubar’s article from The Madwoman in the Closet, I was struck by how I’ve never thought of a pen as a penis, which is probably healthy in many ways but I can see how that was the male in me not seeing the pen for what the pen is. 

However, according to Gilbert and Gubar, that is far too reductive. They preface their argument by citing the actual references to the pen as a penis and the many allusions made by male authors ranging in time from medieval philosophers to the Romantics (not surprising) and then to Freud (again, not surprising). The argument they are making is that in a very real way the pen, like the penis, has the ability to not only “generate life”, but to “ create a posterity to which he [the author] lays claim” (154). This spilling of the authorial ink onto the paper is an act of creation where, and these are telling metaphors, the author is said to have a “penetrating imagination” or a “piercing” quality. Women then, are unable of true creation but are thought of as kind of carriers.

They add that for male artists there is an “anxiety of influence” stemming from the achievements of their predecessors. Female authors, rather, are under an “anxiety of authorship” which they define as a “radical fear that she cannot create, that because she can never become a ‘precursor’ the act of writing will isolate or destroy her” (157).

This anxiety is further followed by other anxieties that the literary forefathers will subdue her voice and identity as a writer escape the dilemma she faces in defining her subjectivity and potentials. Bloom claims that a young poet suffers from the anxiety of belatedness, thereby being unable to successfully rival his literary fathers. But Gilbert and Gubar revised Bloom’s male centered model to make into account the experience of literary daughters. They argue that women writers like Jane Austin, Emile Dickinson do not fit into Bloom’s theory, as there are no material precursors under the male literary tradition. So the literary daughters have the anxiety of authorship imposed by the pervasive view of writings as only male activity- the pen as a metaphorical phallus.

It seems then, that unlike the literary sons who suffer from anxiety of influence, the literary daughters’ anxiety of authorship is positive, and creative, offering them less competition and more grateful connection to their foremothers. However, the literary daughters’ deep sense of insecurity of writing can be found in their infected sentences of uneasiness and repression. But their creativity free from the anxiety of influence helps them to begin new and unique women writing tradition with freshness, novelty, radically making distinct from male writing. They create their own poetics because of the anxiety of authorship.

I wonder how this applies to today’s female writers. There seems to be a number of successful foremothers to rely on. Where does the 21st century woman writer fit into this theory? I guess there are now mothers of the 20th century, grandmothers of the 19th century, great grandmothers of the 18th century, maybe some great-great grandmothers. Their work may not date back to ancient Rome, but still it is an impressive congregation of a female tradition. Do today’s women have enough material to “revise”? Does that mean they now experience the “anxiety of influence”?

Collaboration Disconnect

Chapter 7 from Writing Together: “Old Beginnings”

In chapter 7, Lunsford and Ede quite astutely, point out that many of the students in writing classes are not studying to be professional writers; and many of their chosen professions will have them working collaboratively in creating work-place documents. I found this very provocative because while the goal for genre-based writing is to teach them to be able to write well in a myriad of areas, the “purloined letter” of solitary writing that has burrowed deep into the humanities can be seen as a disservice to our students.

After I read this chapter, I reflected on my writing classes and this class is the first that allowed a seminar paper to be a collaborative effort (which with Dr. Rupiper-Taggart’s history with collaborative writing it isn’t a surprise). Still, it causes concern as to why we as teachers of writing are seemingly so antiquated in this area. This seems especially odd because, from my experience, many of my teachers stress how studying in groups can assist in understanding a topic, and through practice I believe this to be true. So, if studying in groups can lead to stronger learning, why is it seen as different for creating a document? Wouldn’t that also enhance the learning process? This notion seems to dismiss different learning styles and forces a modus operandi that limits students rather than enables them. Perhaps the worry is that the distribution of work won’t be fair, that one student will do most of the work while the other barely contributes. And while that could be a real issue, there are a series of balances that can be put into place that will help keep that kind of behavior in check. Also, the benefits, as we have discussed in class, aside from increased learning, could include how collaboration can also lead to a decrease in plagiarism. 

Allowing for students to collaborate perhaps shouldn’t be a requirement but to say that it can’t be an option seems antiquated. Interestingly, this idea is so pervasively engrained in the humanities that though working together on many published articles came easy for Lunsford and Ede, they were warned against such practices (because they wouldn’t receive “favorable tenure decisions”, implying that they collaborations are somehow lacking). And those that did not discourage the practice bombarded them with questions and were amazed that they were able to effectively write together ay all.

This idea (or “purloined letter”) of “solitary writing” is especially interesting in view of the ideas discussed Latour, Foucault, Barthes, and even Eliot.  If we apply the post-modern ideas of authorship writing, even if done in solitude, ceases to be a solitary activity.  According to aspects of these theories, everything we create is in collaboration with other objects, other ideas, and other traditions that have impacted our beliefs, our research, our understanding. How then, can we dismiss out rightly the idea that an actual collaboration can be anything but beneficial?

Questions:

What other benefits can our students gain from a collaborative effort?

Are there any ideas for assignments especially designed for collaboration?

Milton's Contract: "The five-pound epic"

Historical evidence on author-publisher relations in the developing book trade in late-seventeenth century England as seen by Lindenbaum highlights that literary property, as the right of the author, was considered distinct from and had encompassed the publisher’s copyright. The earliest preserved contractual agreement that transferred a right to print from the author to his publisher was John Milton’s publication contract with Samuel Simmons for Paradise Lost in April of 1667. In this contract, Milton agreed to accept five pounds at the commencement of the contract, five pounds at the end of the first edition (when 1,300 copies had been sold to “particular reading Customers”), and five pounds each at the end of the second and third impressions (of 100 works each) in return for the manuscript of Paradise Lost. Both Milton and Simmons agreed that these three editions would not run more than 1,500 copies each. Twenty pounds for a manuscript of an epic poem extremely seems modest by the standards of that time, but evidence of the amount typically paid for the sale of a manuscript when Simmons purchased Paradise Lost is too scant to conclusively determine that Milton was underpaid for the poem. While a publisher’s unfair treatment of an author might indicate a superior position in the author-publisher relationship that would have allowed it to control all of the rights to print and sell manuscripts, this did not appear to be the case with Milton’s contract and the circumstances surrounding its signing. To the contrary, Milton appeared to have the upper hand in this arrangement, as the contract contained provisions that protected Milton as an owner of specific property rights in the manuscript even after the right to print the work had been assigned to Simmons.

            Perhaps the most telling sign that Milton retained some form of literary property in Paradise Lost after assigning the right to print to Simmons was that one of the clauses in Milton’s contract allowed him to demand an accounting of sales at reasonable intervals. Should Simmons fail to provide such accounting as demanded, Simmons would be under a duty to pay Milton the five pounds for the whole impression as if it were due then rather than after completing the sales of 1,300 copies of the poem. The inclusion of such a clause into the contract seems to indicate that both Milton and Simmons thought that the author of a manuscript possessed some form of property right in the work even after the right to print the work was assigned to a printer. Because the right to demand an accounting of sales was a legal or equitable right that only a co-owner of a property interest or a beneficiary in a trust relationship could own, it appears that both Milton and Simmons considered the author of a manuscript its property owner, putting the printer in possession of the manuscript in the position of a trustee for as long as they owned the more limited right to print the work. Lindenbaum also points to another clause in the contract that suggests that Milton was in possession of some form of property right in the work. The cap on 1,500 copies of the work that Simmons could print ensured that the printer’s profits would not disproportionally exceed the author’s due and provides additional evidence to support the claim that the printer possessed a more limited right to print the work that stemmed from the author’s more encompassing property right. Milton’s publication contract for Paradise Lost thus provides a rare and invaluable glimpse into a notion of literary property as an author’s right acknowledged by both authors and publishers even before authors were recognized as capable of owning copyright in their work.

Questions:

·      While this contract in many ways showed some authorial understanding or legal savvy on Milton’s part, in what way was the contract lacking as evident by the destitution of his granddaughter?

·      Would you agree with the notion that it was desperation due to being out-of-favor that motivated Milton to use Simmons?