Satire Site

http://www.ohio.edu/people/jh386909/satire/

Storyboard

My Satire Website’s Site Mapish Thingy

Default – This page will include a brief definition of satire as well as a short passage on modern American satire (since that would be the focus of the class). There will also be a discussion of course goals, and something resembling a lit review. As well as hyperlinks within various pages, there will also be a menu on the left with links.

Satirical Concepts

v Irony – This will discuss some different types of irony and include embedded examples. Because irony is a rhetorical technique central to modern satire, this page could end up quite long and may need to be divided into more than one page.

v Invective – After defining the term, this page will include some examples (probably from Mencken, and maybe Ann Coulter too [who rarely uses anything but invective]).

Historical Examples

v Chaucer – While Chaucer obviously isn’t American or modern, his use of irony through superlative descriptions of certain pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales is a significant historical example of irony in satire. The CT is a kind of estates satire, a popular genre during Chaucer’s time; however, estates satire typically uses invective whereas Chaucer uses irony be describing how certain pilgrims are the best at things they shouldn’t be good at (i.e. the Monk is an expert hunter).

v Swift – Like Chaucer, Swift is an important figure in the history of satire written in English. I often have students rhetorically analyze “A Modest Proposal,” so this page will likely only have a short excerpt with some of Swift’s rhetorical strategies highlighted.

v Twain – This page will include excerpts from Twain’s work (and possibly some shorter works in their entirety, such as “Advice to Youth”). Twain also seems to exhibit something of a trend in the work of white male American satirists: appealing to a sense of individualism. Even though he comes from a very different place politically then, say, Mencken or P.J. O’Rourke, all three seem to rely heavily on appealing to a sense of individualism.

Parody and Satire – This page will make an important distinction between the two terms and include examples of each. Parody has one target and tends to comment only on that target whereas satire also includes some kind of social or cultural critique, and good satire tends to be target-rich. The Family Guy provides numerous examples of satire, and I will include an embedded clip of one of their Star Wars spoofs. South Park tends to be more satirical, and I will embed a clip of a South Park news clip that satirizes the BP oil spill and Tony Haworth’s response.

Us and Them – Satire can work to bring people together, but it ultimately operates on some level to divide people into “us” and “them.” Those people who get the joke are “in” on it, while someone else is meant to be the target of the joke. This is also a good page for discussing some aspects of satire by women and African Americans, which, unlike satire by white men, often appeals to a sense of community (which makes sense if you are not in a position of privilege).

v Satire by women – Will includes examples by Sarah Vowell, Ann Coulter, and other.

v Satire by African Americans – Some examples from before and during the Civil Rights movement of the sixties. I will also see if I can find a clip from Chris Rock that I can embed.

Satire and the news

v One page will discuss The Daily Show and the Colbert Report (and possibly some lesser known examples, such as InfoMania or Super News). I’m not committed to the title of this page, but it seems like The Daily Show and the Colbert Report deserve special attention as examples of video satire because of their cultural significance. It’s worth looking at the differences in their approaches, and a program like The Daily Show provides some great examples of the affordances of video for satirizing video, especially T.V. clips.

v This would also be a good page to discuss The Onion, which uses multiple modes but is still primarily known for its online news articles. The Onion takes a satirical approach that is similar to the Colbert Report by reporting fake news that deftly follows the genre conventions of real news. Sometimes they are so successful that their stories are picked up and re-reported as if they were real (or as close to real as Fox News ever gets).

Final Project Proposal: A Pedagogical Website on the Rhetoric of Satire

Based on some of the feedback I received regarding my satirical radio assignment, it seems that it might be useful for me to construct a website that would both operate as a resource for a course I may someday teach on the rhetoric of satire and offer some pedagogical justification for such a course (and for the more general rhetorical significance of satire). Thus, this website will present theory of satire as well as various multi-modal examples. Embedded videos, links to comic strips, etc. will allow the site to show examples side-by-side for comparison, and I will be able to illustrate concepts such as the difference between parody and satire (The Family Guy tends to parody whereas South Park tends to satirize). Additionally, while fair use allows for some pedagogical use of copyrighted materials, there is also plenty of satire in the public domain that I can include on the site, such as Twain, Swift, etc.

The site will primarily use HTML, although I may also use some Java script. I've already arranged for access to OU's new server that houses faculty and student websites. The research involved will primarily consist of finding sources that discuss some of the key aspects of satire (irony, invective, the tendency of satire to divide people based on who gets the joke and who is the target of it, etc.). I will also need to find examples of the different kinds of satire the site discusses, and to properly format these examples. The course would require a lot of analysis from the students, so I may also include some resources that would be helpful in that capacity.

Using New Media to Investigate Discipline-specific Literacies

I wrote the following proposal draft in response to CEA of Ohio's CFP:

In their 2007 CCC article, Douglas Downs and Elizabeth Wardle question the ability of first-year composition (FYC) to adequately prepare students for various rhetorical contexts using a fictional cross-disciplinary discourse. They claim that “more than twenty years of research and theory have repeatedly demonstrated that such a unified academic discourse does not exist and have seriously questioned what students can and do transfer from one context to another (Ackerman, Berkenkotter and Huckin, Carter, Diller and Oates, Kaufer and Young, MacDonald, Petraglia, Russell ‘Activity Theory’)” (552). This suggests a need for what the authors refer to as “Intro to Writing Studies” pedagogy, which could lead to more WID programs, yet numerous institutional, theoretical, and financial concerns prevent many universities from implementing such programs. Thus, we must craft new and creative ways for students to investigate discipline-specific literacies within the FYC classroom. New media provide opportunities for students to explore and practice various literacies as they start to engage in the discourse communities within their chosen disciplines, even if those disciplines require multi-modal literacy (i.e. film and music majors).

My presentation will focus on navigating these concerns through the use of a multi-modal assignment that asks students to investigate the kinds of literacies and genres that constitute their disciplines and future occupations. Each student then constructs a wiki page in order to present their findings to other students new to that field of study. The multi-modal presentation of his/her findings allows the student to gain experience with some of the researched composition practices, including the use of images and/or sound within the discourse community. Furthermore, the use of a wiki not only provides students with a new means of composition, it also encourages collaboration and peer-review, and it allows the class to build a knowledge base that can be added to and revised by subsequent classes. Therefore, students will write both for an audience within the classroom and for future students who will benefit from previous research while revising it with their own.

Reflecting on This Blog

In the course of writing blog posts this quarter, I realized fairly quickly that I wasn't really following the genre conventions very effectively. Initially, I conceived of this blog as an electronic venue where I would post short reading-response type essays. However, a few days after completing my first post, I remembered that I had not included a citation for the article to which I was responding. At the same time, it occurred to me that the authors of the articles to which I was responding could potentially Google themselves--or someone they know might Google them--and stumble upon my blog post. In this way, my blog's potential to reach an outside audience (however unlikely that might be) caused me to rethink my compositions as I was creating them, particularly regarding word choice. I also made some slight revisions to my first post because of these concerns. With that said, I still conceived of my audience as primarily consisting of the individuals within the classroom.

After a couple of posts, I also realized that I wasn't doing a very good job of utilizing the affordances of the blog. Those first two posts consisted entirely of text, lacking even a hyperlink, which would at least have offered some suggestion that I knew what I was doing. I think that this too may have come from my conceiving of the genre as more of a response essay than a blog post. From then on I made an effort to add some more dynamic elements to each post; however, I had some difficult in finding images that I would want to use because I was concerned about using those with open-source licenses, and because the subjects of my responses didn't seem to lend themselves well to the inclusion of images as there were few visuals I could think of that would significantly enrich the text.


CommonCraft's "Blogs in Plain English"
Hyperlinks, on the other hand, seemed to provide an easier means of adding something to a post that I could not add to a hard copy document. Even if it was just a matter of linking to the work to which I was responding, at least I knew that such links could prove helpful to an external audience should someone outside the classroom ever stumble upon the post. But hyperlinks also allowed me to easily offer additional resources to my audience of classmates, such as when I linked to the CommonCraft video I had mentioned in class a few days earlier. I would like to think that such links encouraged more productive discussions via the comments back and forth; at least that seems to be how it worked out based on some of the comments I received which referenced links.

The expectation to comment on other classmates' posts also seems to have facilitated some really interesting discussions. Sometimes, I would focus on one or two particular aspects of the readings in my own post, but then someone else's post would get me thinking about another aspect or another way of reading the article. I've used the blog tool in Blackboard to facilitate this kind of discussion; however, Bb doesn't seem to encourage the utilization of its affordances as much as blogger does, probably because students are used to using Bb but are not used to adding images or hypertext to anything they do in Bb.

I've also noticed that the genre of blogging seems to have affected my tone a bit. For instance, I tend to use more contractions than usual when I'm blogging. In fact, most of what I write is complete devoid of contractions; yet I've ended up using some in each paragraph of this reflection. It seems as though I've felt encouraged to do so by the genre in the same way that I've felt encouraged to incorporate images and links. I'm still an inexperienced blogger, but something about blogging seems to affect my tone as well as my aesthetic.


The image is linked to the source

I still have doubts about blogging assignments, mainly because of my concerns about tone and audience; however, I now recognize the differences and advantages of a "real" blog over a Blackboard blog. It seems that real blogs could further encourage students to incorporate images and links while still facilitating an ongoing discussion outside of class. I'm also considering starting another blog, so I suppose that means that I've bought into the technology.

Responding to Chapters on Responding, Peer Review, Networking, etc.

First off, Kara Poe Alexander's assignment on technology and literacy exhibits some striking similarities with my Textbook Chapter assignment. Her assignment focuses more on writing within career fields whereas mine addresses both career fields and the writing expectations of advanced courses within majors; however, my presentation of the assignment tends to privilege career fields (which reminds me, I ought to include the sample interview questions that I created for my students as part of the assignment prompt). One slight criticism of her assignment, then, comes from my own experience with a similar assignment. Students are not accustomed to conducting interviews as part of their research, and many of them will instinctively wait till the last minute to make arrangements. Then, many of them will realize that making such arrangements cannot be done effectively at the last minute (because of delays in email correspondence, availability, etc.). I require students to interview a professor within their field, but Alexander discourages this, instead requiring students to interview a professional currently working within the career field. While I can see some benefits to this approach, it will almost certainly further complicate the already potentially complex process of arranging such an interview. Also, I would be concerned about reifying the notion that the academy is somehow removed from the "real world," or, even worse, encourage the belief that "those who can't do, teach." With that said, I was pleased to find such an assignment within the book as it gives me further encouragement to continue developing my own version of it.

Since I keep referencing the textbook chapter assignment, I thought that it might be helpful to provide an example of student work. Thus, I have posted a student's essay to my audience wiki after receiving written permission from the author.

I would also like to add a warning to the list of possible things that can go wrong with multimodal compositions. Sylvia Church and Elizabeth Powell's chapter again raises the issue of file types. People employing various types of video cameras should be aware that some cameras that save videos to an internal hard drive use unusual files types that will require conversion to more standard file types, and that conversion may itself be a complicated process. For instance, I know that some Panasonic and JVC camcorders save their videos as .mod files. and these can be difficult to convert to a more usable format. I say this from my own experience with a Panasonic camcorder, and it's something that you may want to mention to students if they're considering borrowing someone else's camcorder for a video project.

Lastly, the chapter on building bridges with writing centers raises some great points about how an informed writing center can be a valuable tool in helping students navigate a complicated project.

I always encourage students to utilize our writing center, and I have used it myself, but I have not had as much interaction with the staff or the administration as I could in order to further help them help my students. Perhaps encouraging more interaction between the English department and the writing center would be a good place to start.

Wiki Link

My audience wiki, used to present material on Ede and Lunsford's article, "Among the Audience." Please feel free to contribute to it.

I want to start out by saying that I really enjoyed the most recent batch of readings focusing on wikis, and they sparked my thinking about other ways that I can incorporate wikis into the classroom. For instance, Cleary et al. mention Phillipson's practice of posting poems on a wiki and having the students annotate them, then they respond to each other's annotations. I wish I had thought of that a week ago because the students in the literary survey I'm TAing are currently studying sonnets by Petrarch and Wyatt. I've been trying to come up with ways to encourage more students to participate in their discussion sections, and I think that and annotation and response assignment like this would offer a great option for participating in class, especially to those students who tend to be quiet or shy.

The readings also made me think about the multimodal assignment that we're each expected to design. I came up with an assignment last spring that asked students to research writing in their disciplines, and then each wrote a short textbook chapter to present their research in a way that someone just entering their field could understand. I've been trying to come up with some way to make the assignment multimodal (more than it already is, since I was already asking students to think about and include visual elements). Wikis might be the answer. If I revise the assignment to ask them to design a wiki page presenting the information, then it would allow the class to create a kind of database on the writing expectations of various disciplines. Then, following Dickie Selfe's advice, I could offer extra credit to students who are willing to edit the wiki. The best part is, each new class could build on, update, and revise what previous classes had done. At least, that what I'm think thus far.

I also enjoyed discovering that the BGSU page on wikis uses the same CommonCraft video that I use to explain wikis to my own students. I mentioned this video in class a couple of weeks ago, but here it is if you haven't yet watched it (or for anyone viewing this blog who isn't in English 792E):

Expressivist Aesthetics and the Purposes of College Composition

I've briefly discussed a few of my concerns regarding the expressivist tendencies of some new media theorists; however, Geoffrey Sirc's article is the most explicitly expressivist I've read so far. He says (114), "I'm most interested in composition that has an ultimate poetic effect" while talking about teaching composition (rather than creative writing or graphic design). And he goes on to call for a focus on aesthetics in the classroom: "Our first aspect, then, to how we might use technology to achieve powerful ends with new media lies in aestheticizing the scene of composition in an idiosyncratic, obsessed way" (116). Hence, he envisions students as artists: "I want students--designers, now, not essayists--free for such associational drifts: entering things naively, without countless rehearsals; tying to capture a mood or vision" (121). This approach concerns me because I fear it will do little to prepare students for either college or the "real world." I appreciate any teacher who wants to teach their students passion for art, to teach them how to love something. However, I think that a purely aesthetic approach to composition is irresponsible.

I find it interesting that so much of the discussion of new media seems to stem from expressivism. We've heard arguments for this kind of composition pedagogy before from teachers who think that their main purpose is to facilitate their students' creativity and help them unlock their inner writers (now graphic designers). I, however, have a hard time buying into such arguments. That's not to say that I don't appreciate aesthetics. If I'm teaching texts by Milton or Shakespeare, I do so partly because I believe that they are examples of some of the greatest poetry written in the English language. I also do so because of how they reflect and challenge their contemporary social and political milieus, and they help us discuss how and why they continue to hold cultural value.

Sirc's argument for a focus on aesthetics is perhaps complicated by his own aesthetic: "It's important, I think, to have students work with lived texts of desire (rather than, say, the middlebrow academia of a Jane Tompkins or Mary Louise Pratt) in order to develop a passional aesthetic like Cornell's and Benjamin's" (117). The value placed on avante-garde art highlights it's ability to challenge, but perhaps also undermines the composition classroom's ability to give students access to a dominant discourse. Sirc argues that many modern composition teachers are basically curators; however, this assumes that teaching a dominant discourse necessarily perpetuates the hegemony. Can it not also provide awareness in order to challenge the hegemony? If we "let students use what they really care about and love (or hate) as the new subject matter in their work" (125), are we not somehow abjuring pedagogical responsibilities (not just institutional, but social)? I would like my students to enjoy what they are working on as well as be genuinely interested in it, but I'm not sure that that should be my highest priority.

Let me end with an example. Research shows that most students communicate with each other through text messages, but academics communicate primarily through emails. This has led some to suggest that we should start communicating with our students via text messages rather than emails. Wouldn't such a transition be a disservice to students in the long run? If we try to appeal only to their passions, how will they learn what they need to know?

Sirc, Geoffrey. "Box-Logic." Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition. Logn: Utah State UP, 2004. Print.

The "Digital Imperative" and 21st-Century Audiences

J. Elizabeth Clark's article, "The Digital Imperative: Making the Case for a 21st-Century Pedagogy," focuses on using new media in the classroom, and I am particularly interested in her discussion of audience. She claims that "artifacts of student learning have the potential to become actual published products, or works that raise questions around the public/private split of contemporary writing" (29), yet I have concerns about new media's assumed ability to help our students negotiate this split.

Clark describes "Ally," one of her students who entered the class with a common student perception of classroom writing tasks: "She thought of writing as a performance for the teacher, but not as something that had a significant role in her own life" (30). And she goes on to describe the effects of assignments that use new media on Ally's understanding of audience: "Without the ePortfolio and her blog, Ally's work in the course would have been a series of disconnected assignments written for a teacher-peer audience. With the publication of her work on the ePortfolio and the blog, her work immediately changed focus, as she now had the ability to share her work" (30). While it's possible that Ally developed the deep understanding of audience described in the article, we should not assume that assigning new media compositions will concretize student conceptions of their audiences.

Clark's desire to expand student audiences beyond the classroom highlights an issue that Joseph Petraglia refers to as pseudotransactionality, which basically refers to the inauthenticity of classroom writing tasks that--no matter how the prompt frames them--are always directed at a teacher-audience. Ally's "ability to share her work" is supposed to be transactional in that Clark describes it as being directed at a "real world" audience, with real world consequences. However, my own research suggests that the kind of blog assignment described by Clark does not transgress the pseudotransactional classroom situation quite as easily as we might assume. In fact, out of the 19 students in one Freshman Comp class I surveyed, when asked if they had ever been assigned to write for an audience other than the instructor, 8 identified a blog assignment, 6 identified various other assignments, and 5 said they never had such as assignment. I had not expected these responses, and I was surprised because the 8 students who identified a blog assignment were referring to an assignment they had just completed two weeks earlier in that vary class. In other words, 11 of the 19 students did not appear to conceive of the blog assignment as one that asked them to write for an audience other than the instructor. While this is only one class, their responses agree with much of what I've read and discussed with fellow instructors.

Clark addresses this issue with her second exemplum student, whose online personal essay included specific details of illegal activities, which could have had serious real world consequences that the student apparently did not foresee. After describing the student's situation, Clark says, "students--and in fact most users of Web 2.0 technologies--have yet to fully understand the implications of living a publicly accessible life. Responsible digital literacy can only come from helping students to make conscientious choices about how to use technology conscientiously and critically" (31). I agree with this statement, and despite my criticisms of parts of Clark's argument, I think that teaching new media is a crucial aspect of teaching 21st-century audience awareness. After all, how else will our students learn to be more savvy about their Facebook privacy settings and why they should avoid posting pictures of their friends performing keg stands.

Having said all that, there are other ways to negotiate pseudotransactionality, some of which may actually be more effective than new media. A seemingly necessary component for students to recognize an audience external to the classroom is the reception of feedback from that audience. Other teachers who find blog assignments ineffective say one main reason is because many students think that, out of the multitude of blogs available on the vast internet, no one outside of the class is going to bother looking at theirs. Instructors can team up with one another to expand blog writing assignments beyond the classroom, but then they're only really expanding the pool of peers from which they can conduct peer review. Writing for publication assignments don't have to use new media, and if a student has a letter to the editor published in a local paper, then it really might be viewed by a larger (and/or more "authentic") audience than their blog would ever receive. Additionally, even if their letters aren't published, the editor's acknowledgment of receiving those letters could solidify the external audience to a greater extent than any blog comment.

Clark's article was published in Computers and Composition 27 (2010) 27-35, and in case the link to Petraglia's article stops working: Petraglia, Joseph. “Spinning Like a Kite: A Closer Look at the Pseudotransactional Function of Writing.” JAC 15.1 (1995): N.p. Web. 2 June 2010.

How "new" is New Media?

Anne Frances Wysocki's definition of New Media focuses on the materiality of texts rather than the question of whether or not they are digital. Her definition allows texts that are not digital to be considered new media, but it also seems to exclude digital texts that appear to lack a certain level of self-awareness. It seems to me that self-awareness is an important aspect of most compositions, and one that we should focus on in the classroom--after all, I want my students to be aware of their "writerly" decisions, regardless of the type of text that they are composing. However, Wysocki's definition seems to ignore the realities of intentionality and awareness reflected in at least some of what other people would consider new media.

One example of new media that often seems to lack the kind of self-awareness Wysocki's definition requires is Powerpoint. Powerpoint software encourages the production of multimodal texts, and it has been widely available since 2003. Because of it's seeming ubiquity in academic and business settings, Powerpoint presentations have developed their own genre conventions (backgrounds, length, number of slides, etc.), and while these continue to evolve and are not concrete constraints, they have created a kind of uniformity between most of the presentations composed with the software. When these conventions are combined with default settings and backgrounds (along with the other exigencies of the rhetorical situation), we can see how it is not at all common for Powerpoint presenters to be "aware of the range of materialities of texts and who then highlight the materiality" (Wysocki 15). After all, students and employees alike often perceive Powerpoint as more of an obligation than a writerly choice.

Wysocki's definition of new media also seems to stress a kind of transparency that I am not convinced exists in much of what we or our students view as new media. Composers of new media, she suggests, should be forthright as well as self-aware: "Such composers design texts that make as overtly visible as possible the values they embody" (15). Perhaps composers who fit the rest of her definition would exhibit this quality in their work, but I'm not sure how well it applies to much of what our students consume on the internet. Apart from matters of honesty, my skepticism may simply tie back into the issue of self-awareness. If a composer is not aware of the values their composition embodies, then how can they make those values overtly visible? Perhaps, then, Wysocki's definition better describes a pedagogical aim than a material reality. We may want all of our students to develop and exhibit this kind of awareness; however, we have to be aware that much of what they consume--whether through YouTube, Facebook, or a Powerpoint presentation--probably does not exactly fit this definition.

Wysocki, Anne F. Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition. Logan: Utah State UP, 2004. Print.

Introduction

I'm a second-year MA candidate in English with a dual concentration in rhetoric and composition and literary history. My research interests in early modern drama and poetry include works by Marlowe, Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton. My recent scholarship includes work on the historiography of Shakespeare through an analysis of Alexander Pope's edition of The Taming of the Shrew, which set an editorial standard for the play that lasted over a century and continues to affect modern readings of it. Regarding Milton, I have been working on interrogating the role of chaos in Paradise Lost through indigenous decolonization theory. Concerning rhetoric and composition, my work focuses on audience theory, activity theory, and genre. Thus, my overall research interests focus on historical and political contexts, genre, and historiography.

I'm particularly looking forward to this class because I used to be something of an expert on pedagogical uses of social media, but I've become a bit rusty over the last year or so. Additionally, my interest in audience theory comes from working as an editorial assistant on a collection of essays on the topic, Engaging Audience: Writing in an Age of New Literacies. Hence, I'm eager to further explore the intersections of technology and rhetoric, and to see how they can enrich my teaching.