I have walked in a lightly defined circle around some of these issues in the past, but I was thinking today it might be worthwhile to lay this down in a post, sort of get it all out of my head. If you know me well, you know that I trained as a rhetoric and writing person, and while I don’t toss terminology and names around, I know the field and the scholars who are active (and the relevant history). I was never, strictly speaking, the sort of person who fit neatly into the “compositionist” box, as I am deeply interested in theoretical knowledge (I am NOT a theory head, though I play one on TV sometimes). Likewise, as I just mentioned I’m not the sort of person who wants to lay down thick swatches of theory like the traditional Theory Head of yore. So I wasn’t, strictly speaking, a rhetoric scholar. I mean that’s what I called myself, but I wasn’t precisely that.
I study games and popular culture, and while I was in a PhD program with people with MFAs, and hence no one really ever noticed, I started my academic career as a writer in creative writing, in short fiction and CNF, not in poetry as seems to be the standard for most people who defect into rhetoric. I’m also trained in political science (pre-law style), and I have a background in critical race theory. So I’m the mixed-blood culture and class guy who studies games and comic books and the hero’s journey. I’m never “the comic book” scholar in a group, and I’m certainly not the “movie” scholar. I’m not a classics person, and I don’t favor any era or continent’s literature. I’m the game guy in most circles, but I’m not the game guy in that I’m an Indie darling who focuses on only the most humble of games. Much like I’m a comic book scholar who cares about titles like Amazing Spider-Man and Detective Comics, I’m a games scholar who studies World of Warcraft and Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto and Mortal Kombat.
In spite of being always noted as an odd fit for the discipline, I managed to teach, right out of the gate, almost the full gamut of Professional Writing classes. I even revamped one, helped rebuild two others, and created two. All of that in my first year and a half on the job. And in spite of having encounters with editors that bordered on the sort of savage beating a new initiate takes from a frat, I have multiple peer reviewed publications (even some collaborative ones, which were actually much harder to complete but that field puts NO value at all on). I have a book under contract and almost ready to see print (I hope… revision processes on a book are tough). I did okay. I could have built a tenured career in a professional writing department, if a professional writing department had understood where education is going and the value of someone who doesn’t sit neatly in the box.
I ended up in the perfect spot for someone like me, entering the tenure track in a games and simulations program that I am a part of building, working on developing a Varsity Esports Program and new classes on Esports and streaming and writing for games and game design and race in games, etc. I’m housed in a college of creative arts, a place where unlike the rigid structures of most English departments understands how a hybrid scholar who does a mix of making and researching works.
But most importantly, there’s a philosophical difference in where I work now and where I’ve worked before (and where I was trained). I thought I was just “broken” in that I believe that teaching– what we do, we are no paid researchers who accidentally have to teach, we are creators of knowledge who research in concert with doing our part to increase and spread knowledge– was less about making sure that students could memorize things and recite the names of people and their theories, less worried about people being able to draw a line from, say, Aristotle, to themselves with a stop on Cicero, on Quintillian, on Booth, on Edmund Burke, somewhere around Foucault, etc. In fact I said in a job talk– in a move that caused the person asking the question to furrow her brow and walk out of my talk– when asked if I could talk about the books and scholars that I’d use in a class on Indigenous Rhetoric that I could name a few people and talk through some ideas, but I have a strong belief in using my bookshelf and my own notes to develop classes and never stand in front of a crowd and build a syllabus. I have always believed that we have to know enough about an academic field to know where to look for more information or what questions to use as our research base. Gone are the days when being an expert means knowing everything about one person’s work. This didn’t make me many friends, but it’s almost exactly the elevator pitch my current boss uses to describe the difference between traditional academia and the future of education. In short, I’m ready to embrace the world we live in, where Google can give me access to the text of, say, Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Era of Mechanical Reproduction,” so I don’t need to memorize that work and be able to recite it on command. I can remember that the key point is the term “aura” and let Google get me right back to the page I read years and years ago in a matter of seconds. It’s silly to devote a chunk of my life and of my intellect to memorizing something that is easily accessed with my phone by asking Siri to look it up.
This is where I might take it too far. I believe this should apply to the creation of new knowledge, too. I would never plagiarize, and I will never fail to give credit for an idea, but if I’m writing about a video game and there’s only two piece of rhetorical literature that are relevant amid the 40 or so that mention the same game or same concept, I’m not going to cite all 40 of them just so people know that I’m a smarty-smart who read all that stuff. It isn’t relevant to my argument, and honestly, if the degree and the job and the successful talks don’t give me ethos, I don’t think writing Mark JP Wolf and Ian Bogost’s names with dates next to them just because once they said “video game” and “rhetoric” will give me more authority.
This is leading me to my five points of what I think rhetoric and English studies is doing wrong with the new generations of scholars. Since I’m talking about how I have been treated, and how my peers have been treated, feel free to take this with a grain of salt. I have my own attitudes about things people have done to me, and I won’t claim to be “right” where as they are “wrong.” I will simply claim the right to my opinion and will let the fact that I’m a scholar by trade (even if my original home field didn’t “get” me), so I have the ethos to have a useful opinion. You can disagree. I love you anyway.
- English/Rhetoric Scholars live in a jargon vacuum. I write about gaming communities more often than not, and gamers have their own jargon, some of which is game specific and some of which is genre specific. If you don’t believe me, read some James Paul Gee. I, personally, grow increasingly tired of rhetoric scholars who think they have to pickle their scholarship in rhetoric jargon, so to illustrate the uselessness of it and the difficulty it creates, I often use game jargon in an article or chapter before I define it. This is partly a narrative choice– stopping a quote from a participant to explain it kills storytelling and dismantles their voice. But it’s also partly a political move. No one gives a shit if you know what hermeneutics means. But words like that are all over rhetorical scholarship. We make it hard to read what we write for no reason other than gatekeeping, so if you read one of my articles and you don’t know what a jungler is, you might have to finish a paragraph feeling the way an undergrad feels when they try to slog through your jargon-gravy texts. Deal with it or don’t, but don’t lecture me about using game terms while using your $ 700,000 Greek and Latin. Yes, I know what techne means. I named one of my WoW characters that. It doesn’t mean you can’t just say “making” or “craft knowledge” so that a person who didn’t read Aristotle can follow what you mean. We champion the student’s right to their own language, but we create an impossible word salad of an expected way to write that is counter to all of our theory. Pick up Cross Talk on Composition Theory and read it. It’s both the explanation of and the example of the problem. Reading English Studies theory should be easy, for we are the ones who are trained to write. If we communicate poorly so we can look smart and get people to publish us, we’re the biggest frauds in academia.
- English studies preaches tolerance and liberalism but is one of the most conservative and closed off communities you’ll ever find. Don’t believe me? Go try to suggest teaching a class without starting with old white dudes. You can go do that. I’ll wait here. It won’t go well for you. You see, English Studies loves diversity, as long as that diversity is rooted in a full-on love affair with everything that is canon.
- The field sainted Stanley Fish, but no one believes in this concept of reader response. I’ve been told by full professors, and by editors, that I used a piece of theory “wrong.” That is– sorry to get blunt here– fucking impossible. Theory exists to be interpreted and reworked and reapplied. One cannot get it “wrong” unless they somehow fly in the face of it and show blatant disrespect. If I try to apply something a French guy from 100 years ago said to my perspective as a mixed-blood American in 2017, I better change it up a little bit. If not, what’s the point? If all knowledge is baked in, and we can’t reintepret theory, but we also have to go back to the start and cite all the white dudes (see point 1), we’ve already broken scholarship by insuring that everything has already been said and now we’re just saying it again.
- We aren’t science, so looking for ways to replicate our research misses the point. But some people so desperately want to be science that they feel like there needs to be a testable, reusable methodology in any study of writing. I think this might just be the first point again, that everyone wants to trace everything back, but honestly I don’t see the utility in proving that what Northrop Frye was doing still works to explain the narrative of Horizon Zero Dawn. What good does that do us?
- We are trying to teach people to keep storytelling and written communication alive in a world where we believe it’s waning or at the very least transforming, but few of us respect the idea of making stuff with new tools. I had a horrifying discussion with a group of not-very-old scholars about SnapChat not too long ago. They couldn’t grasp the craft that went into utilizing a temporal means of communication (I was trying to explain how much work and rhetorical skill goes into a SnapChat takeover). These folks were good hearted and not by any means bad at their jobs, but they were so tied to the need to have a specific sort of artifact that when I tried to explain to them what the deliverable would be for a project that utilized SnapChat, they just kept harping on the production quality of the video vs. something made for YouTube (and edited, and well lit, with careful audio). There’s no less skill involved in SnapChat if you do something sophisticated with it, but it’s not one of the validated “acceptable modes of communication,” so many English scholars disregard it. Prezi was there a couple of years ago. YouTube was a decade ago. Wait until composition students are making video games for their first year writing class. Smoke will flow from ears.
I often talk with my wife about what we thought we were training to do and to be and what we are. We met in our PhD program. We both feel sort of differently misled, and we both feel a different response. The field isn’t what the field told us it would be. I found my place, I’m fairly certain, by leaning on the part of my hybrid identity that is ironically given the least respect by academia as a whole. She is still determining what her path is.
I often balk at how academia works, but I love working there. I don’t see that as enigmatic or contradictory, but I understand if you do, dear readers. I have always felt the most at home and ironically the most unwanted in academia. I am pretty sure that’s my identity, that I’m the splinter in the paw of the lion. That might not be entirely accurate. Maybe I’m the arrowhead in the heart of the dragon. It’ll still live, and can thrive, with me stuck there, but if it dislodges me because of the pain and misunderstanding, it’s going to bleed. And me… I’m a pain. But it’s a pain you can trust.