Electracy: Gregory L. Ulmer’s Textshop Experiments (Critical Studies in the Humanities) - Softcover

Ulmer, Gregory L.; Saper, Craig J.

9781934542507: Electracy: Gregory L. Ulmer’s Textshop Experiments (Critical Studies in the Humanities)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1934542504 ISBN 13: 9781934542507

Publisher: The Davies Group, Publishers, 2015

“Textshop” in the title refers to a pedagogy for teaching rhetorical invention, with application to any form of production of texts or works in Arts and Letters fields, or for teaching creative thinking in general. More specifically this book provides background and context for the published work of Ulmer, filling in gaps between his books, and showing the genealogy of Ulmer’s innovative approach to media education. The revolutions of the past two centuries included the transformation of every discipline and field of knowledge, as well as of technology, popular culture, and everyday life. It is ironic that the one mode of representation that escaped the rejection of mimetic realism in modernist arts and letters is pedagogy (the representation of the object of knowledge). Within this reserve many disciplines, especially in the sciences, nonetheless updated their practices and applied the new discoveries to their areas of responsibility. The exception is the Humanities, which studies about its innovators (James Joyce, the Surrealists, Dadaism) but does not admit the modernist revolution in style into the practices of knowledge production. All that is changing now, as the Humanities go online, into a multimodal environment for which conventional literacy is not adequate. In these essays, Ulmer shows how to translate the poetics of experimental arts and contemporary theory into a liberal arts pedagogy for teaching with media. This rhetoric is generalized in turn into a logic of invention (heuretics), relevant to learning across the curriculum. In the digital apparatus—electracy—there is a formal correlation aligning hypermedia platforms, experimental arts poetics, and logics of creativity. Textshop is a pedagogy for negotiating the transition from literacy to electracy. These essays introduce heuretics (the logic of invention) by explaining how the logic was discovered. In the spirit of the liberal arts as self-knowledge, Ulmer dramatizes his own encounter with the mysteries and difficulties of modernist experiments in the arts and the obscurity of the philosophy associated with them. At the center of the difficulty was the term “text,” which seemed to have undergone a metamorphosis in the modernist revolution. To help students as well as himself in his courses in the history of the Western tradition, literary criticism, and film studies, Ulmer took the inventors of “text” theory at their word—that the relevant question is not what texts mean, but how they are made—and began to use text to know text. The essays bring the reader along on Ulmer’s path of inquiry and learning, sharing his reasoning, his pedagogy, and his experiments, testifying to his efforts as a teacher to communicate the irreducible importance of a new Humanities education to the future of digital civilization.

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About the Author:

Gregory L. Ulmer is Professor of English and Media Studies at the University of Florida. He is the author of Applied Grammatology (1985), Teletheory (1989), Heuretics (1994), Internet Invention (2003), Electronic Monuments (2005), Miami Virtue (2012), Avatar Emergency (2012), along with numerous essays and book chapters. He is on the faculty of the European Graduate School, and Coordinator of the Florida Research Ensemble, an experimental arts consultancy. His current projects include the design and testing of a pedagogy for electracy supporting global online learning. Craig Saper is Professor and Director of the Language, Literacy, & Culture Doctoral Program at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC). He is the author of Networked Art (2001), Artificial Mythologies (1997), Imaging Place (2010), and Intimate Bureaucracies (2011). His publications on Gregory L Ulmer’s work include chapters in New Media/New Methods (2008), The Illogic of Sense (2008), and articles in Visible Language, Rhizomes, Enculturation, and the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory. Victor J. Vitanza is Professor English and Rhetorics at Clemson U. He is also Professor of Rhetoric and Philosophy (The Jean-Fran�ois Lyotard Professor) at The European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland, Division of Media and Communications. He is the editor of PRE/TEXT: The First Decade (1993) and is the Publisher and Editor of PRE/TEXT: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory (1980- ). Other books inlude Negation, Subjectivity, and The History of Rhetoric (1997), editor of Writing Histories of Rhetoric (1994, 2013), and Sexual Violence in Western Thought and Writing: Chaste Rape (2011). His most recent book in production, Chaste Cinematics (Punctum Books). His present project is a book and film: The working title of the book is A Re-thinking of Historiographies (of Rhetorics) as Atemporal, Anachronistic Post-cinematic Practices (with a complementary DVD film, on location in Sicily and Turkey). He has established St. Vitus Pictures, a non-profit film production company for the film.

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