The Rhetoric of Cool: Composition Studies and New Media

by Jeff Rice, Gregory L. Ulmer (Foreword)

The Rhetoric of Cool: Composition Studies and New Media offers a historical critique of composition studies’ rebirth narrative, using that critique to propose a new rhetoric for new media work. Author Jeff Rice returns to critical moments during the rebirth of composition studies when the discipline chose not to emphasize technology, cultural studies, and visual writing, which are now fundamental to composition studies. Rice redefines these moments in order to invent a new electronic practice.
            The Rhetoric of Cool addresses the disciplinary claim that composition studies underwent a rebirth in 1963. At that time, three writers reviewed technology, cultural studies, and visual writing outside composition studies and independently used the word cool to describe each position. Starting from these three positions, Rice focuses on chora, appropriation, commutation, juxtaposition, nonlinearity, and imagery—rhetorical gestures conducive to new media work-- to construct the rhetoric of cool.
An innovative work that approaches computers and writing issues from historical, critical, theoretical, and practical perspectives, The Rhetoric of Cool challenges current understandings of writing and new media and proposes a rhetorical rather than an instrumental response for teaching writing in new media contexts.

Genres: Nonfiction, Education

208 pages, Paperback

First published May 11, 2007

About the author

Jeff Rice was born in Lawton, Oklahoma and grew up in Miami, Florida. He is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Campus Writing Program at the University of Missouri. Previously, he was Director of Writing and Assistant Professor of English at the University of Detroit-Mercy and Assistant Professor of English at Wayne State University, where headed the department’s Digital Literacy Initiative. He joined the Division of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Media at the University of Kentucky in Fall 2011.

Professor Rice is the author of The Rhetoric of Cool: Composition Studies and New Media (Southern Illinois University Press 2007) and the textbook Writing About Cool: Hypertext and Cultural Studies in the Computer Classroom (Longman 2004). He is also the co-editor of New Media/New Methods: The Academic Turn from Literacy to Electracy (Parlor Press 2008) and Keywords in Markup: From to A (University of Minnesota Press 2011).

Professor Rice has published over 20 articles and chapters in new media, composition, pedagogy, and rhetoric. He recently finished his second monograph, Digital Detroit: Rhetoric and Space in the Age of the Network, a project that explores a networked rhetoric via the city of Detroit. In addition to his academic work, he blogs at Yellow Dog (http://www.ydog.net) and Make Mine Potato (http://makeminepotato.ydog.net), where he is sketching out a new book project on Web 2.0 and the rhetoric of obsession in the craft beer industry. That project is tentatively titled 'Craft Obsession.'

Reviews

[scott noble · Rating 1 out of 5]

From the get-go, Jeff Rice has some explaining to do, because, honestly, “who would think to associate composition studies and cool?” (18). Rice shifts the focus of composition studies away from the print medium and towards the under-researched digital media my modifying tradition into a more overlapping “mixed” form of electronic writing. Rice claims that the rhetoric of cool conveys the message that composition is something more than words on a page, further asserting ways that digital media allow for a kaleidoscopic involvement with electronic writing in the digital age, with the practical application involving mostly the composition of Webpages. While Rice’s ideas do maintain the importance of outside cultural circulatory influences in the writing classroom, I find the rhetoric of cool a little too cool for the reality in which the practical values must have an effect.
The Rhetoric of Cool is meant to be an eye-opening approach for all professional participants active in the area of composition studies and can be useful to each one in different contexts, some more than others: theorists, scholars, instructors, and policy makers. Rice provides a new attempt that would, more or less, completely reorganize the field of composition studies as a computer/Web based approach that creates referential relationships between what is more or less hodgepodgical ideas. Rice calls for a complete about face by leaving the fetishized print medium behind for an all-digital format for composition. In regards to first-year writing, Rice’s rhetoric is beyond the reality that it must come face to face with. Considering that he heavily emphasizes William S. Burroughs, the DJ, and Blue Note jazz album covers as vital examples of representation for his rhetoric, the former world of composition-as-writing is theoretically being replaced by virtual-Web-composition. Rice’s practical application of cool could easily be cross-sectioned with a graphic design class as he proposes that the students’ writing consist of composing web pages and iconoclastic image association projects (on a website, still), with the effect weighing heavily on hyperlink association. With grave emphases on appropriation, juxtaposition, and non-linearity, I feel like Rice’s approach would better suit the more experience student who has a more directed idea as to where her writing instruction is going to lead her (i.e., the interactive world of digital media).
For the sake of its distinctive approach to writing, Rice’s rhetorical strategy of writing cool could be useful for graphic designers who work in the digital mass media. Anyone from a magazine editor to a website designer could take note of his varying use of image association and his appropriation of Gregory Ulmer’s idea of “choral writing,” which “organizes any manner of information by means of the writer’s specific position in the time and space of a culture” (34). Rice himself emphasizes the importance of imagery and pushes for the move out of the relentless hold of print media, convinced that the digital media will provide the open-endedness that words on a page no longer offer its reader. What I find to be most concerning is how this approach to composition pedagogy will affect those students who first want to learn how to write in the traditional form. Since the process of learning how to compose words on any page (Web page, notebook page, or the classis Sketch Pad) is an ongoing process, it seems as if leaving behind the traditional linearity of writing will cheat students out of the basic knowledge of how to order things and compose coherent pieces of writing. Rice’s composition mixology circles around William S. Borough’s cut-and-paste approach to writing, a “rhetoric of resistance to political and economic structures” (75), I believe that it is far more important for students to learn the structure of establishments before they have the know-all to subvert that which is established. His metaphor of writer-as-DJ brings this problem to the forefront as well. Rice offers Afrika Bambaataa as an example, noting how the artist acquired a vast record collection that “functioned as the basis for future compositions” (66). Bambaataa, first, had to establish a basis of profound knowledge for the already pre-established compositions that came before him before he has the capacity to appropriate, juxtapose, and commutate his mixes in a way that produces the new meaning. While Rice brings the traditional critiques into his new text, he seems to leave tradition in the dark when it comes to the writing process.
An overtly obvious subtext of Rice’s Rhetoric of Cool is its stress on the Web as the new paper and all that it encompasses (Weblogs, Wikis, Websites, etc.) as the new direction of composition studies. Rice directly and explicitly subverts most traditional values in his chapter layout: chora, appropriation, juxtaposition, commutation, nonlinearity(?), and imagery. While these elements still do play conventional roles in the traditional approach to composition, Rice emphasizes these elements as the basis. While now, one purpose for composition is to build the student’s ability to coherently construct their ideas in a form that is professional, valid, and readable, Rice’s proposal has the student becoming a DJ, mixing and matching seemingly unrelated ideas (mostly images) into a coherent (yet non-linear) composition that allows for more open-ended interpretation. While this is all well and good, it is a drastic measure in regards to professionalism in the English discipline. While focusing on Weblogs and Wikis will allow the students to become more open-minded to the idea of what composition really is, Rice’s approach is not only utopian (that the English discipline will equate Web site composition to essay/genre composition) but it also reeks of other problems: economics (computers in every classroom), student requirements (freshmen constructing/composing websites?), and the digital faculties of instructors (the know-how of Web building). While the effort and work put forth to make writing ‘cool’ is by all means admirable, Rice’s approach can be considered a stepping stone into a full-on launch into the pedagogically digitized future where everyone, before entering college as a freshman, already knows, participates in, and values Website construction as a form of composition viable for requirements in the English discipline.

[Craig · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm always down with any composition studies book that muses on new technologies and their impact on the writing event, but I can't help but think situatedness in the 60s is not necessarily appropriate to what is happening in the now -- ie, thing are a whole lot more technologically sophisticated than they were in the 60s. And perhaps that's an unfair expectation...no one has all the answers, so why should Rice? Even if "cool" is not meant as a specific term assigned to particular people or things, it implies a pedagogy that seems to be asserting itself as better/ other. I'm not sure that's a positive thing.

In sum, this is a specific argument about a specific thing and, as that and that alone, it is pretty good/ clear. Don't expect a lot of connectedness to previous conversations or even contemporary ones (although there is some mention of Manovich and Johnson-Eilola) and you'll be fine.

[Michael Greer · Rating 5 out of 5]

The exposition begins with the august hallways of Broward County Community College. The appeal of the college works off of its social environment, hip, young, different, cool. When young people are seeking to distinguish themselves words like "cool," "hip," "different" are important descriptors. What type of institution markets itself with an image of the surfboard? One where it will actually be fun to slip the difference between recreation and academic excellence. "Small classes," "recognized professors," "small class size" all work to produce a certain "je ne sais quoi." Our author, more than just familiar with this milieu, works out a way to present his major thesis: cool has a rhetorical function.

History: Cool did not come out of nowheresville. It wasn't a commodity. It has roots in the 1940s, especially the life of Lester Young, jazz saxophonist. Speculation has it that Young often said, "I'm cool," as a report of his state of mind, that he was calm.

[Ann · Rating 1 out of 5]

Raises interesting issues but does not present the issues in an interesting manner by any means.