Where's the Disciplining?

They (it’s always them) say that the key to successful blogging is consistency. Yeah.

Anyway, another busy week; this one spent prepping for CCCC in Chicago. Tomorrow the students are presenting their posters in one of the buildings on campus. I’m looking forward to seeing them—and to seeing some of the faculty’s reactions.

With the poster presentations, the focus on individual texts will end. The class will turn to issues of disciplinarity and genre. For example, in class on Wed. we looked at five letters to editors about the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina. We talked a great deal about how those five authors defined the event and the government’s responsibilities. The letters help reproduce ideas about the relationships citizens have with their government and with each other. But we didn’t really get into that as much as we discussed how the letters reflected the individual authors’ ideas and political positions. When I get back from the conference, the focus of the class will become one step more abstract as we will begin to discuss how genres like editorials create discourse conventions that define what is normal and acceptable and what is not.

I expect that we’ll start talking a lot about how we as subjects are disciplined by the texts we encounter; how social control is exerted on us via discourses; and how we establish social hierarchies through texts. In short, we’ll be talking about Foucault.

I’m hoping to maintain the de-centered-ness of the class as we move into the heavy theory stuff, but I feel a strong responsibility to make sure the class is working their way through it in appropriate ways—whatever those might be.