HU520 The Rhetorics of a Print/Digital Culture

So what good it do, this study of print and digital cultures?

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What We've Said Already

Graduate students and graduate faculty in English studies programs straddle the print and digital worlds in a very real way because their intellectual interests, professional prospects, and teaching approaches depend on how they accommodate, resist, and make use of both worlds.

More generally, these two central modes of discourse in our culture combine to influence the way we think, work, and create. This course will review historical representations of print and digital technologies and combine those with current critical speculations about where they are taking our profession (broadly defined as English Studies), our private/public lives, and our culture. The object of this exploration will be to construct a critical rhetoric of media use.

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What good it do?

• A fascination with the big picture and how that picture differs from and informs what I see happening locally.
• A growing fascination with the replication and distribution of information: how these processes change us and how we can change them.
• The comfort of knowing that even in a frantically paced world we are connected to something old and relatively stable.
• A perception that the theories and practices that Tech. Comm. discipline draws from need to be broadened.
• The need to know how change really happens over time, so I can imagine what post-secondary education will look like in the future and what I can do productively to modify that change.
• A more robust and complete understanding of what it means to develop critical agency.
• The practical need to make technology choices: choosing between them.

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Assignments

Course Description

Weekly Schedule

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