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Donald Challenger
Profile
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Focus & questions
7 Prospect St.
Clinton, NY 13323
Phone: 853-3604
Send e-mail
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Some questions I'm seeking to address through this course:
- How does -- not will -- hypertextuality shape the way
we tell stories, understand the past, construct meaning? A great deal of
futuristic speculation has worked its way into print about the radical long-term
implications of electronic discourse. If the codex book is our historical
standard, however, "long-term" will mean centuries. It is not necessary
to have our consciousness transformed by hypertext in order to begin to
say revealing things about it -- in order to understand that it is something
more than another writing tool.
- If hypertextuality shapes the way we tell stories, understand
the past, and construct meaning, does it also simultaneously question the
whole business of telling, understanding, and meaning? Print is certainly
capable of capturing this self-reflexivity, as is made clear by a long line
of poets, novelists, and critical thinkers from the early Greeks to postmodern
feminists. But there is some argument that writing and reading in hypertext
foregrounds the interplay of structure, "content," and intention in unique ways. Or is
that simply a product of our own hyper-awareness as we explore a new medium?
- How might hypertext influence that public narrative discourse we call
news? If, as Arthur Miller said, "a good newspaper is a nation having a
conversation with itself," that conversation is already in many ways endangered.
Do hypertext and related technologies such as the World Wide Web encourage
a revitalized conversation, or are they the final nails in the coffin? What
happens when citizens participate in public life by way of what has been
called The Daily Me? How, in fact, do we maintain useful distinctions
between public and private life in a time of chat rooms, cornea scans, marketing
profiles, and voluntary surveillance?
- Apart from such speculations, I have very practical interests
in hypertextuality and its relationship to writing, in applications from
college composition to fictional construction. How can we teach students
to structure, model, and evaluate hypertext and linking when our own rhetoric
of hypertext remains so unformed? Is this erosion of "authority" temporary,
or does it suggest a historical shift encouraged by the advent of hypertextuality
itself? In either case, how can we make that erosion of authority a productive
interlude?
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"The Rhetoric must lead us through the Scramble, the Wrangle of the Marketplace, the flurries and flareups of the Human Barnyard, the Give and Take, the wavering line of pressure and counterpressure, the Logomachy, the onus of ownership, the Wars of Nerves, the War. It, too, has its peaceful moments: at times its endless competition can add up to the transcending of itself. In ways of its own, it can move from the factional to the universal. But its ideal culminations are more often beset by strife as the condition of their organized expression, or material embodiment. Their very universality becomes transformed into a partisan weapon. For one need not scrutinize the concept of 'identification' very sharply to see, implied in it at every turn, its ironic counterpart: division. Rhetoric is concerned with the state of Babel after the Fall."
-- Kenneth Burke,
A Rhetoric of Motives
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