Proposal Title
Driving Toward a Rhetoric of Collaborative Space
Proposal Type
Panel Presentation
Location
Olscamp 203
Start Date
21-10-2017 2:15 PM
End Date
21-10-2017 3:30 PM
Abstract
Heidelberg is a Detroit-based, outdoor art installation that for 30 years has both delighted and angered residents is used as a backdrop for exploring spaces of collaborative engagement. This panel examines the multivalent meanings of Heidelberg and how it, and similar spaces, can be used rhetorically in the Composition classroom.
Driving Toward a Rhetoric of Collaborative Space
Olscamp 203
Heidelberg is a Detroit-based, outdoor art installation that for 30 years has both delighted and angered residents is used as a backdrop for exploring spaces of collaborative engagement. This panel examines the multivalent meanings of Heidelberg and how it, and similar spaces, can be used rhetorically in the Composition classroom.
Proposal
Collaborative writing generally is defined as an activity involving two or more persons working together to produce a written document. Since the publication of Singular Texts/Plural Authors, the meaning of collaboration has been debated and refined, but all definitions inextricably lead to the production of text(s). Furthermore, transactional theories of rhetoric treat the process of composition as reflecting the interactions of the various parts of any rhetorical situation (Berlin, 1987). Here, writer, audience, and object(s) operate simultaneously to produce truth or create meaning. Writing, or composing, is not only something that occurs from pen to page or text to screen, but also from person to city. According to Michel de Certeau, “inhabitants of cities constantly rewrite city space by resisting and accommodating the orderly plans of corporations, the state, and other apparatuses” (DeGenaro, 2007). The Heidelberg Project, an art project started in Detroit in the 1980s and is made up of hundreds of discarded objects left by former residents, is one of these instances of people (re)writing city space. Heidelberg does not communicate, but represents the power or potential for action; it is the “impetus to collective empowerment.” Speaker 1 examines the history of Heidelberg as well as the collective histories that the site represents. Using Heidelberg as a backdrop, Speaker 1 uses a materialist rhetoric to examine the site and the site’s possibilities for meaning making. Speaker 2 examines Heidelberg as an ideology. And, though it is experienced bodily in the space of the virtual the individual folds in from and is informed by traces of collectivity. As such, Heidelberg calls each to an experience of otherness in which individual writers become a collective “we.” Speaker 3 seeks to disentangle collaboration from writing extending such a definition to that of meaning-making and knowledge sharing within specific cultural communities. Through an examination of its history, how this project connects to otherness and collaboration, and how we might connect this project to the composition classroom this panel presents the possibilities for the audience to discover their own “Heidelberg” space. This panel’s presentation was formulated during a five-hour car ride that included the panelists who were reflecting (collaborating) on what we call our “Heidelberg” experience. Steven Mailloux writes, “rhetorical hermeneutics attempts to move critical theory from general theories about the interpretive process to rhetorical histories of specific interpretive acts.” Following Mailloux, each of the presentations on this panel is concerned with “specific interpretive acts.” The overarching themes of this panel are derived from each presenter’s desire to understand the ways in which knowledge is created, shared, re-shaped by individual experience, and how instruction in Composition can draw from such experiences. To this end, each presenter raises the question of how this experience can be made generalizable in ways that allows composition classrooms to identify their own cultural communities where students can embark on the process of collaboration not only with others in their respective classes but the community holistically. If one measurement of the value of a city is represented by the character of its people, then that value can best be ascertained by the ongoing story told by its characters. We want our students to both engage and help further write these stories; finding one’s own Heidelberg space is an apt metaphor for this activity.