Pros and Cons: Negotiating Value in Blog Culture

Against the American grain

hile many scholars have addressed the critical issues of whether English can or should hang together as a field politically, economically, and culturally, I address in this article the issue of whether we in English studies can hang together topically—that is, whether we can see ourselves as sharing a common object of study. It is obvious that different subdisciplines of English have different methodologies, from hermeneutic to social scientific, that raise different questions and are based in different ideologies. If these subdisciplines have no more in common with one another than do the studies of history and literature, or philosophy and composition, or psychology and linguistics, then the question of whether English constitutes a discipline is strictly a political question and need only be discussed in political terms, a question answerable in terms of political expediency or public perception more than in terms of disciplinarity. If, however, the fields of literature, linguistics, and rhetoric-composition share more in common with one another than they do with other disciplines, then a greater argument can be made that we in English should work to maintain our connections, for our different methodologies and questions can complement and contribute to one another’s research and teaching. What we in English would seem to have in common is the study of discourse, especially of text, although the definition of “text” varies. If that common object of study is significant, then our separate examinations of it should combine to create greater understanding of the complexity of reading and writing. To examine that claim, I will compare and attempt to integrate the scholarship on one part of

https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/bitstream/handle/1808/12295/Devitt_Integrating.pdf?sequence=1

Integrating Rhetorical and Literary Theories of Genre.

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We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs

PrefaceAcknowledgmentsPt. IAmerican Theory: Democracy, Liberalism, and RightsCh. 1Liberal Democracy and the Costs of Consent3Ch. 2Foundationalism and Democracy19Ch. 3Why Democracy Must Be Liberal: An Epitaph for Marxism31Ch. 4The Compromised Republic: Public Purposelessness in America41Ch. 5The Rights of We the People Are All the Rights There Are60Ch. 6Have Rights Gone Wrong? The Reconstruction of Rights79Pt. IIAmerican Practice: Leadership, Citizenship, and CensorshipCh. 7Neither Leaders nor Followers: Citizenship under Strong Democracy95Ch. 8Command Performance: Where Have All the Leaders Gone?111Ch. 9The Undemocratic Party System: Citizenship in an Elite/Mass Society119Ch. 10One Nation Indivisible or a Compact of Sovereign States? The Two Faces of Federalism134Ch. 11The Market as Censor in a World of Consumer Totalism143Pt. IIIEducation for Democracy: Civic Education, Service, and CitizenshipCh. 12Thomas Jefferson and the Education of the Citizen161Ch. 13The Civic Mission of the University178Ch. 14Service, Citizenship, and Democracy: Civic Duty as an Entailment of Civil Right187Ch. 15Cultural Conservatism and Democratic Education: Lessons from the Sixties203Ch. 16America Skips School: Why We Talk So Much about Education and Do So Little214Ch. 17Education for Democracy225Pt. IVDemocracy and Technology: Endless Frontier or End of Democracy?Ch. 18The Second American Revolution237Ch. 19Pangloss, Pandora, or Jefferson? Three Scenarios for the Future of Technology and Democracy245Ch. 20The New Telecommunications Technology: Endless Frontier or the End of Democracy?258Index283

A Passion for Democracy: American Essays

Blogs have become a popular internet phenomenon. Rather than look at blogs as online diaries, I discuss them as sites for a developing generic practice that is connected to the idea of the internet as potentially non-corporate and democratic. In this context, what might "queer blogging" be, and why do queer bloggers constantly appeal to experience and evidence as the guarantee of reality online?

Pros and Cons: Negotiating Value in Blog Culture

References

Against the American grain

Integrating Rhetorical and Literary Theories of Genre.

We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs

A Passion for Democracy: American Essays

The digital queer: weblogs and internet identity

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