Cooke Blog

I’ve never seen Blade Runner, nor have I ever read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep before. I’m glad to be given this opportunity though as it makes me remember when I read Hamlet on the Holodeck which covered how science fiction can act as a prophetic voice to future technologies. There are a few things that come to mind as I start to read Androids: 1—as I said, what is in science fiction in one era, can often point to reality in another and 2—often science fiction reveals its roots are still founded in the past.

For instance, in the first few chapters of Androids, video phones still are hung up by placing them on a “cradle.” Recordings are still done on “voice tape.” Television sets still use cathode ray tubes that need time to warm up. Societal norms of conformity are important (such as having real as opposed to electronic animals). The Buster Friendly show sounds very much like an old-fashioned local children’s or variety show. Buster Friendly wants Budweiser Beer. The woman’s striped coat is not unlike the popular fashion of the late 1960’s. Soviet society still exists in Russia Butterfly collecting is still a hobby for little boys.

Yet a few other details point to what we have in our current era. In Androids, the junk industry has been elevated, just as recycling and those who go “green” have been elevated as doing important work in today’s society. Buster Friendly blasts Mercerism as part of his comedy, which I’ve seen especially in the UK that often prominent comedians use the time they have on stage to blast those that espouse traditional beliefs (Bill Bailey, Dylan Moran, Ricki Gervais just to name a few). They mention the “infinity key,” which in a way makes me think of how modern day thieves have figured out how they can enter multiple domiciles using a basic version of a common key and can literally “tap” their way into any lock that uses that type of key. The idea of electronic animals makes me think of those little fake pets that came over from Japan in the 1990’s. Is it clever how they try to be “real?” I guess, but it’s never as fulfilling since they are merely programed to act in a way that a real animal would act.

Empathy Box

The concept of the empathy box and how everyone who hooks into it at the same time hooks into an alternate reality does feel very much like a precursor to cyberspace. But then of course, that’s easy for me to say NOW, since cyberspace exists.

As a Marx Brothers fan, I was relieved to know that the name Groucho would live into the future. Granted, that future WAS originally written to take place in the early 1990’s, so I guess I shouldn’t be that surprised.

One question: Why do abandoned buildings have running water and working electricity?

Dick, P. K. (1968). Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. New York: Del Ray Trade Books.
Murray, J. H. (1998). Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace.. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

After a challenging holiday break, it’s time once again to crack the books open. This is my first course with Dr. Shelley Rodrigo and it sounds like she is going to keep us busy. We’ll be reading Lingua Fracta by C. G. Brooke, Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep by P.K. Dick and New Media: The Key Concepts by N. Gane and D. Beer. We’ll be jumping right in on the readings and I’ll be creating a self-introduction on zooburst.com.

With all the reflective writing we’ll be doing, I’m sure a lot more of what we’re going to read is going to “stick.”

Until the next…

Paul Prior’s discussion of Tracing Process: How Texts Come Into Being picks up nicely from Charles Bazerman’s chapter on Intertextuality. Since no text is created or consumed in a self-contained bubble, then it can be deduced that the intertextual connections and pathways should be traceable and that there is much to learn from analyzing the steps in which texts are created (Bazerman, 2004, p. 84).

As in the practice of genealogical research, any human structure, expression, organization or communicated unit, has the potential to be traced from a parent text to its offspring and subsequent grand-children, or more commonly, traced backwards in time to its origins. Prior, and much of the earlier research he cites (Prior, 2004, p. 199), focuses on what could be termed traditional (written language) texts, yet the method of tracing continues to expand to myriad contexts, across myriad formats and technologies, for myriad motives.

Clay Spinuzzi traces genres in the corporate environment in his 2003 work, Tracing Genres through Organizations.

Three of our readings for this week concern the findings of our very own Liza Potts as she traces digital communications in times of disaster and in the changing climate of the digital music industry, in the hope of inspiring technical communicators and social media designers to make modifications which would either drastically improve communications during critical moments after a catastrophe (Potts, 2009a, 2009b), or work toward advocating toward agreeable, mutually beneficial relationships in the digital music industry (Potts, 2010, p. 300).

ODU colleague and Prezi master, Vincent Rhodes demonstrates his ability to trace comments in a Twitter stream during a conference presentation with unexpected results (Rhodes, 2010). Rhodes’ discussion and analysis of this event this event can be found in his presentation here.

The ramifications of tracing information are fascinating. Within the Worldwide Web of computer connections, tracing becomes much easier than in the more linear days of physical trips to libraries and musty, dark archives. One of the readings in Liza Potts’ Tracing Digital Culture course in the 2009 ODU Summer Doctoral Institute noted one particularly intriguing example of tracing information around the event of a stolen Sidekick (Guttman). The rhizomatic connections among global, interested parties helped a woman not only recover her Sidekick, but publicly humiliate the perpetrator. Read the fascinating story about how it was retrieved here.

An exciting outcome to be sure, but what if a party is wrongfully accused? What if your computer shows that you’ve visited a website that could potentially harm your social status? Damage can be done to a reputation just as quickly as a global show of support.

For other scholarly readings on Tracing Process, once again, I can’t recommend Rebecca Moore Howard’s gigantic bibliography of Rhetoric and Composition highly enough. Moore Howard cites no less than 146 entries pertaining to tracing, or rather Post-Process (including Prior’s article as well).

For more information on Actor Network Theory, try Bruno LaTour’s Reassembling the Social.

Works Cited

Bazerman, C. (2006). Intertextuality: How texts rely on other texts. What Writing Does and How it Does it. Bazerman, C. and P Prior. (Eds.), New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 83-96.

Guttman, E. The Stolen Sidekick Page. Last updated 9 Feb, 2007. Retrieved from http://evanwashere.com/StolenSidekick/

LaTour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social. New York: Oxford University Press.

Moore Howard, R. Post-process. Bibliography of Rhetoric and Composition. Retrieved from http://wrt-howard.syr.edu/Bibs/Process.htm

Potts, L. (2010). Consuming digital rights: mapping the artifacts of entertainment. Technical Communication, 57(3), 300-318.

Potts, L. (2009). Diagramming with actor network theory: a method for modeling holistic experience. Professional Communication Conference, IEEE International. 16-18 July 2008, 1-6. Retrieved from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/mostRecentIssue.jsp?punumber=4603795

Potts, L. (2009). Using Actor Network Theory to trace and improve multimodal communication design. Technical Communication Quarterly, 18(3), 281-301.

Prior, P. (2004) Tracing process: how texts come into being. What Writing Does and How It Does It. Bazerman, C. and P Prior. (Eds.), New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.167-200.

Rhodes, V. (2010). Moderation or presentation? Using Twitter backchannel for more effective conference presentations. Computers and Writing Conference, West Lafayette, IN. 22 May, 2010. Presentation. Retrieved from http://www.digitalcrossrhodes.com/2010/05/moderation-or-presentation-using-twitter-backchannel-for-more-effective-conference-presentations/

Spinuzzi, C. (2003). Tracing Genres Through Organizations: A Sociocultural Approach to Information Design (Acting with Technology). Cambridge: MIT Press.

C. Bazerman’s discussion on Intertextuality examines the actuality that no one writes or makes any kind of utterance in a self-contained bubble. Human communicative events relate to prior or current texts and have the potential to be linked to something that follows. Literally everyone borrows from other sources, by the mere fact that people use shared languages to communicate.

Intertextual reference is used for specific motivations: from referencing a text at face value or creating a commentary by using certain phrasing or language (i.e. politispeak in Yes Minister—See this example), humans make intertextual references to situate their position within broader discourses.

In Against Intertextuality (2004), W. Irwin criticizes the way in which the term has come to mean allusion or source study. Irwin doesn’t believe an author can never communicate intentionality because if that were true, instructions could never be followed. Irwin’s criticism is not so much against the basic ideas that J. Kristeva merged from M. Bakhtin and F. Saussure in the somewhat oppressive atmosphere of the Academie Francaise in the late 1960’s (Irwin, 2004), but rather the extreme severing of text and intentionality and intentional obfuscation in poststructuralist writing.

Bazerman agrees with some of this critique in his conclusion (2006): “Intertextuality is not just a matter of which other texts you refer to, but how you use them, what you use them for and ultimately how you position yourself as a writer to them to make your own statement.”

I agree that authors make active decisions in what to quote and how to frame quotes within new texts. A great deal of control, agency and intentionality still remains. If Barthes really didn’t believe in the ability to communicate intentionality and that the author is truly immaterial, then why is the article called “Death of the Author by Roland Barthes?”

Intertextuality on the Internet

In looking online for more information about intertextuality, I was surprised that most of what is on the internet on the subject are basically examples of what people categorize as intertextuality. There are examples in music, poetry, biblical studies, literature, cinema, theatre, television and on the Internet—some more scholastic than others. There is an interesting video on Youtube called Intertextuality Resource that a teacher made for his students to show them how filmmakers draw from an intertextual assumption of their audiences to add to humor.

For those interested in more scholarly discussions about intertextuality or indeed about any main issues in English Studies, one of the most useful websites is R. M. Howard’s massive bibliography of Rhetoric and Composition. On her page, she cites no less than 63 entries pertaining to intertextual issues (including the article by Bazerman’s that we read).

Bazerman cites G. Allen’s Intertextuality as the overview to own on the subject.

J. Kristeva has an official website as does W. Irwin at the King’s College in Wilks-Barre, PA. Both sites are great resources for finding what other publications these scholars have participated in.

References
Allen, G. (2000). Intertextuality. London: Routledge.

Barthes, R. (1977). Death of the author. Image – Music – Text. London: Fontana,142-148.

Bazerman, C. (2004) Intertextuality: How texts rely on other texts. What Writing Does and How It Does It. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 83-96.

Edmunds, Lowell. (2001). Intertextuality and the Reading of Roman Poetry. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Retrieved from http://www.amazon.com/Intertextuality-Reading-Poetry-Lowell-Edmunds/dp/0801877415/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1287886624&sr=1-1#_

Gray, J. (2005). Watching With The Simpsons: Television, Parody, And Intertextuality. London: Routledge.

Gunning, T. (2004). The Intertextuality of Early Cinema: A Prologue to Fantômas. A Companion to Literature and Film. Stam, R. and Raengo, A. (Eds). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

Howard, R. M. Bibliographies for Composition and Rhetoric. Retrieved from http://wrt-howard.syr.edu/bibs.html

Irwin, W. (2004). Against intertextuality. Philosophy and Literature. 28, 227-242.

Irwin, W. William Irwin, PhD.homepage. Retrieved from http://staff.kings.edu/wtirwin/

Johnson, B. (2009). Intertextuality Resource. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6BFeVWb8vc

Kristeva, J. Julia Kristeva Official Homepage. Retrieved from http://www.kristeva.fr/

Lotterby, S. (Producer) (1988). The tangled web. Yes, Minister. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8keZbZL2ero

Nehama A. (2010). The biblical intertext in peter shaffer’s Amadeus (or, saul and david in eighteenth-century vienna). Comparative Drama. 44(1), 45-62. Retrieved from http://proxy.lib.odu.edu/login?url=http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/comparative_drama/v044/44.1.aschkenasy.html

Potts, Amy. Music Genres Intertextuality.(PowerPoint). Retrieved from http://www.slideshare.net/amyamz12334/music-genres-intertextuality-1985761

Pyeon, Y. (2003). You Have Not Spoken What Is Right About Me: Intertextuality and the Book of Job . Studies in Biblical Literature. 45. New York: Peter Lang,

Short. K. G.(1991). Intertextuality: Making Connections across Literature and Life. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the National Council of Teachers of English (81st, Seattle, WA) 11/22-27/1991.

What are latest examples of intertextuality headlines? Yahoo! Answers. Retrieved from http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100330071720AAL2t0q

Originally from the DC area, I received a B.A. in Studio Art (Drawing) from George Mason University and an M.A. in Communication (Film) from Regent University, where I  worked in their Center for Teaching and Learning creating media pieces for online courses until 2011.

In 2013, I moved to New York and finished my Ph.D. from Old Dominion University, majoring in English (New Media/Professional Writing track) in 2017. Around my education, I’ve worked in graphics, animation, theatre, radio, video production as well as various educational and corporate training contexts.

This blog was part of my doctoral program.

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