Electracy: Gregory L. Ulmer’s Textshop Experiments

by Gregory L. Ulmer (Editor), Craig J. Saper (Editor), Victor J. Vitanza (Editor)

“Textshop” in the title refers to a pedagogy for teaching rhetorical invention, with application to any form of production of texts or works in Arts and Letters fields, or for teaching creative thinking in general. More specifically this book provides background and context for the published work of Ulmer, filling in gaps between his books, and showing the genealogy of Ulmer’s innovative approach to media education. The revolutions of the past two centuries included the transformation of every discipline and field of knowledge, as well as of technology, popular culture, and everyday life. It is ironic that the one mode of representation that escaped the rejection of mimetic realism in modernist arts and letters is pedagogy (the representation of the object of knowledge). Within this reserve many disciplines, especially in the sciences, nonetheless updated their practices and applied the new discoveries to their areas of responsibility. The exception is the Humanities, which studies about its innovators (James Joyce, the Surrealists, Dadaism) but does not admit the modernist revolution in style into the practices of knowledge production. All that is changing now, as the Humanities go online, into a multimodal environment for which conventional literacy is not adequate. In these essays, Ulmer shows how to translate the poetics of experimental arts and contemporary theory into a liberal arts pedagogy for teaching with media. This rhetoric is generalized in turn into a logic of invention (heuretics), relevant to learning across the curriculum. In the digital apparatus—electracy—there is a formal correlation aligning hypermedia platforms, experimental arts poetics, and logics of creativity. Textshop is a pedagogy for negotiating the transition from literacy to electracy. These essays introduce heuretics (the logic of invention) by explaining how the logic was discovered. In the spirit of the liberal arts as self-knowledge, Ulmer dramatizes his own encounter with the mysteries and difficulties of modernist experiments in the arts and the obscurity of the philosophy associated with them. At the center of the difficulty was the term “text,” which seemed to have undergone a metamorphosis in the modernist revolution. To help students as well as himself in his courses in the history of the Western tradition, literary criticism, and film studies, Ulmer took the inventors of “text” theory at their word—that the relevant question is not what texts mean, but how they are made—and began to use text to know text. The essays bring the reader along on Ulmer’s path of inquiry and learning, sharing his reasoning, his pedagogy, and his experiments, testifying to his efforts as a teacher to communicate the irreducible importance of a new Humanities education to the future of digital civilization.

352 pages, Paperback

Published January 7, 2015