It was refreshing to hear of another theorist (Elbow and Murray being others) who struggled to achieve her place in the field. Lunsford’s humility in addressing the challenges of “making it” in the world of academe is encouraging, because the pompousness of some of these other guys can be nauseating at times. Her ideas regarding collaboration are noteworthy. Her relationship with Lisa Ede and others shows that the result of consistently exposing yourself to differing view points (and even just different personalities) can be the impetus that inspires great work.
One of the interesting ideas associated with Lunsford is her focus on the absence of attention to memoria in rhetoric study since the introduction of print. I think Ong would be particularly interested in this too, seeing how this was the most essential aspect of the word in purely oral cultures. So, how does Memory factor into rhetoric when language is based mainly on the printed/electronic word? The only “memory” I can think of is on a USB drive, which simply gives the electronic word more agility and longevity.
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I, too, found myself interested in the role the canon of "Memoria" might play today. As someone whose family is mostly Southern, I grew up in a world where oral storytelling was still the norm, and I've come to believe that without the "voice" of history, we can easily become disconnected, feeling as though even our own history has nothing to do with us.
ReplyDeleteLike walking through a museum or, better yet, an old, lived in house, there is so often an awe in thinking, "this person who lived hundreds of years ago touched this, created this" - and suddenly all those years in between have a continuity. I wonder if that is something we will lose (and miss) if we get too used to communicating only through text (especially using the shorthand version of text we so often use now).