I really like the way this piece lays out space in composition and rhetoric.
From "Composition's Imagined Geographies: The Politics of Space in the Frontier, City, and
Cyberspace" by Nedra Reynolds, College Composition and Communication, Vol. 50, No. 1 (Sep., 1998), pp. 12-35
"Attending to the politics of space can begin with simple observations about where writers and writing instructors work-in a variety of institutional, public, and private spaces (some of them difficult to categorize as either public or private): the academic buildings of our offices, computer labs, and writing centers; the cafeterias, libraries, and classrooms of our campuses; the large conference hotels where we meet to exchange ideas and socialize; the kitchen table, desks, or computer corners in our homes. These actual locations for the work of writing and writing instruction coexist with several metaphorical or imaginary places where we write, study writing, or create theories about writing: webs of meaning, research paradigms, home departments, discourse communities, frontiers, cities, and cyberspaces."
"Spatial metaphors have long dominated our written discourse in this field ("field" being one of the first spatial references we can name) because, first, writing itself is spatial, or we cannot very well conceive of writing in ways other than spatial. In "The Limits of Containment: Text-as-Container in Composition Studies," Darsie Bowden asserts that composition "is espe- cially rife with metaphors because composing involves complex cognitive activities...that are difficult to talk about and understand" (364). As Bowden's analysis suggests, many of our metaphors in writing and composition studies involve or depend on imaginary conceptions of space. From bound texts to pages to paragraphs, sentences, and words, we read and write in distinctly spatial ways. We read from left to right (in most languages), and we scan pages up and down or rifle through a stack of pages from top to bottom. We are accustomed to margins and borders that frame texts for us and page numbers or arrow icons that mark our place. (How often have you found a remembered passage by its placement on a page, its position in the text?) Academic and professional writers are comfort- able with manipulating textual spaces and know that the tasks of organiz- ing and presenting information-with spatial constraints all around- constitute one of a writer's biggest challenges. Techno-revolutions are changing our notions of texts on pages, most of us realize, and the days of container metaphors for texts may be numbered.
"Jay David Bolter's Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing thoroughly demonstrates that writing specialists would be hard pressed to imagine or explain writing in terms other than spatial. From topoi to transitions, we make decisions throughout the writing process based on spatial relationships; for example, where an example goes or what point connects to what claim. To control textual space well is to be a good writer; in fact, controlling textual spaces is very much tied to both literacy and power. Chris Anson identifies some commonly-accepted practices that are really about writing teachers' efforts to assert control over textual space-rules about margins and double-spacing, about where the staple or paper clip goes, about where the writer's name and the date belong-all of these practices or rules are about control, which as he points out, might slip away from us in the age of electronic writing.
"When created via computer interfaces, texts burst out of their contain- ers, as Cynthia Selfe and Richard Selfe have argued. One of the reasons that word processing has been so revolutionary to writers is that it allows for easier, faster manipulation of space: sentences, chunks, or paragraphs can be deleted or moved in seconds. Because readers orient themselves spatially within printed texts-"How many more pages?"-Bolter explains that spatial disorientation is, in fact, one of the problems or challenges of electronic writing, where "the reader seldom has a sense of where he or she is in the book" (87).
"Because writing teachers recognize both the spatial nature of writing and the importance of controlling textual as well as disciplinary space, compositionists have developed a rich repertoire of memorable spatial images and referents, everything from webs of meaning to turf wars. Spatial metaphors have served to establish what composition should be or to la- ment what composition has become. For example, claims of composition as a discipline have called on the lofty spatial metaphors of paradigms and "domains" (Phelps) or on the more mundane: inside Stephen North's sprawling, junky house of lore resides a group of sad occupants who live in the basement (Miller). Feminist readings of the field have concentrated on the domestic spaces of composition, where underpaid women are assigned primarily chores and housekeeping tasks (Slagle and Rose; Neel). In our discussions of economic and political issues about composition, we refer to heavy course-loads as teaching "in the trenches" because composition oc- cupies the "low" position in the academy, akin to a carnival (Miller).
"Generally, as composition has encountered postmodernism, metaphors of inside and outside, margin and center, boundaries and zones have be- come increasingly familiar, appealing, even comfortable. Mike Rose's Lives on the Boundary; Carolyn Ericksen Hill's Writing on the Margins; and Mary Louise Pratt's "arts of the contact zone" identify three of the most popular spatial metaphors for discussing issues of difference and diversity or for as- serting where the work of composition studies should concentrate. Per-haps the most appealing spatial metaphor right now is Gloria Anzaldfia's "borderlands" (La Frontera), where cultures are mixed and mingled and where geographic borders do not hold. Imagining spaces where differences mingle is important to a field characterized by interdisciplinarity and populated with some of the most marginalized members of the academy: per-course instructors, teaching assistants, and first-year students. "
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