Wysocki, Anne Frances. “The Sticky Embrace of Beauty: On Some Formal Problems in Teaching about the Visual Aspects of Texts.” In Writing New Media. Eds. Anne Frances Wysocki, et al. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2004. 147-198.

Wyscoki argues for an alternative understanding of beauty, aesthetic, and form that is grounded in the local and the particular rather than universal generalities and maxims that visual designers use for composing images and texts, universal rules that were developed first through Kant’s philosophy. Kant believed that the judgment of beauty is inherent and universal, happening when a person sees and appreciates its structure in terms of its formal relations. This allows the object (or body) deemed beautiful to be made abstract and distanced, a dangerous ethical situation. Wysocki, seeing this tension, argues that composition teachers, instead of just teaching students about design by instructing them in general, accepted rules for visual arrangment, should question the social and cultural practices that deem something efficient, pleasing, or visual, analyzing and creating to make what we take for granted unfamiliar to us so that we might appreciate and understand its particularities. In this way, she shows how form is rhetorical, informed and mediated by choices grounded in history and cultural context.

Quotable Quotes

How can we teach visual communication in such a way “That form does not override content, so that form is, in fact, understood as itself part of content, so that, finally, I better understand how to support students (and myself) be generously and questioningly recipricoal in our designings” (144)

“Form is itself always a set of structuring principles, with different forms growing out of and reproducing different but specific values” (159).

“If we believe that to be human is to be tied to place and time and messiness and complexity, then, by so abstracting us, this desire dehumanizes us and our work and how we see each other. This is dangerous.” (169)

“The web of social and cultural practices in which we move give us the words and concepts, as well as the tastes, for understanding what we sense” (171).

Notable Notes

Kant Critique of Judgment

The New Yorker Peek advertisement – woman’s body

design elements aren’t neutral – design values can’t just be looked at analytically….ours are grounded in industrializaiton, standardization, linear, order, efficiency (Nazi memos)

assignments ask students to learn design principles deductively by gathering designs. Also, redesigning web sites and textbooks

reciprocal relationship – we need “approaches that see form as this kind of recognition, tying us to others and to our times and places” (170)

I finished The Dew Breaker sometime last week, and it was good. The end reminded me a lot of Junot Diaz’s The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and it tied the story together in a way that I wasn’t quite expecting. Now I’m reading a bunch of nonfiction shorts, which have to be returned to the library soon, so I might just pick and choose the ones I want to read and give up on the rest.

I’m tired.

Did I tell you guys about Wordstock? It’s Portland’s annual literary festival, and I went to it a couple of weekends ago. I bought a bunch of $2 literary journals and listened to a panel about the importance of place in writing. As I’ve mentioned before, I love listening to writers speak, and this was no exception. I spent a few days digesting it with my roommate, who also enjoyed the talk, and yes. The role of place in writing is something that I think about often. There was a lot of talk about the moral and ethic implications of visiting a place, stepping into a culture that is not your own, and the line between representation and exploitation. 

This past weekend, we had a bunch of visitors in from Seattle, so we did the whole Portland thing, heading downtown for a rally again Prop 8, checking out the farmer’s market, and hitting up Reading Frenzy and Powells. I bought a couple of zines (the new Cometbus is out!) and 3 books—Infinite Jest (wowza), The Golden Notebook, and a book of nonfiction by Wallace Stegner. I really want to read Infinite Jest, but my goodness, have you looked at it? Held it in your hands? That is one massive manifesto. But I am excited. Time to get on a schedule.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how diversified my reading has gotten. Lately, I’ve been consuming it mostly based on proximity and availability. A couple of chapters from Me Talk Pretty One Day, which has hung out on the kitchen table for the past week or so. A poem and fiction excerpt from The New Yorker in the doctor’s office. You know.