Invention is juxtaposition
- “Along with incorporating associative, remixed composing into our pedagogy, it's also important that composition and rhetoric specialists (at least sometimes) compose scholarly texts that resist linear print models--that we compose texts which show rather than tell (Ball 2004) about the ways in which associative juxtaposition can provoke new insight.”
- You have to gather a lot of disparate material to play with the juxtaposition “In order to generate chaos, writers need to resist narrowing focus and coming to closure too quickly; rather, writers who learn the ‘uses of chaos’; (Berthoff 1981 p. 68) come to value the process of gathering and juxtaposing disparate materials in order to generate a 'new' idea.”
Invention is embodied
- “In practice, invention manifests through the body, for a given body actively participates as an inherent material, alongside other materials, other bodies, in the reading and writing process, in the ever-becoming, ever-shifting engulfment of semiosis.”
- Embodiment is technology mediated.
- “Meaning making is mediated through the body—in a given body's available means. As Kristie Fleckenstein argues, ‘any use of language implicates a use of corporeality, blurring the distinctions between flesh and word, bodies and texts’ (p. 46).”
- “In other words, invention happens when one sits down at the computer, facing a blank screen, but invention continues as one moves from the computer screen to the kitchen, from typing to washing dishes; the mind doesn't stand still, compartmentalized, because one's body moves locations and tasks, but rather, the body travels through fluid boundaries, only compartmentalized by the tendency to enforce linear demarcations between experiences and spaces. The mind, through the body's movements, to echo Hayles, ‘forges connections,’ renewed combinations of a whole, integrated subject matter--inherent with digressions, swirls, steps off the beaten path. The body, or what Hawhee (2004) calls the ‘mind-body complex,’ is ever-present, ever-collaborative.”
Invention is social
- “Our view of invention as a social act also acknowledges the importance of interactions and conversations between individuals as key parts of invention processes. As evidenced by Plato's use of dialogues throughout his work (even if they are fictionalized conversations), talking to and with other people allows for a pooling of knowledge that can then be rearticulated by a rhetor to further complicate the values and beliefs of a community. Conversing with other writers also provides a space to work through new knowledge, which allows the writer to develop as-yet un(der)formed ideas as well as gain new insights she might not uncover otherwise.”
- Others are invisibly present because they have shaped our ideas prior to invention.
- The audience is also implicated in the act of invention. “Without considering the effects one's rhetorical choices will have on an audience and the ways in which these choices will impact existing views of a subject, a rhetor's attempts at persuasion become nearly impossible.” Also, one’s work will help the reader reinvent his/her own work.
The authors also claim:
- The role of the composition is to put things together, which means letting go of the internal drive toward coherence.
- The new is always very old.
- We need to dialogue with each other in our scholarship.
**This webtext makes use of video, video and audio recorded dialogue, and audio overlapped in video. Scholarship is presented in linear text under the opening videos.