Composition: History & Theory: 1990 - 1999
Reynolds, Nedra. “Composition’s Imagined Geographies: The politics of Space in the Frontier...”
Description
As an attempt to illustrate postmodernism “for those who cannot (or will not) read Fredric Jameson,” (253) Nedra Reynolds’s “Composition’s Imagined Geographies: The politics of Space in the Frontier, City, and Cyberspace” examines how composition, “a product of North America and of capitalism,” has, through scholars like Mina Shaughnessy, Joseph Harris, and Howard Rheingold, created spatial metaphors branching off frontier metaphors that bring with them the “dominant ideologies of space, place, and landscape in the U.S. [which boil down to]: the more the better; own as much as possible; keep trespassers off; if it looks uninhabited, it must be” (239). Reynolds goes on to explain how these transparent (seemingly harmless) spaces, are composed by signifiers that point back to these ideologies, which (because they are seemingly harmless ) cause composition scholars to overlook the material conditions of teaching and composing in real physical/material spaces. Time-space compression, or the “illusion that there is more time” because the world is “‘smaller’ than it used to be,” is a major concern for Reynolds who sees technology in particular as a contributor to this compression which “affects composition’s workers on a daily basis, in concrete ways that need our attention” (248). Ultimately, Reynolds’s argument is to “think smaller and more locally” about the geographies of our profession (248) and to develop a “paradoxical sense of space to inform our research and practices and to approach the study of the social production of spaces in a field already committed to examining the production of discourse” (252).
Author
rebecca butorac
Date of Upload
11/3/2009