College English - Volume 75, Issue 4, 2013

This essay questions the digital humanities’ dependence on interpretation and critique as strategies for reading and responding to texts. Instead, the essay proposes suggestion as a digital rhetorical practice, one that does not replace hermeneutics, but instead offers alternative ways to respond to texts. The essay uses the Occupy movement as an example and, in particular, focuses on the circulated image of a police officer pepper spraying protesters at one event in order to show how suggestion functions within a network of moments and associations.

This article identifies and examines a digital arm of creative writing studies and organizes that proposal into four categories through which to theorize the “craft” of creative production, each borrowed from Tim Mayers’s (Re)Writing Craft: Composition, Creative Writing, and the Future of English Studies: process, genre, author, and institutionality. Using research from composition studies and literary studies, the article examines the concerns each of these categories is beginning to confront as more and more creative texts recruit digital technologies. As such, the argument outlines four tiers that each work as a line of inquiry regarding the valuable—indeed necessary—ways to imagine concerns regarding craft in twenty-first- century creative writing studies.

By analyzing Zen guided meditations, I argue that literacy researchers can improve the field’s conceptual tools by investigating experiential knowledge. Using work on procedural knowledge and the emotional bases of perception, cognition, and decision making, I show that experiential knowledge drives perceptions and action, thus shaping subjectivity. Because subjectivities (re)constitute larger systems, scholars should investigate how literacy interacts with experiential knowledge to learn whether and how it mediates personal and systemic change. To further such efforts, I show how some literacy practices use conceptual and procedural knowledge to revise experiential knowledge, and I outline an experiential approach to studying literacy.

This symposium explores the role(s) College English has (or has not) had in the scholarly work of four scholars. Lynn Bloom explores the many ways College English influenced her work and the work of others throughout their scholarly lives. Edward M. White examines four articles he has published in College English and draws connections between these and the development of college English over the past fifty years. Jessica Enoch studies College English as an archive whose meaning is developed both on and off its pages. And, finally, Byron Hawk troubles the ideas raised in previous essays, drawing attention to how a flagship journal such as College English can operate within the broader network of scholars in the field. Taken together, these perspectives draw attention to how College English connects to the field at large and how authors and readers may see the potential role(s) the journal plays in scholarly publishing in English studies today.