Kelly Ritter

E-Valuating Learning: Rate My Professors and Public Rhetorics of Pedagogy

The Rate My Professors (RMP) online student discourse community shapes and defines current public rhetorics of pedagogy. RMP is a cultural phenomenon indicative of a larger movement in extra-institutional discourse toward ranking and assessing people and products. More important than the postings on RMP, however, or their measurable accuracy, is how RMP reflects the increasingly convergent interests of consumer culture and academic culture, shaping the ways that pedagogy is valued and assessed by students within the public domain. Faculty therefore must consider RMPs effect on public discourse about pedagogy in order to help students understand evaluation as a tool for civic exchange.

Teaching Lore: Creative Writers and the University

[The] highly commercialized teaching of creative writing, the teaching of it in myriads of separated little vacuums, is in its own shabby way big business and really has only remotely to do with the work of English de partments. Yet it does seem to govern academic practice. Many colleges and universities seal themselves off from this plague outside their walls and have nothing whatsoever to do with creative writing. ... I myself have come to believe that creative writing courses have a valuable and inevitable place in the context of the normal work of a department of English. Certainly writing can no more be taught than painting or any skill in any art, but it can be taught as much.

SPECTACLE AT THE DISCO: Boogie Nights, Soundtrack, and the New American Musical

Abstract In our postmodern visual culture, the idea of spectacle conjures images of excess. In defining spectatorship, we emphasize the visual, drawing physical eyewitnesses toward the spectacular moment itself and into the reification of that moment on the film screen. However, recent Hollywood cinema has challenged the notion that all spectacle must take place within the realm of the visual, as many films strive to reach spectators aurally, via their soundtracks. In particular, popular song has been used in many commercially successful films to re-create each spectators relationship with his or her past. Films with best-selling pop soundtracks, such as The Wedding Singer and Romy and Michelles High School Reunion, among others, have financially exploited the spectators attention to familiar song within comedic narratives, prompting viewers to purchase collections of songs they may already own, motivated by nostalgia and pleasant rearrangements of these songs within light, entertaining narratives. In other cases, “retro” films such as 54 and The Last Days of Disco have attempted to capitalize on the popularity of musical trends, such as disco, to revisit what the “scene” meant to its patrons, as well as what disco might mean commercially to new generations. But rarely do the songs in this type of film serve as anything but collective backdrop or the means by which a filmmaker might establish setting, particularly in terms of a decade. They merely reconfigure radio programming, reorder Top 40 hits for a theatrical space.

Archival Research in Composition Studies: Re-Imagining the Historian's Role

This article argues that historians of composition studies are burdened by adherence to history-as-narrative in archival research, whether supporting or countering master narratives of the field. I propose that historians redefine their work in conversation with the principles of archival ethnography, a concept from the field of library and information science. Reseeing historiography through this lens means privileging the position of the archivist as community interloper, thus creating a shift in responsibility from interpretation of archival material to public transmission thereof. Re-imagining the historians role as ethnographic also aims to redress the ethical burden of inevitable re-presentation of past agents, practices, and values.