Response to Visualizing Engish

Craig Stroupe, “Visualizing English: Recognizing the Hybrid, Literacy of Visual and Verbal Authorship on the Web,” addresses the discourse of hypertext in English departments, characterized in Stroupe’s essay with a quote from W.J.T. Mitchell, “as a battleground between the values associated with verbal and visual codes.” Well, such heated discussions appear not to be limited to our class. Interestingly Stroup, this time quoting David Siegel, arrives at the same remedy Stay-Ann, experienced through her work in advertising of coordinating such teams Siegel describes as “layered into . . . diverse amalgamation of literacies,” had suggested for the “problematic combination of verbal and nonverbal features in texts,” to hire someone. In fact, Siegel, places writers he labels as “contentmasters” in this “new work paradigm” at the base of the hierarchy, not necessarily “in control of form and rhetoric of production” similar to a scriptwriter in television. Of course, such a misguided pecking order would upset English departments focused on creating and analyzing “verbal blocks of text,” and as Stroup notes, their “political and pecuniary interests.”

Stroup’s assessment that a critical consciousness of the distinctive literacies of hybridity, both codes of verbal and image, can function a single double-voiced rhetoric—is a sexy and stimulating concept except for the complexity it presents to the individual writer who must desperately seek a visual-digital artist or invest huge blocks of time in learning digital literacy, time such writers might lament taken from their writing practice. Therefore, I do not reject Stacy-Ann’s sage advice but my experience as an individual rejoicing in the solitude of my writing practice not possessing deep corporate pockets have found hiring someone, if that someone could be easily found, an unwelcome distraction and huge expense. Therefore, Stroupe’s argument that hybridity be embraced by English departments and taught is class would create a hybrid independent, double-voiced cyborg population fluent in both verbal and visual codes. Fine, but where does this leave the overwhelmingly massive digital literate ageing “immigrant” population? Me. Even if I wanted to dedicate a year to total immersion in the digital culture what are my chances of assimilation? I mean how do I bridge the chasm between contentmaster and cyborg?

In all honesty I cannot deny membership, although not an academic, in the group Lanham’s historicism represents but agree with Stroupe that the more genuine products of popular culture should not be overlooked but more supported and produced so it can be heard.
I am in complete agreement with Stroupe’s “imagetext,” as I translate Mitchell’s coinage to be simultaneous with methanarratives that are hybrid products of visualized English,Anne Carson’s Nox being a fine example, visualized text is the focus of the narratives I write and therefore embrace Stroupe’s irritation with the privileging of linear black and white blocks of narratives. I just seem to need more time to overcome my ambivalence, not because I think digital rhetoric less intellectually serious that printed texts but because digital media’s focus on producing products for mindless consumption. I am seduced by the class readings of digitalized blocks of texts that in the case of “Visualizing English” unable to highlight had to be printed to allow a space for reader interaction.





a richly complex and appealing blend of slow cooking at digital speed 
I want to have my alphabet and surf it too