Rice, Jeff. The Rhetoric of Cool: Composition Studies and New Media.
Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007.
Gregory Ulmer provides the forward to this text and explains the context for the argument that Rice presents. Rice, having worked with Ulmer as a graduate student, builds upon the work of his mentor by “ invit[ing] Composition Studies to take up this paradigmatic project: the invention of electracy” (Ulmer xi).
As stated in the introduction, Rice brings together “cultural studies, technology, and visual writing” as a means of inventing a “new electronic rhetoric” (3). Rice examines cool in relation to school, or academics, and the various connotations of the word as it relates to composition studies. Asking students in freshman composition courses to write about cool, Rice combines cultural representations of the concept of cool with divergent academic concepts of hot and cool forms of media and the rhetorical implications of writing in an increasingly electronic and digital environment. He writes, “What cool offers writing instruction is not so much its content (popularity or slang) but instead its rhetoric” (7). The chapters are divided into the “rhetorical moves” of “Chora, Appropriation, Juxtaposition, Commutation, Nonlinearity, and Imagery” all intended to supplement what Rice considers a missed opportunity in the paradigm shift of 1963 that gave rise to the field of Composition “with a capital C.”
In chapter 1, “The Story of Composition Studies and Cool,” Rice reconstructs the narrative of the birth of composition studies to include the rhetoric of “cool.” He proposes that those in the developing field of composition studies missed an opportunity to include this rhetoric of cool in the 1963 paradigm shift that directed composition studies away from product to process based methodology. Essentially, the movement neglected to consider the cultural studies and technological advancements of new media that would ultimately result in a new age of what Ulmer terms electracy. He notes that the book’s purpose is to “establish the rhetorical foundations from which cool operates” (27). The Rhetoric of Cool serves as a theoretical foundation for a textbook Rice has written on the same subject.
Rice addresses rhetorical concept of chora in chapter 2, “the principle that rhetorical meaning is not stable but instead fluid and moving” (29). Opposed to the more static and fixed notion of Aristotle’s topoi, Gregory Ulmer uses the term chora to describe a “hyper-rhetoric practice that updates the topoi for new media.” In this chapter, Rice explores the various cultural connotations of “cool” during the 1960s citing the iconic James Dean, popular songs idolizing the “bad boy” image,” the images and soundtrack portrayed in the film American Graffiti, as well as the perception of cool as being aloof, laid back, and unemotional. There are multiple meanings of cool that combine to generate this discourse. Again citing his mentor, “Ulmer notes that cool is one of many ways to make sense of the world” (34). It is, therefore, necessary to view cool through the “popcycle,” Ulmer’s term for the “framework that ties together” the institutions that create discourse. Entertainment is the institution that generates cool, and this is the system that helps us understand reality in our new media age. The various meanings of cool “crosses several genres (film, music, popular beliefs) while maintaining its overall meaning structure” (39). Rice asks students to choose a term relevant to their field of study, and by applying the associative concept of chora to the classroom, “students locate and research other meanings associated with that term from other disciplines, events, moments and media” (44). Essentially, Rice is using the “rhetoric of cool” as a model for working through the rhetorical principle of chora. He continues with this approach in the following chapters: “Appropriation, Juxtaposition, Commutation, Nonlinearity, and Imagery.”
The value of this text was not clear to me until I researched and read Ulmer. Rice is working through the rhetorical functions of CATTt, Ulmer’s method of invention that stands for “Contrast, Analogy, Theory, Target, and tale.” This text is a theoretical exercise that uses “cool” as the term that helps us define meaning and make associations within our new systems of electracy. Rice is adding this theoretical approach to the rhetoric of cool as his contribution to the invention of electracy, which is the term Ulmer uses for our electronically mediated post-literate world.
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