Theoretical Inspiration
Image of Wunderkammer ("wonder closet") taken from Creative Commons image on Google.com/image search.
Earlier this year, Susan Delagrange published a digital article on visual arrangement in Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. Within an intertextual, multi-modal framework, Delagrange examines and practices “critical wonder,” or the process of imaginative and thoughtful discovery via digital (or tactile) design. She compares the wunderkammern (or “wondrous cabinets”/“wonder rooms” popular in the 16th and 17th century) to current digital constructs, linking the two very different realms through the phenomenon of (what I understand to be) chaotic composing. Just as wunderkammern offered observers strange occasion for linking seemingly disparate concepts, our current interactive digital realms offer us “new opportunities to ‘perform’ our pedagogy as a productive, rhetorically rich art, and to compose texts and make meaning that are not possible in traditional print” (Delagrange “Performance”). Calls for digital creation in Rhetoric and Composition appear early in the 21st century,[1] and Delagrange’s article both examines and responds to that call. The digital article—http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/13.2/topoi/delagrange—is itself a series of intertexts, images, videos, and other elements arranged in space. It creates from disparate parts a whole framework that shows how visual arrangement can be used as a method of knowledge-making.
[1] See the CCCC Chair’s Addresses of Douglas Hesse and Kathleen Blake Yancey for examples.
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