[Pictured above: A pre-Pandemic gathering of ITALIC students and faculty, including former PWR Faculty Director, Nick Jenkins, top left)
My office in the Burbank dorm, where the first-year residential education arts program ITALIC (Immersion in the Arts – Living in Culture) is located, is a short distance from Sweet Hall, yet it often feels like I’m far away from everyone in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric. I mention its location because so much of my teaching at Stanford, since joining PWR in 2017, has been shaped by physical spaces – the Burbank lecture theater, Sweet, CERAS meeting rooms, the Hume Center, Green Library, the Bookstore Café – where I’ve worked with colleagues and students. As the PWR lecturer in ITALIC I’m effectively part of two teaching communities on campus. Both are distinguished by a pedagogical culture of sharing and collaboration, inside and outside the classroom. Much of my day-to-day work occurs in Burbank, where the students attend lectures, regularly eat lunch with the teaching team, and explore artmaking across various mediums, genres, and forms of cultural expression.
ITALIC is a year-long academic program in which approximately forty-five students, all of whom live in Burbank, explore the history, theory, and practice of art with a teaching team led by the Faculty Director, Karla Oeler (Art & Art History), and the Associate Director, Kim Beil. Over the past three and-a-bit years I’ve had the pleasure of working with Professor Oeler and Dr. Beil, and faculty members Nicholas Jenkins (English), Jonathan Berger (Music), Heather Hadlock (Music), and Samer Al-Saber (Theater and Performance Studies), not to mention my officemate Ryan Tacata, a lecturer in ITALIC who led, until leaving the program last year, discussion sections with the students, together with Dr. Beil. Members of the teaching team tend to deliver lectures according to their specialization – Dr. Beil will analyze, say, a Horace Poolaw photograph, whereas Professor Oeler will explicate the meaning of a Sergei Parajanov film – but everyone presents their ideas and interpretations across disciplines. In addition to lectures on New Zealand cinema, Italian neorealist films, and science-fiction, I’ve given talks, for example, on Gustave Flaubert’s novels, installation art by Ragnar Kjartansson, and the paintings of Agnes Martin. ITALIC is notable for the number of guest lectures given by Stanford faculty, lecturers, and invited artists, in fields such as painting, photography, sculpture, conceptual art, literature, music, theater, dance, film, television, and music videos. There are, concurrently, a number of practice-based workshops throughout the year, ranging from improvisation to film production to zine-making, as well as campus events and field trips around the Bay Area, concluding in the Spring quarter with a two-day visit to Los Angeles.
Every year is different. There is both continuity and change within the teaching team, and each fall a new group of students begin in the program. Their interests, personalities, talents, and commitments determine the character and energy of ITALIC, even if the fire is fueled, too, by the curriculum. Each quarter has an overarching theme, such as “creating,” “challenging,” and “interpreting” art, cumulatively connecting the lectures and readings. It’s worth stressing that ITALIC is, to borrow a term from Gilles Deleuze, somewhat ‘rhizomatic’ in its structure: nonlinear, cross-cultural, and multimodal. Words, images, and sounds bounce off each other, multidirectionally and multidimensionally, through and between the teaching team and the students – and, of course, amongst the students themselves, accomplished artists who are eager to share their voices. And within this flux of aesthetics, culture, philosophy, and politics, the students develop, too, their research and writing skills.
About a third of students take the ITALIC-specific PWR 1 course (ITALIC 95) with me for a quarter at some point in the year. It differs from the typical PWR experience in two principal ways: one) all the students know each another from the dorm and the ITALIC lectures, sections, workshops, and fieldtrips, and two) there are myriad shared reference points from ITALIC, such as specific artworks, readings, and experiences. (It’s for this reason that my PWR 1 class via Zoom for Spring 2020 was maybe unique: we already knew each other well from ITALIC.) The scope of the course itself is broad – it’s titled The Rhetoric of Art. Just like ITALIC, this ‘big theme,’ as I call it, includes anything aesthetic which a student might want to explore across the TIC and RBA.
To repeat: ‘immersion in the arts – living in culture.’ Art is a part of culture. Our identities – in terms, for example, of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and religion – are formed, too, within a culture, or cultures. Artworks are prismatic portals through which we can see ourselves and others across time, whether it’s within the world of so-called ‘fine art’ or in the pages of a comic book. The complicated social, cultural, and ideological relations between the body and the soul as they are formed and expressed through language, are complex and dynamic. Art can make sense of these relations, even if it can, as often as not, obscure them. Writing about art within the PWR 1 curriculum enables ITALIC students to examine how artworks reflect, reveal, obfuscate, reinforce, and contest these relations in extraordinary, and often beautiful, ways. When you think and write about art, I’ve often found, you find out something about yourself. In developing their skills in rhetoric, research, and writing students thus have an opportunity to learn together by sharing what they really care and think about.
When setting off into rhetorical analysis, I therefore provide a freewriting prompt which asks students which discourse communities they consider themselves members of, so that they begin contextualizing arguments. In Spring 2019 I referred to the musical Hamilton, a performance of which we’d recently attended together in San Francisco, when exploring the ‘rhetorical situation.’ I primed the students by sharing some of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s lyrics from “Non-Stop” via a slide deck, which seemed especially pertinent in a first-year writing course:
Why do you always say what you believe?
Why do you always say what you believe?
Ev’ry proclamation guarantees free ammunition for your enemies
Why do you write like it’s
Going out of style?
Write day and night like it’s
Going out of style?
Ev’ry day you fight like it’s
Going out of style
Do what you do
In small groups they discussed how various intersecting discourse communities – hip hop artists and fans; musicals writers and fans; historians and biographers; and performers, choreographers, and theatrical technicians – would interpret Hamilton, and the appeals the respective rhetors would employ in making persuasive arguments. I’ve used other examples, from ITALIC and beyond, to highlight how social and cultural norms affect the discursive spaces in which argumentation takes place. I endeavor to introduce, with such activities, a sense of the central importance of cultural rhetorics as they relate, particularly, to arts criticism.
For the RA assignment, I accordingly provide five pre-selected texts from which the students can choose, which I switch up most quarters. They are all art-themed, with many addressing the connections between identity, social experience, and aesthetics, which are a central concern of most students in any given year. These critical texts – such as Trisha Low’s “Against Pure Cinema,” Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda’s “On Whiteness and the Racial Imaginary,” and Natalie Diaz’s “A Lexicon of the Indigenous Body” – complement the students’ reading in ITALIC, and hopefully center voices which have been, and continue to be, sidelined and ignored inside and outside the academy. These texts, like the shared reference points from ITALIC, are a helpful springboard for the TIC and RBA. Not only do students comparatively discover and interrogate their own respective reactions and interpretations of what’s being argued, when peer reviewing, they also think through, analytically, how something is argued, and why. When heading off in different directions for their research projects they have a sense, from their collaborative work, of art-focused conversations occurring within and across distinct discursive contexts.
When developing research skills, there are likewise occasions to use ITALIC texts and experiences, whether it’s idea-generation for the TIC, or relating already-familiar concepts and theories to novel artworks. In one quarter, for example, I began a class with a freewriting prompt which asked students to come up with interesting research questions about a Mark Applebaum composition, Cardi B’s Invasion of Privacy, John Adams’ Girls of the Golden West, and Taiko performance in the United States – music they’d recently listened to and discussed in ITALIC. In another quarter, as we transitioned from the TIC to the RBA, students in small groups first assessed different perspectives on Chris Marker’s La Jetée, mapping a mock-TIC (the film and texts being ITALIC 95-specific), and then outlined interpretations of the film inspired by either Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” or Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, both of which they’d encountered in ITALIC lectures and sections.
This kind of conceptual work is interlaced with the nuts and bolts of research skills. Students explore myriad topics inside our ‘big theme’ of art. Many become creative by necessity when drafting and revising their TICs, as there’s little or no peer-reviewed scholarship (or, for that matter, substantial ‘popular’ criticism) on their topic, often because they’re writing about brand new albums and films, or relatively obscure artists. In these instances, which are fairly common, I encourage students to use the TIC as a theoretical catalyst for the RBA, where they can map a conversation addressing the underlying premises, conditions, and questions subtending their interest in the topic at hand. They might delve into history, sociology, psychology, philosophy, or art theory, depending on the project. It can be an exciting period of discovery, in which a student surveys the critical literature, traversing the subject areas, from A to Z.
When it comes to guiding students through the RBA, however, I’m convinced of the benefits of delimitation. That is, the value of writing about what I’ll term an ‘object,’ whether it’s a book of poems, a photo-essay, an album, a movie, or a play. Pedagogically-speaking, it’s a chance to concurrently work on different aspects of exposition and argumentation – through contextualization, illustration, and analysis. Objects provide a focal point. Students can figure out how much of their essay should be taken up with biographical information and historical scene-setting, where and how to condense and summarize a plot, theme, or motif, when to dig into their material and provide rich, thick description and when to zoom out to reestablish the bigger picture, everything hopefully driven by a thesis that’s well-supported with and by this evidence.
Sometimes there’s misplaced trepidation about a self-perceived lack of authority, as a student might not have done this kind of writing before, in which the evidence emerges through their own interpretive insights. Building an argument through analysis is empowering and edifying for a student. It’s here, I think, where artworks are special within rhetoric and composition – these objects have a form, texture, and meaning which require description and evaluation. Students work on the mechanics of scholarly research and writing, and in doing so get to inhabit a mental space where they can think in-depth about something significant to them.
With this in mind, I concluded the Winter 2020 quarter – just before everyday life was upended due to the COVID-19 pandemic – with a somewhat fundamental question for my students: “What is (the meaning of) life?” They came, having pondered this, having written five different texts – a poem, a list, a philosophical/spiritual statement, a political/ideological statement, and a personal anecdote – which they shared with one another and with me. As a consideration of ‘style and voice’ this activity produced snapshots of their thoughts and feelings, expressed in different genres. The texts were quite varied – lyrical, meditative, serious, reasoned, impassioned, whimsical, sentimental, and personal – and reflected, I’d say, different facets of each student’s personality and identity. Their writing clearly shared a theme though: the desire for meaningful human connection. Now, in retrospect, I’m struck by how the very thing – togetherness – which we still need to avoid, all these months later, was at the very heart of their thinking.
ITALIC, like the PWR courses for 2020-21, will be taught via Zoom this year. It is, and will be, very different. The students in Fall quarter were not on campus, not living together in Burbank. And I’ll teach PWR 1 to approximately thirty ITALIC students in the Winter quarter, split into two ITALIC 95 sections. But having just recently finished the first quarter with them, online in ITALIC, I’m reminded of what makes the program so great: the students and the teaching team. I began this account of my past three years as the PWR lecturer in ITALIC with an evocation of place – those spaces on campus where we talk, seek and give advice and support, praise one another, and make each other laugh – mainly because I teach writing in a residential education program, with my office in the dorm itself. The buildings where we come together are, like Zoom, helpful tools for us. But it’s really the relationships that are at the center of what we do in PWR. With my specific theme for my PWR 1 course, the Rhetoric of Art, I’m reminded, too, of the power of art to establish and sustain these relationships. In ITALIC, via Zoom, I’ve attended wonderful, inspiring lectures and listened to and read and looked at engaging artworks by a very talented group of creative and thoughtful people.
I’m looking forward to working with the students next quarter, guiding them through the RA, TIC, and RBA, and everything in-between, so that they might continue to discover some things about art, themselves, and each another, within a community.
