10/18--Response to Comstock and Hocks, and Selfe

As Comstock and Hocks point out in their article, “Voice in the Cultural Soundscape: Sonic Literacy in Composition Studies,” “As many Western philosophers from Plato to Jacques Derrida have noted, Westerners tend to be phonocentric, quick to ascribe presence and immediacy to speech, even recorded speech.” In reading this article, I know agree with this statement and believe it to be true, though I’ve never really thought about this before. In my training as a graduate TA, especially in my MA, I was taught to critically evaluate what counted as a “text” and to encourage multimodal composition in the classroom. I cannot, however, remember ever discussing projects characterized by aurality.

In reading these articles, I was struck by an experience I had as a first year TA teaching ENGL 1101 by myself for the first time. A student always sat in class with one ear bud in his ear and I asked him several times during the term to take it out. When I began teaching as a full time instructor at a technical college upon graduation, I had a clause in my syllabus about ear buds. While in these situations, one can be relatively certain the students were not using music to supplement or transform their classroom experience in some critical way, I know wonder how music changes the experience of the composing student. As Selfe states, “This phenomenon [of today’s students’ penchant for listening to and producing sound and its ironic implications for English teachers], however, may reveal as much about our profession’s attitudes toward aurality and writing—or the related history of these expressive modalities within our discipline—as it does about students’ literacy values and practices” (2). Certainly environment plays a role in students’ state of mind, especially the sensory environment. I am really interested in exploring some activities that incorporate sonic literacy and aurality in the future. In particular, I find important the assertion that “sounds dissolve into nothing in a way that images and writing do not,” and am interested in further discussing and exploring the implications of this statement.