help...revision

I don't think I like this, but I tried to take your suggestions while still keeping it brief. I've made it less dense (I think). Therefore, though it has been suggested to refer to some other sources, I have opted to save that for the final paper. Please give me some more suggestions, because I honestly felt more pleased with the earlier version, though I understood everyone's criticisms. Here it is:

Old Breadcrumbs in New Bread: Constructing New Literacies from Familiar Materials

In 1999, Michael Spooner and Kathleen Blake Yancey, under the constructed voice/persona, Myka Vielstimmig, explored the pedagogical implications of electronic media on composition in their collaborative "new essay," "Petals on a Wet Black Bough: Textuality, Collaboration, and the New Essay." Their conception of the new essay stems from the collaborative ethos of internet writing (91) and is defined by a different logic than that of the traditional, "old," linear academic essay: "The new essay seems to have its own logic: intuitive, associative, emergent, dialogic, multiple--one grounded in working together and in re/presenting that working together" (90). Vielstimmig argue(s) that internet communication has given rise to a new kind of essay, and thus a new kind of literacy, that combines rhetoric and poetic, is collaborative, is visual as well as textual, and that leaves traces of its own process of creation within the materiality of the final product.

My presentation will explore the ways in which "old" media, such as comic books and associative poetry can provide a way to understand and produce essays in "new" digital media. Specifically, I suggest that the comic book form can provide a framework for viewing, creating, and designing new digital media. This presentation will examine excerpts from comics and graphic novels through the lens of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics and Vielstimmig's parameters for a "new essay" and then apply the insights gained from this examination to digital media compositions. Additionally, we will explore the pedagogical possibilities of applying this framework to some associative poetry to see if we gain any new insights into the poetic.

Vielstimmig's title belies that this associative mode of understanding did not emerge with digital media. They allude to Ezra Pound's poem, "In a Station of the Metro," and in fact quote it in its entirety interspersed between their own dialogue-paragraphs. Poems are often associative, and they certainly do not rely on the world-wide-web or digital technology for their production. Vielstimmig admits as much later in the essay: "my suggestion is that we are 'trained' associatively in consumption--we are trained to read poetry and fiction" (109). Those in English Studies should therefore be quite versed in associative literacy, and following this logic, perhaps those in the field of Creative Writing are most prepared for the new literacy, having been trained in the production as well as the consumption of associative texts.

We in English Studies, however, need a framework for addressing and understanding the "visual turn" in literacy and composition that Gunther Kress argues is accelerating with new digital media (68). Comics are, of course, texts that make use of the visual as well as the textual. They are also collaborative, in the spirit of Vielstimmig's brand of "new essay." The comic form can potentially help us to integrate the associative, the poetical and the rhetorical with the visual and digital.