"Contextualizing Place as Type: Creating an Auburn Typeface"
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Harry LewisHarry Lewis is earning his degree in the Masters in Technical and Professional Communication program at Auburn University. His interests include visual rhetoric, typography, and the intersections of marketing and tech comm. Before attending Auburn, he received his BA from Saginaw Valley State University (MI). He is currently searching for jobs in marketing or UX, and enjoys dogs, hockey, and bad jokes. ContentsThe State of Location in Composition Typography as Rhetorical Argumentation |
The State of Location in CompositionIn Peter Vandenberg and Jennifer Clary-Lemon’s (2007) Looking for Location Where It Can’t Be Found, the authors discuss the trend of graduate-level university courses and their tendency to guide future composition instructors to abstract themselves from their locations of composition. They argue that this practice places these writers within a pseudo-virtual reality, as “the overwhelming commitment to scholarly writing as virtuoso performance in graduate training in composition studies effectively abstracts future writing teachers from material location into the hyperreality of a professional discourse that recognizes an obligation to little more than effective generalization.” This is then followed by a call to action, as there’s a proposal for “a movement into the dynamic realm of social interest and localized realities as a check against this displacement” (p. 92). As a graduate student focusing on technical communication and visual rhetoric at Auburn University, I hope to push back against this abstraction from place, and explore the ways that typography can provide an opportunity to locate myself as a composer within my current academic environment. (My mom always told me I was good at doing exactly what I was told not to do.) Being able to recognize and contextualize the influence of an environment on a composer allows for a chance to avoid falling into Vandenberg and Clary-Lemon’s (2007) conceptualization of academic discourse as “hyperreal” and cyclical. This trend, they assert, is a production of composers who follow the discursive ideals of the institution from which they are physically emerging, while seeking to abstract themselves from that same environment. The admittance into hyperrealistic discourse requires the ability for a composer to write themselves out of space and place, detaching their work from an observable place and into a conceptual “where,” wherein the composer’s authority in composition transitively stems from “the perception of being cut loose from space and place” (Vandenberg and Clary-Lemon, 2007, 95). The inverse of this pedagogy, I believe, would mean producing work that is not only actively cognizant of its location of creation, but also uses the location’s influence as exigence for creation. Vandenberg and Clary-Lemon (2007) bluntly profess the need for graduate students to “recognize ways in which the scholarship they produce is embedded and constrained, both within and by institutional and disciplinary structures” (p. 97). Towards the conclusion of this paper, I will propose a heuristic intended to give undergraduate students an opportunity to locate their work within their composition environments, much as I will do for myself, throughout. "Writing the University," as I will be doing, stems from Nedra Reynolds’ (2004) theory that spaces are defined through habitus, that is, the continual reproduction and construction of space through practice and habit (p. 5). To situate myself as a composer within my place of composition, I used Auburn’s lived, perceived, and imagined rhetorical situation as inspiration for typographic design. This exercise not only allows myself and others the ability to push back against becoming trapped within a hyperreal discourse, but creates an exciting and personal opportunity to explore typical conceptions of rhetoric.
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