Hilarie's Response to Shipka

[Website Services Admin]

#870

I’m summarizing today, so you’ll hear this from me later, but my end of semester pre-nostalgia won’t allow me not to post.

What stands out for me in Shipka’s thinking about the different dimensions of writing that take it beyond the page (and maybe into a different conception of time and space than the one in which the printed page exists) is what she calls “the ways writing shapes while taking shape from” other activities (132) and which she earlier called, following Reynolds’ notion of mapping the processes of writing, “still more comprehensive maps of literate activity” (131). These quotes, in their emphasis on the activity of creation and the expanded ways in which literacy can work, beautifully encapsulate the interconnectedness of multimodal work that Ryan talks about in his post. For me, this expansion came out most immediately in my thinking about the connections between movement (whether it’s kickboxing or yoga or anything else) and writing/creation – or even just the immediate connections between writing and thinking that precede or accompany creation, and that are where felt sense asserts itself.

The experience of writing phenomenologically about Van Manen – something, I have to admit, I didn’t immediately realize I was doing – brought home even more poignantly the way that writing connects to the body in both a felt sense way and in an emotional way. My most direct creative way of communicating my feelings is through the physical action of writing words, and the experience of translating that into multimodality has given me a lot to think about. For example, is it really the act of writing that gives me this expressive portal, or is the expression primarily happening when I put words together in my head? What would I do if I couldn’t physically write?

Shipka also articulates a very useful concept for my work and my thinking with the notion of the (useful) function of strangeness. Along the lines of Nolan’s and my part of our Cs presentation, I’d like to think through how much and in what ways this dynamic is comparable to silence and its role in the creative process. (Nolan and I want to say that it not only has a role, but also that that role is an important one.) Like silence, strangeness doesn’t seem immediately useful, but actually, like the experience of existing at the edge of thought, it forces us to think in new and different ways.

[Sondra Perl]

#879

All fascinating.
In regard to this statement, “The experience of writing phenomenologically about Van Manen – something, I have to admit, I didn’t immediately realize I was doing – brought home even more poignantly the way that writing connects to the body in both a felt sense way and in an emotional way,”
I would make the following adjustment:
I don’t think you were writing phenomenologically ‘about van Manen’ so much as writing phenomenologically about phenomena in your life, your life experience. There is no better tribute to his ideas than to enact them. That is what you did. You brought the reader inside your felt experience so that we, too, could experience it and of course this called on felt sense — for reader and writer.

[Author]

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