What Is A Text?

Dear All Good Folks: Our final work space on testimony & trauma (and spaces & memorials) Your TNR Approach to Textuality . Nice work. -Prof. Graban Board images from today

Dear All Good Folks: We may work here today ! And here's our ongoing work on defining/articulating a TNR Approach ! Soon, -Prof. Graban board images from today, courtesy of S. Turner!

[reposting after the discussion ....] BIG QUESTIONS: We've spent some class days considering how text moves through gestalt / visual lifeworlds / visual ethics. How can text move through testimony? How do these concepts of "hypermediacy" and "embodiment"-- and how they work in various hypertext trauma/testimonial projects -- give us insight into how text moves ? Another way to ask this is: How do hypermediacy and embodiment (in Delagrange's conception of them) contribute to Gilmore's "testimony" (which she says necessarily moves through time, memory, and public spaces) and Anzaldua's "mestiza way/consciousness"? SOME RESPONSES THAT EMERGED FROM DISCUSSION (in chronological order): the form of these projects tells us something about how we come to know text (we use it according to whether or not we have had a specific experience with texts like it) the form leaves us with tension or a paradox to contend with, which coul

Beyond Prison is the digital project that I chose to discuss for this post. On the website, the creator decided that his or her’s main focus was going to be on the 7 different kinds of programs that are currently available to those who are currently incarcerated and the youth who too may be at risk of being incarcerated. The site starts off with an introduction tab that gives us diagrams and charts filled with statistics of those who are currently incarcerated. While navigating through the website, I noticed that the creator provided stories which gave me the idea that he or she did this to get people to empathize and sympathize with these individuals. This site includes à wide range of people: women and men who are incarcerated and it includes children which I thought was important. In chapter two of Susan Delagrange’s Technologies of Wonder: Digital Practice in a Rhetorical World, I learned about remediation and quickly realized that it is simply another word for remix. Susan

In her hypertext essay PUBLIC SECRETS Susan Daniels presents “an interactive testimonial in which women incarcerated in the California State Prison system reveal the secrets of the war on drugs, the criminal justice system, and the prison industrial complex.” This hypertext offers a unique opportunity to hear the voices of the women and truly listen to their individual narratives. The presentation of the text as a hypertext allows it to uniquely tell the stories of these women through remediation. Susan H. Delegrange notes in "(Re)vision & Remediation" that women are faced with "both misrepresentation and lack of representation (that) hints at the ongoing problematic of space and the body for women. Their exclusion from the public sphere and their historical lack of physical and discursive mobility were rationalized by dominant masculinist discourses about women’s bodies—what they should be doing (tending to home and family), and where they should be doin

In Autobiography’s Wounds , Gilmore explains: “Language about trauma varies. It can be subjected to legal, therapeutic, or aesthetic standards. Something it comprises a weave of imagination, memory, and fact. At other times it might be narrowly descriptive” (Gilmore 103). For Gilmore, the way we talk about trauma is a more complex system than we realize (and more varied than intended. She goes on to say that “the witness testifies to an event. There is an expectation that the story – as a record of the event – will not change even as the survivor of these events struggles to grow beyond them and to add insight to injury. The witness is never simply saying what happened, as if the vent could be untied from the one who experienced it” (Gilmore 103). Gilmore wants us to realize the innate connection between the victim and trauma, a relationship that inevitably shapes and controls how we view the trauma. Gilmore is arguing for assigning agency to the trauma itself. Dani

This report by the Human Rights Watch showcases through empirical analysis and individual testimony how existing discriminatory legislation in seven Eastern Caribbean countries negatively impacts LBGTQ populations. The current legislation brings an elevated risk of discrimination, violence and abuse to those identifying as homosexual, bisexual, transgender, etc. Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines all possess versions of 'buggery' and 'gross indecency laws', echoes of British colonialism, that prohibit same-sex conduct between consenting persons. Within the report are outlined accounts of LGBTQ individuals who have had their lives radically altered by the revelation, or otherwise by secrecy of their sexual orientation. Because church and community are key components to social life in the Eastern Caribbean, news travels quickly and fear of being stigmatized, ostracized, or even physically a

I found a report on the website, Human Rights Watch titled All We Want is Equality, and it is a human rights text that is a call to action to stand up against discrimination from LGBT people. The report talks about how this issue has gone on long before the freedom to marry was gained. Even after then nothing has been done in the federal government to protect people from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity when in the workforce, housing, and access to services (Ryan Thoreson). This report relates to Gilmore's idea of testimony in how there are multiple accounts of LGBT people who are discriminated against from August 2017 to January 2018. Through this research they can show how this is having an effect on their community. This report also relates to Gilmore's idea about trauma discourse. The report gives one account by Brandiilyne Mangum-Dear, a lesbian pastor in Mississippi, who states, "We’re not being melodramatic. You’re being treated with