ENG 4815.001 Fall 2023 Fleckenstein

Almost 60 years ago, Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media (1964), broke with the traditional disciplinary focus on the alphabetic communication to assert that the “medium”—rather than the medium’s “content”—is the “the message,” that media, in their various guises, carry the predominant communicative value. Thus, the physicality of the radio, the television, and the film experience all constitute a message—a meaning—in and of themselves which we, consciously and unconsciously, shape and by which we, consciously and unconsciously, are shaped. In other words, media are texts.

Here, in 2023, using the lens provided by new materialisms and its critics, we return to McLuhan’s assertion and examine it anew in a radically different era. Together, we explore the nature of what we might call media textuality and its implications for our professional and personal lives. More specifically, we focus on everyday material objects, such as pencils, tables, screw drivers, and smart phones, and ask how they exist as texts—even rhetorical texts—with meaning and agency, advocating for a particular version of realit(ies). In the process, we expand our understanding of medium, reading, writing, and living.

Grades will be based on the following:

• two “case studies,” in which you create and theorize an object using, first, the lens provided by new materialisms, and, second, the lens provided by indigenous (non-western) epistemologies;
• a group “text” presentation and discussion related to our readings;
• one essay exam (focused on our readings/discussions);
• a final reflective essay exploring the “professional” implications of media textuality for your professional lives.