1st Edition

Connections Between Neuroscience, Rhetoric, and Writing A Plastic Pedagogy for the Digital Age

By Edward J. Comstock Copyright 2018
    198 Pages 1 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    198 Pages 1 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    This book argues that contemporary neuroscience compliments, extends, and challenges recent and influential posthuman and new materialist accounts of the relations between rhetoric, affect, and writing pedagogy. Drawing on cutting-edge neuro-philosophy, Comstock re-thinks both historical and current relations between writing and power around questions of affect, attention, and plasticity. In considering the uses and limits of exciting new findings from the neurobiology, this volume both theorizes and offers pedagogical strategies for teaching writing in a digital age characterized by the erosion of wonder and pervasive disaffection. Ultimately, in response to recent critiques transcendental reason and subjectivity, and related calls for the increased inclusion of multi-modal and digital writing and rhetoric, Comstock argues for an embodied pedagogy that values the substantial relations between writing and pedagogical care.

    Introduction

    CHAPTER 1

    Neuroscience and Neuroideology: Plasticity, Flexibility, and the Emotional Architecture of Experience

    CHAPTER 1.5: Pedagogy Breakout 1

    When Writing Explodes: The Relations Between Emotional Intelligence, Transference, and Blockages

    CHAPTER 2

    Composition’s Correlationalisms: Objects of Wonder

    CHAPTER 3

    To Care or not to Care: The Supposed Indestructability of Wonder

    CHAPTER 3.5: Pedagogy Breakout 2

    Taking the "Low Road" to Embodied Pedagogy: "Tacit Knowledge" and Wonder in Writing

    CHAPTER 4

    Writing Pedagogy and The Crises of Attention: From Distraction to Disaffection

    CHAPTER 5

    Technology, Intelligence, and the Plasticity of Writing in the New Attention Economy

    CHAPTER 5.5: Pedagogy Breakout 3

    Neurophilosophy, Argument Theory, and the Future of Reason: Towards an Embodied Public Rhetoric

    Biography

    Edward J. Comstock is Senior Professorial Lecturer of Literature at American University, USA.