art & alt
following bolter and grusin's analysis, we should expect re-media-ting scholarly genres to be a complex, bi-directional process—with older genres and forms being repurposed in new ways and those new ways filtering back into the older genres and forms, which rarely disappear. in a sense, the question then is how new/old genres interact with old/new genres (think yin-yang, not neat stage models of this-then-that). when scholarly genres are being reworked, the experiments typically involve the creative blending of other genres, and often blends with literary/artistic forms and genres.
consider laurel richardson's fields of play (1997) , where she discusses and presents her playfully/seriously experimental forms of sociological scholarship, offering, for example, the "results" of a sociological interview as a poem or performing a multi-voiced version of a conference paper, perhaps with a scripted greek chorus.
to do sociology differently, richardson turned to cultural practices marked artistic (poetry being one; various forms of participatory performance being another) and she did this in (old) print and oral/visual genres.
that's one reason i appreciate the inclusion here of anmarie trimble and jennifer grotz's chapter, focused on born magazine, a great online laboratory for experiments in re-media-ting poetic textuality (with different programs, but mostly with flash® and shockwave® so far). i've been pointing students to born magazine since an art and design colleague pointed me to it almost a decade ago. born magazine is most decidedly a poetry/graphic design site, not a site where the question is whether a semiotic object like blank missives by esther lee and chris erickson will get you tenured as a scholar (worth noting though that universities tenure art as well as knowledge work).
when i think of experimental writing, i am transported back to many experiences with one of my professors at minnesota, lillian bridwell-bowles, who wrote a 1992 article that reflected on what was already then a long period of reworking practices of scholarship and teaching:
"experiencing what my colleague lisa albrecht described as my 'own personal paradigm shift,' i have sought alternatives—a more personal voice, an expanded use of metaphor, a less rigid methodological framework, a writing process that allows me to combine hypothesizing with reporting data, to use patterns of writing that allow for multiple truths, what dale spender has called a 'multidimensional reality,' rather than a single thesis, and so on. this ongoing process has made me realize that students may need new options for writing if they, too, are struggling with expressing concepts, attitudes, and beliefs that do not fit into traditional academic forms. to give them permission to experiment, i simply tell them that they need not always write the 'standard academic essay' and encourage them to write something else." (p. 350, capitalization and justification altered)
what lilly was emphasizing here—experiment with form, language play, use of voices that were socially outside the mainstream, resistance to dominant culture and dominant epistemology, one type of feminist stance to dialogue and knowledge—is a pretty decent map, minus digital media, of what these chapters describe as new scholarly genres. she was talking about the presence of such "diverse discourse" in already published and respected scholarship as well as in the writing of her students, from undergraduates to advanced doctoral students. she emphasized how feminist approaches to rhetoric recommend non-argumentative stances, pointing to the kind of invitational rhetoric that gresham and aftanes highlight in their chapter, to the diverse discourse of undergraduate scholarship that the normal group highlights in their chapter, as well as to the kinds of playful, speculative and performative work that purdy and walker note in their chapter. and she was raising the question of whether such work would be accorded the same kind of value as dominant discourses are. that lilly had been on the cutting edge of digital work in the 1980s was a factor, but her orientation to alternative discourse was, i believe, most deeply informed by feminist scholarship, politics, and art.
whether under notions of new digital genres of scholarship or older notions of experimental or alternative (alt)writing/discourse, artistic forms offer a cultural reservoir of ways to disrupt scholarly means of representation, stances, and ideologies. so watching how literary forms evolve and are re-mediated is very relevantly tied into how scholarly genres might evolve.