Gee-whizz, Sholovsky's swell

The first time I picked up some of James Paul Gee's work was in my MA in a class called "Computers and Writing." (This class was amazing, by the way. Tres chic.) It wasn't a primary source for the class, but his commentary on gaming in the classroom was a totally new paradigm that many people haven't considered for the 21st century. (And the work was published in 2008, and the class ran Winter 2009, so it was timely). He showed how video games have stages of learning that readily gets "noobs" to engage in contexts. And we writing teachers should learn from that structure and implement those similar tools in the the writing classroom. The techniques respond to the Millennial-generation, but show has skills are acquired and then advanced in stages with objectives--think Super Mario Brothers advancing to save the princess. Now I'm not a gamer, but that argument is so savvy and smooth, it's just sexy. (Dare I say, maybe, unicorn-sexy?!)

I wasn't familiar with any of other Gee's work--ASU is a big hub for composition/rhetoric, especially in terms of L2 issues--so I was excited to see what he came up with in How to Do Discourse Analysis: a Toolkit. After reading the first two units, I'm not sure how I feel about the book. It's both helpful and annoying, almost akin to Rapley's text: the presentation is unique, but I've also spent a lot of time in this field, so it's not like I haven't read this argument before (time and time again). Gee's perspective is significantly different because he takes a sociolinguistic approach to decode language, really sticking to a issues we have canonized in English: literary and rhetorical constructions. I don't think he earns unicorn points for this method to explain DA, but he definitely gets some happy prancing points for giving a shout out to Viktor Shklovsky. Shklovsky's one of my favorite literary critics because of his essay, "Art as Technique."

Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one's wife, an the fear of war... And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stoney. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar," to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. 

(Shklovsky, Victor. "Art as Technique." The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. ed. David H. Richter. 3rd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2007: 778.)

I love this quote. It regularly comes up every few semesters in my work because it's so important in remembering that language isn't a tool. It's an art. It's a style. So when Gee included a citation to Shklovsky's work on defamiliarization, a bell went off in my head. Yes! It is exactly the art of defamiliarizing language that qualitative researchers, especially those in DA, need to do. We all know words, grammar, tone, style, etc. But the act of considering the implications of these words from someone else's perspective requires us to think of something quotidienne as unique. I think this is why I gravitate towards styles of phenomenology, but I don't feel like I know enough about it to be totally firm on the stance. But I like the idea of trying to find the art of the daily life.

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Sorry this is late--my apt. seems to have a busted water pipe and drowning my neighbor's below. I'm worried this may stymie my chances to get to class tomorrow. Here's hoping the problem gets diagnosed ASAP--and it's not my fault!