Shauna Chung is a PhD candidate in the Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design program at Clemson University. Her scholarship operates at the intersection of digital rhetoric, religious discourse, and composition theory. More specifically, her work focuses on ways that students—both religiously committed and non-religious—can leverage and experiment with digital technologies to acknowledge and speak across difference with greater empathy. Aside from her academic pursuits, she's also a sometimes-musician that dabbles in composing and tries not to let her 20+ years of classical piano training go to waste.

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“In an experimental humanities, students (and teachers) learn to write original poetics. The value of these poetics may then be tested by using them to see what sorts of work they help the students (or any investigator) to generate. In the heuretics classroom, students become producers as well as consumers of theory” (Ulmer, Heuretics xiii).

Artist Statement

I have written traditional essays: thesis statements chasing down palatable scholarship, ingesting and digesting the work of notable scholars, and making the expected moves of an academic discipline. I have endured seminars: reading texts in search of the studium, formulating critiques smelling of academese and slathered onto papers that earn me A’s but do not move me. I have learned “rules”: show your hand early in the argument[1], demonstrate that you understand various dimensions of the scholarly conversation, define italicized words before moving on[2], subtly hunt for and humbly seek to fill that lacuna in the literature. To fulfill these expectations with rigor and credibility, I thought that I needed to forget myself and keep certain identity markers at home.

More specifically, I forgot mystory—that, first and foremost, I was raised in a Christian tradition. My family discourse taught me that God was an unquestionable constant, that He radiated a love that would reform my inherent sinfulness, that He was Totality. I learned this in the Bible verses my parents would recite, the pieces I’d play on the piano as a kid, the songs I’d write in high school for guitar, the hymns we’d sing in church: “Holy, holy, holy! / Lord God Almighty / early in the morning / our song shall rise to Thee. / Holy, holy, holy! / Merciful and mighty / God in three persons / Blessed Trinity!” (Herber). My church community populated this picture—my perception of the Divine—with standards for proper worship, dress, diet, behavior, speech, thought. I policed myself to adhere to these standards and to purge all shadow of doubt. Even entertainment was sanitized to accommodate these strictures; I thought that there should be no talk of magic, no Harry Potter, no myths and legends since each challenged the authority and power of God. “Here,” said the church schools I attended from kindergarten through college, handing me an arsenal of apologetics that I could use to verify my worldview and draw clearer lines between the sacred and the secular.

It only took one semester of an English graduate curriculum at a large public university on the West Coast to blur the lines I so neatly and obediently constructed. Derrida and Nietzche dealt the finishing blows. I learned to pledge allegiance to the Academy and, in an effort to “liberate” myself from the opiate of the masses, willingly chose to forget mystory. My Christian tradition, I thought, was an impediment to différance and life. Plus, I wanted to (finally) read Harry Potter without feeling guilty. Once again, I drew clear lines between the secular and the sacred.

“Hold on!” exclaimed Gregory Ulmer in Heuretics. “Don’t throw out the mystory with the bathwater. See what could happen when you leave room for ‘the broadest criterion of what is relevant’” (6). Instead of substituting my Christianity for what I thought was academic discourse (i.e. a replicated system of verification and closure), Ulmer encouraged me to position mystory as a guide to “compose by using all the meanings (write the paradigm)” (48). “Chorography,” he called it—a method of writing fueled by creativity and invention that assumes the latter “may not be undertaken ‘in general,’ solely by means of abstractions that leave out the foundation of thought in the practices constituting the cultural identity and ideology of the inventor” (84). In other words, to practice chorography, I needed to address and exploit the God lurking beneath my structured academic prose. I needed to recognize that my essays, seemingly sanitized of Christian discourse, still contained a trace of the “Savior.”

In the classrooms of graduate professors who not only valued chorography but also encouraged choral writing in assignments, I began to experiment—to write “in the order neither of the sensible nor the intelligible but in the order of making, of generating” (67). To do this, I began writing with the trace, recognizing that the terms I’d excluded could be sounded out not just in words but also melodies that seeped out of the texts I read for class. I allowed myself to feel the tension reverberating between the secular and the sacred, choosing not to logic the feeling into neat binaries but letting it wound me. I let go of the impulse to Truth my way out of ambiguity and sought to keep definition open—to perpetually “re-mark the X” (169). Aural media, namely sonic essays, soundscapes, and original songs, played host to these processes and unlocked affordances unavailable via a solely literate apparatus.

The following four pieces are the fruits of these experiments, each an analogy of choral writing by way of mystory. By “analogy,” I refer to the “A” in Ulmer’s CATTt, or what he describes as “figuration, displacement” of an established frame or idea wherein “an existing discourse in a different domain manifests some of the desired features” for a new inventive framework (Heuretics 8; Konsult xii). In my case, I seek to invert the traditional essay response in academic writing by composing with elements inspired by podcasts, found sound sampling, and indie folk music. The resulting productions in these genres strive to exemplify chorography in both form and content, and each writes without excluding the mystory I’ve briefly noted above.

In the first experiment, titled “Taking Sinatra and Santa to Church: Exploring Barthes’ Text of the Conflictual in Sade, Fourier, Loyola,” I respond to Roland Barthes’ paradoxical characterization of language as harmoniously conflictual. To illustrate this sonically, I recorded myself singing the hymn “Holy, Holy, Holy” and layered this track with other songs that followed a similar chord progression. My selection of these accompanying songs was extremely aleatory and intuitive as I, through flash reasoning and chance, discovered how I could bend and extend certain songs to fit the hymn. The resulting music track was my unconscious attempt to “write an intuition,” which Ulmer deems important for chorographic learning (Heuretics 37). Layered over these tracks is an “essay” response of sorts that relates Barthes’ ideas to church discourse and further riffs off of the music.

The second experiment, “Sanctioned Babel,” does less explicit analysis of a text and, instead, performs the response. I sampled found sound that I recorded—a malfunctioning electric level on a gate—to create a short musical composition featuring a guitar, vocals, an electronic frequency, and rhythm generated from the gate lever. In much the same way that Ulmer reads ulmer when “The Other writes le mur,” (Heuretics 184) I read this song when Barthes writes Pleasure of the Text. The resulting composition performed this reading punceptually, or through creating a chain of signifiers that followed no predestined order or method but tuned itself to an emerging method that “reorganize[d] abduction, deduction, and induction” (228).

The third experiment steps further away from a didactic essay response and operates exclusively in music. Like “Sanctioned Babel,” it performs instead of explains. The song, entitled “Medusa,” takes inspiration from Hélène Cixous’ “Laugh of the Medusa” and Victor Vitanza’s desire for “one, two, and ‘some more,’” or a breaking from binaries (Haynes and Vitanza 62). The song invokes the Medusa myth and rewrites her story by challenging phallocentric logics. My production seeks to “learn to write [Cixous and Vitanza’s ideas] with patterns that function more like music than like concepts” (Ulmer, Heruretics 91).

The fourth experiment—a song called “A Trace”—contends with the mystory more explicitly and responds to a suite of texts and ideas by Martin Heidegger, Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Kenneth Burke, Diane Davis, Luce Irigaray, the Bible, and Greek mythology. It demonstrates writing with the excluded trace as well as chorography being “written within the popcycle [Career, Family, Entertainment, and Community] of ideology, without any certainty of truth” (Ulmer, Heuretics 197).

The assignment prompts for these pieces followed this premise: “write” a one-page response to the assigned texts, composing in any medium. Students were invited to experiment, which created conditions to “write original poetics” and explore alternatives for traditional essay responses (Heuretics xiii). My experiments seek to offer analogies for choral writing as well as examples of how sonic affordances could be put in service to practicing heuretics and reinventing academic genres in the humanities.

Taking Sinatra and Santa to Church: Exploring Barthes’ Text of the Conflictual in Sade, Fourier, Loyola

Sanctioned Babel

“Medusa”: A Tribute to Helene Cixous and Victor Vitanza

“A Trace”

Notes

[1] This Artist’s Statement notwithstanding…

[2] According to Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida, the studium is the “application to a thing, taste for someone, a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment, of course, but without special acuity” (26). It is that which can be gleaned through critical study of a “thing” without exiting the scene of analysis. It’s a trained examination.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller, Hill and Wang, 1975.

- - -. Sade, Fourier, Loyola. Translated by Richard Miller, Hill and Wang, 1976.

Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. University of California Press, 1969.

Caputo, John D. The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion. Indiana University Press, 1997.

Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs, vol. 1, no. 4, 1976, pp. 875-893. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3173239.

Davis, Diane. “Rhetoricity at the End of the World.” Philosophy & Rhetoric, vol. 50, no. 4, 2017, pp. 431-451.

Haynes-Burton, Cynthia and Victor J. Vitanza. “Interview with Victor J. Vitanza.” Composition Studies vol. 21, no. 1, 1993, pp. 49-65. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43501218.

Heber, Reginald. “Holy, Holy, Holy!” Melody by John Bacchus Dykes, 1861.

Heidegger, Martin. “What Are Poets For?” Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter, Harper & Row, 2001, pp. 87-140.

Irigaray, Luce. “Plato’s Hystera.” Speculum of the Other Woman. Translated by Gillian C. Gill, Cornell University Press, 1985, pp. 243-353.

The Bible. Authorized King James Version, Oxford UP, 1998.

Ulmer, Gregory. Heuretics. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

- - -. Konsult: Theopraxesis. Parlor Press, 2019.

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