Alex Reid

scholarly community of videos, blogs, etc. addressing a range of social issues. - Alex Reid

"Thanks. Sorry it took so long for me to approve your comment. I must have missed it in what is, unfortunately, an increasing crowd of comment spam. I understand what you're saying here. I do think that literary studies, and the humanities in general, were more powerful culturally in the early-mid-20th century when it was possible to propound an anglo-american canon to an anglo-american student population. The humanities rested upon a shared nationalistic and ethnic identity, even when it came to studying "foreign languages." Of course, as you know better than I, we can't really call Spanish a "foreign language" in the US anymore, if we ever could. I don't think "theory" can really be blamed for the decline of English Studies. For one thing, out beyond the research institutions, to this day, "theory" doesn't hold much sway. I've taught at a couple comprehensive colleges and the curriculum is still quite traditional in the delivery of new critical readings of the canon. On the other..." - Alex Reid

"That sounds like an interesting project. The idea of "responsible collaboration" sounds like a question of ethics to me, which is certainly tied to rhetoric. I also find the concept of compression worthy of exploration in both rhetorical and technological terms. Certainly one of the proclaimed advantages of the wave is that instead of having 100 copies of an email (one in each person's mailbox on a 100-person listserv), there's just the one wave: that's a kind of compression." - Alex Reid