Connections Between Neuroscience, Rhetoric, and Writing

A Plastic Pedagogy for the Digital Age

Edward J. Comstock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351813839
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Neuroscience and Neuroideology: Plasticity, Flexibility, and the Emotional Architecture of Experience
• 2 Composition’s Correlationalisms: Objects of Wonder
• 3 To Care or Not to Care: The Supposed Indestructability of Wonder
• 4 Writing Pedagogy and the Crises of Attention: From Distraction to Disaffection
• 5 Technology, Intelligence, and the Plasticity of Writing in the New Attention Economy
• Index