The Metaphor of Collage: Beyond Computer Composition

Even the most cursory examination of the literature concerning computers and composition shows that computers are generally thought to be an addition to the composition classroom. The designation com position enforces the idea of the as an addition to an already constituted composition, and other common terms such as aided instruction, or literacy, and the titles of books and articles such as Collins and Sommers' Writing On-Line: Using Computers in the Teaching of Writing and Hawisher and Le Blanc's Re-Imagining Computers and Composition work to reinforce the idea that the intersection of comput ers and composition is dominated by the addition of a (see also Balestri, Miller, Sadler, Schwartz, and Self). Thus, however much computers may change our view of what counts as writing, our pedagogies are already fundamentally constrained by a view of composition that privileges compo sition-as-writing at the same time that it seeks to incorporate the into a new view of composition. In a general way this concern with and with texts might seem unexceptionable. But a closer examination of the literature of composition shows that the language of and of texts already shapes the kinds of projects that we consider writing and the kinds of texts that we will consider proper to the composition classroom. This fact is perhaps best exemplified by the way the discourse of composition has taken shape around a notion of literacy, which inevitably links our understanding of computers and composition to our ideas of what it means to read. Gail Hawisher and Paul Le Blanc, for example, ask us to Imagine what happens to our notions of when text becomes virtual?when it is produced, transmitted, and consumed in electronic form on a computer (ix). However virtual may become for Hawisher and Le Blanc, it never ceases to be writing. Composition remains concerned with written texts, though these texts are now electronic. The fundamental difference between an electronic text and any other text is its electrification. But that electrified composition text remains a product of literacy rather than a product of some perhaps only imaginary beyond of and