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Actually, two things come to mind, although probably more. One is that, in my view, the
field has not attended, as it might, to everyday writing practices. Especially, in terms of
the documents that have both shaped everyday writing practices and that tell us something
about how people have written. We, of course, have interview-based studies like Deborah
Brandt’s work, of course. We have some document-based studies. I’m thinking here of Katrina Powell’s
work looking at the letters that people in the Shenandoah Valley used to try to hold
onto their land. But, those are exceptions, I would suggest, to the rule. The rule being
that we’re much better at looking at student work. We’re much better now at looking at
program histories, that seems to almost be a commonplace. And, it’s only more recently
that we’re beginning to look at everyday practices. The things about a postcard is
that only one commentator that I’ve found has said -- and it’s somebody who writes
in the UK and it basically a cultural studies critique, Esther Milne. It is, and we don’t
actually need this comment because we can see for ourselves, that a postcard is a thoroughly
democratic genre, possible the most democratic genre that we might see in terms of its ability
to forward the writing of anyone, whether that person be a child or an adult whose signature
consists of an X. So, postcards on the one hand, when you have a robust archive, and
we might talk about what that means, can show us how postcards developed as a genre over
time and they show us an interesting genre because it’s a very regulated genre created
in 1873 by the US Post Office. The post office has decided over time in this country where
you can put the address and where you cannot write. So, for instance, the single back card
was common until 1907 which meant that you could only write on the front of the card
and that meant that you were writing around whatever the image was or ontop of it, in
a kind of layering effect which actually really interesting because that begins to forecast
some of the layering we see in composition today. So, on the one hand, you can see the
development of this genre over time in both sponsored and self-sponsored kind of way and,
on the other hand, you can actually see what people did with the postcard which wasn’t
necessarily what the genre itself told people to do. So, there were cards, for instance,
that functioned as birthday cards because they basically said happy birthday on them
and on the back there was a hallmark-like verse. But, them people would pick up a run-of-the-mill
postcard that looked something like this and they would turn it into a birthday card, a
Christmas card, an Easter card, and I have versions of all of those. So, it’s interesting
to see what people do with the genre, especially when it is as scripted as this genre is. So,
there’s a lot to be learned here. And I haven’t really spent much time on what people
have done with postcards or on how they have circulated. But, it’s very clear that they
did circulate. Scott Gage, who is at Colorado-State Pueblo and who finished his degree here last
year, did a very fine dissertation, part of which focuses on the impact of lynching postcards
and how the circulation of those cards basically constituted a certain kind of community. The
circulation of postcards documenting the 1906 San Francisco earthquake was sufficiently
wide and large that the city fathers in the San Francisco call said please stop sending
those images away because no one will want to come to visit us. So, there’s another
message here, we talk about circulation, but we haven’t actually, we talk about it, I
think in some small ways. It’s not been a large theme of the field.I think it’s
becoming a little larger. I think there’s some assumption when we talk about circulation
that it’s a new thing, that it’s a new phenomenon. But, I’d simply point out that
some of the circulation has taken place a long time before now and it’s good to know
a little more about how that worked and what the effect of that was because it gives us
an historical context that is different from the historical context that we typically evoke.
If you go back and look at the history of Rhetoric and Comp there is one school of thought
that suggests that in the current version of rhetoric and comp that one way it was established
as a field prior to its becoming established as a discipline was through the work of people
like Janice Lauer and Ed Corbett who reached back to classical rhetoric to provide something
of an intellectual foundation of the field. I think what I’m advocating is that we harken
back to a more recent time when everyday people were doing very interesting kinds of writing
and that that too creates an intellectual foundation for the field and in this case
the intellectual foundation is located in the postcard.That’s what I would say.