Bibliographic instruction and postmodern pedagogy - The Library and Undergraduate Education

Library Trends, Fall, 1995 by Taylor E. Hubbard

How can all five elements of classical rhetoric be reunited? Lanham proposes a bipolar model, maintaining that learning is both an unconscious and a self-conscious act. We have been taught, against our basic instincts, to accept the objective world of Platonic forms by unconsciously looking "through" texts as though they were windows on a higher reality beyond personal experience. Computers and the electronic word allow--even encourage--manipulation of text, thus altering the privileged status of facts by forcing us to look consciously "at" the media as well as "through" it, a process Lanham calls "toggling." Electronic information is heavily influenced by the arts and humanities--the emotional and the playful. Computers are rhetorical machines that invite students to manipulate text, images, and sounds, thereby participating in the creation of knowledge. On the one hand, students would continue to be taught to look through' linear narratives [books] to the Platonic world of facts and truths. On the other, students learn the reflexive act of looking "at" how information is altered and acted upon by the medium which presents it. To illustrate the reunion of the lost tribes of rhetoric, Lanham points to twentieth--century art. He maintains that, since the Italian Futurists in 1909, modern art has been toggling between making statements about art (looking 'at' it) by contradicting viewers' expectations, while at the same time using art as a medium of communication to an aesthetic experience (looking "through" it). Every work answers the question: "What is art?' Using rhetorical analysis and the a-historicism of postmodernism as one pole and the conventions and constructs of Platonically based disciplines as the other, we can begin to ask the same "What is . . . " question of any discipline or subject.

What might a BI program based on Lanham's ideas look like? For one thing, it would probably look critically at how the codex book functions as an icon of knowledge. This, after all, is the form of knowledge we as librarians deal with constantly. Has, for example, the physical composition of the book determined that the acceptable formula for fiction is beginning-middle-end? Does the book suggest a closed argument, a dispenser of information that will only answer questions posed by itself, resisting interrogation by any user?

Few of those riding in the posse of postmodernism and curriculum reform may be willing to jump over the bookless precipice to keep up with Lanham. However, his concept of "at" and "through" is an important model aimed at creating in students a self-consciousness about their own and others' role in the information creation process, while at the same time looking through the media to disciplinary matters beyond. This, of course, returns us to the postmodernists' perspective of inquiry through discourse analysis, the sociology of knowledge, deconstruction, and other manifestations of postmodernism. Knowing knowledge requires knowing the how and why of its creation and uses as well as its expression and claims in presentation. Its organization should not obscure these basics.