A Technology of the Self

September 1, 2023 4:00 PM

A Writing Studies Primer attempts to supplement and enhance the necessarily instrumental nature of a handbook for composition courses by cultivating students’ awareness of writing as a culturally determined act. This is great. But, teeming with factual errors and underpinned by a triumphalist Eurocentrism, it only embraces the surface relativism of liberal values, which ultimately needs history to be quaint so that the surface relativisms of modernity can emerge as modernity’s greatest distinction. from Slanting the History of Handwriting

Handwriting, previously

posted by chavenet (2 comments total)

This is wonderful— I particularly appreciated the discussion of cursive at the end. I was delighted when I reached the byline and my the end and saw that Leah Price had written it. What We Talk About When We Talk About Books and How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain made my world richer.
posted by marple at 6:59 AM on September 2, 2023 [1 favorite]

The article was commissioned by Leah Price but its author is Sonja Drimmer (and they are both great!)
posted by Horace Rumpole at 11:43 AM on September 2, 2023 [1 favorite]