Cynthia L. Selfe’s “The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing”

In Cynthia L. Selfe’s own words, her article, “The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing” is meant to “offer some perspective about the way in which U.S. composition studies has subsumed, remediated, and rediscovered aurality during the past 150 years”. Yet the story is admittedly far from complete, and our profession continues to show a clear preference to words communicated through written form. Yet Selfe makes it clear that she is not against the value that we place on writing. However, she does “want to argue that teachers of composition need to pay attention to, and come to value, the multiple ways in which students compose and communicate meaning, the exciting hybrid, multimodal texts they create- in both nondigital and digital environments - to meet their own needs in a changing world”.  

 

These different compositional modalities offer additional forms of expression that Selfe feels are necessary and extremely beneficial in the turbulent world that we live in. Using other forms of composing, such as aurality, has not been something that I have spent much time thinking about in the past, so this article was interesting to read. I liked hearing Selfe’s argument and opinion concerning this issue.