Preliminaries 
Teaching 
The act of writing is always situated within a given set of contexts. Writers too are grounded in ever-shifting situations: as we write we do so in connection with perceived exigencies, audiences, languages, technologies, genres, and so on. Considering these many factors, the complexity of the relations among them and ourselves, and the verity that none of us possesses the power to predict the future, I believe that writing must also be understood as fundamentally speculative. That is to say that each time we write, we make innumerable speculations both large and small about what we think we are trying to accomplish, the means and methods by which we might work toward that accomplishment, and the ways in which our given set of contexts supports, compels, or dictates what we might and ought do. Sometimes we succeed, other times we fail, but the trick is that in both cases our work as writers is never finished: contexts change, and so do we.
The major takeaway I hope students leave my classes with, then, is the notion that writing is an ongoing, speculative process that, while often transactional, is above all generative. What we write shapes who we become. The texts that we create circulate, and as they do so they function as part of the contexts in which others read and write. Writing thus not only responds to contexts but also generates new contexts. Which is why I’m interested in textual histories—macro-histories of trends in media and technology as well as micro-histories of creation and circulation—and I invite my students to investigate these histories with me.
The design of a course I have taught recently provides a glimpse of one such approach. In the course, the main stated goal of which is to investigate intertextuality, students read/view/listen to/interact with a wide variety of popular texts, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to Bob Dylan’s Tempest, along with a backdrop of readings on assemblage and intertextuality, including works by Deleuze, Barthes, and Harris. Meanwhile, students spend the semester creating individual intertextual maps. In short, the assignment prompts students to select an ‘entry text’ from any genre or medium, trace intertext as they see it from that text to three other texts, then repeat the tracing for each of those, and then once more, until each student has a list of 40 discrete, interrelated texts. Students then create interactive online maps of the relations among those texts according to the criterion/a of their choosing, in conjunction with both the tracing exercise and structured conversations online, during class, and in conferences with me.
This assemblage approach prompts students to make inventive connections that generate new lines of flight in their own thinking about composing and, more importantly, provides them with the opportunity to apprehend the extent to which writing, writers, and texts always operate together and within specific contexts. They thus become better equipped to speculate about, respond to, and generate their own writing contexts in the future—the goal that guides all my work as a teacher.