Jenna Zan

My name is Jenna Zan and I’m a PhD student and Associate Director of the University Writing Program. My scholarly work is concerned with that which perpetually unsettles–i.e. hauntings/hauntedness of spaces, bodies, and contents–and how ghost stories can be a “portal” to decolonizing research possibilities. I’m currently riddling out the role that ghost stories have played in my family’s oral histories of exile from Burma. In my free time, I like communing with—yes, ghosts—but also chickens and the many lifeforms busying themselves around my home in the Jefferson National Forest.

Mashup Mirror: A Funhouse Index of Attention

Come one, come all, to the mashup mirror—and get lost in the discursive journey of your reflection. As a response to Brown, Jr.’s call for a “mashup” approach to composing as a “matter of tuning the dial appropriately” and finding synergy between scholê and dromos (89); and Ridolfo and DeVoss’ call to consider how “rhetorical…

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Beyond the Looking Glass of “Likes”: What a Move to the Country Taught Me About Context Collapse and Relational Repair

It’s October of 2018. I’m moving to the rural fringes of my college town, and I’m anxious. I brace myself for lawns adorned with confederate flags and Trump memorabilia. I have imaginary dialogues with bible-thumping, gun-toting neighbors who would likely peg me, at first glimpse, as a liberal “snowflake.” I feel as though I’m venturing…

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Listening as Intervention

I’m drawn to Jennifer Clary-Lemon’s new materials environmental rhetoric for many reasons, one of which involves her call for us to “listen better” to the troubled/troubling ways we dwell amidst—and are implicated within—environmental change and destruction.  I think of “listening better” as a valuable extension of “deep listening,” as both approaches to sensed/sensing dwelling provoke…

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Narrative Ecologies: A Living Landscape Between Hyper and Deep Attention?

In response to Hayles, Ed Folsom discusses the interplay of narrative and database, noting that the most powerful narratives become like databases in themselves, their plethora of meanings and throughways—like the Garden of Forking Paths—always exceeding any singular account/interpretation. Notably, Hayles positions narrative as a potential “common ground between hyper and deep attention” (197).  If…

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Crowded Zoo, Empty World

One of the most manipulative aspects of the like vs. dislike framework is how much it limits our encounters with ourselves and others. Odell writes about how algorithms “incrementally entomb” us until we become a static, deeply monolithic sum of our likes—an ‘us’ that fosters self-understanding through tidy, world-shrinking formulas shrouded as play (137). Meanwhile,…

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Thoughts From the Couch: Technologies of Solace in Pop Culture’s Mirror

In a scene from The Deerhunter (1978), a disillusioned “Nick,” played by Christopher Walken, steps onto the veranda of the hospital where he was convalescing alongside other Vietnam War soldiers. He absorbs a scene of uniformity-in-death: countless metal coffins are being stacked so that the bodies of the dead could be returned home. Nick then…

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