Richard Ohmann Award for
Outstanding Article in College English
The Richard Ohmann award recognizes the outstanding articles published in the College English journal. The award is selected by a comittee recognizes the article that makes the most significant contribution to scholarship, research, theory, or pedagogy in English Studies.
Dates of Articles to be Considered: articles to be considered will be chosen from the College English volume year, September through July in the year prior to selection. The first award was given for the 2000-2001 issues of the journal.
Writing with Light: Jacob Riis's ambivalent Exposures
Author, Christopher Carter
Through a nuanced analysis of a neglected form of rhetorical power, social documentary photography, Carter exposes the extent to which technologies, materialities, and rhetorics intersect to "remediate" and reinforce class relations and boundaries. Christopher Carter's “Writing with Light: Jacob Riis’s Ambivalent Exposures,” focuses on this documentary photographer's innovative fusion of image and word. Analyzing Riis’s work with depth and critical insight, Carter draws on Riis’s journals, lecture notes, and “imageword combinations” (118), to highlight how Riis’s reformist photography and essays fought for the subaltern of New York City. As Carter suggests, Riis’s work created new awareness of space as inherently rhetorical while it simultaneously authorized a conservative, preservationist action. In explicating Riis's philosophy and construction of the urban problem, Carter usefully compares Riis to Friedrich Engles, showing how the two conceived of and dealt with the urban plight of the
working class very differently. Beautifully written, Carter’s essay provides a compelling argument for analyzing the ways in which our own uses of seemingly innovative technologies (e.g., multimodal writing, digital and visual rhetorics) "secure the structure of capitalism by altering its surfaces, changing nothing so much as the look of things" (139).