Title: Hospitality and Authoring: An Essay for the English Profession
Abstract: What kind of light does hospitality throw on Comer's letter?Obviously, the letter sends familiar signals of welcome.With express warmth and friendliness, it helps two strangers connect, ushering a new guest (Rich) into a sheltering house (the course).It even offers a gift exchange, of sorts, common in traditional hospitality, with the guest "sharing" experiences and the host reciprocating with her expression of enjoyment in receiving them.An understanding of the history of hospitality, however, quickly sees through these rhetorical gestures, which are just trappings of hospitality.In acts of genuine, traditional hospitality, host and guest-strangers to each other-meet in the flesh, one on one, weaponless hands clasping.Here the meeting is digitized and Comer and Rich have never met and do not know how far apart, in real miles, they are.Comer does not even know they are meeting.The personal hello is a pose.How can you personally greet 67,530 people in a week, much less read through their essays?Also in traditional hospitality, the empathy of the host for the houseless guest is heartfelt.Here Comer knows nothing and therefore feels nothing about Rich or her other enrollees.Rhetorically, she has no recourse but to switch immediately to a mass "you."Perhaps most telling, in the deep and private exchange that constitutes traditional hospitality, the host never asks the guest for personal information, not even the guest's name.Here, with her first words ("Dear Richard H. Haswell"), Comer reveals that the real host is not her but a computerized program that has remembered Rich's name, including the middle initial, from the instant he signed up.Later, but not much later, the computer will encourage Rich to join the "Signature" track, at a reduced "introductory" price of $39, and to fill out a personal "profile."It is no surprise that Google.com,which survives on personal information for advertising purposes, helped underwrite this Duke MOOC.Duke's English Composition I: Achieving Expertise betrays other parallels with the ways of traditional hospitality, most of them diabolical inversions.The MOOC allies not with the eighteenth-century code of "knock is open wide" but with the twentieth-century code of what we will call colonial, entertainment, or entrepreneurial hospitality.This is given away by the advertisement tone of Comer's letter, the distinctive mix of fake and effusive ("so very much enjoying reading through").Historical hospitality has degenerated into "the hospitality trade," where knock is just a prospect to make money.The point is that discursive traditions of hospitality are still alive, occasionally in their age-old form but usually so altered that most people do not recognize the connections.Like