O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies Issue 1: Object/Ecology (Autumn 2013) ISSN 2326-8344 Composing the Carpenter’s Workshop James J. Brown, Jr. & Nathaniel A. Rivers ABSTRACT Rhetoric and composition (R/C) has been increasingly concerned with understanding rhetoric and writing beyond the human-centered rhetorical situation. This piece argues that R/C can be hospitable to various projects that take up the agency and existence of objects. Further, the composition classroom presents a promising space for what we call, by way of Ian Bogost, rhetorical carpentry. In particular, the field’s focus on ecology is concerned with making and with production. This is in keeping with R/C’s long tradition of focusing on rhetorical invention, which productively resonates with the object-oriented studies. After all these implements and text designed by intellects So vexed to find evidently there’s just so much that hides. The Shins, “Saint Simon” Since at least Marilyn Cooper’s 1986 essay, “The Ecology of Writing,” the discipline of Rhetoric and Composition (R/C) has been taking up the question of how an ecological frame changes the scene of composition. In that essay, Cooper argued that R/C’s various approaches to studying writers assumed a “solitary author” at the center of the writing situation (Cooper 1986, 364). In the face of this focus on the autonomous writer, Cooper offered her ecological model of writing in order to argue that “writing is an activity through which a person is continually engaged with a variety of socially constituted systems” (Cooper 1986, 367). A host of rhetoricians have taken up Cooper’s call. Margaret Syverson’s The Wealth of Reality: