Created by a writing studies PhD student and an artist, Catachresis Studios is a digital media design project that produces public-facing lessons on the intersection between games, rhetoric, writing and other English disciplines through a variety of modes: video essays, web comics, video games, zines, and resouce pages.
Our Mission
We seek to create high quality and entertaining digital texts that share ideas on how the content we interact with every day is inherently ideological and rhetorical. The texts we produce are equal-parts pedagogical and creative, seeking to teach digital rhetorical and digital writing concepts while also demonstrating them in practice. Most of our work is filtered through video games: we are passionate scholars of video games and writing and believe the integration of games and other popular digital texts can only improve the teaching and learning of writing.
Our ultimate purpose is two-fold: we seek to contribute to the ongoing work of legitimizing non-traditional texts such as video essays and games as scholarship, and we would like to work toward building a platform for public-facing English scholarship that shines an accessible light on the work the field does during a time of crisis when it comes to digital literacy and public sentiment toward universities.
Why the name “catachresis?”
“[Catachresis is]. . . a mischievous language rebel that breaks the rules in such a way that it becomes oddly correct.”
Malky McEwan (The Writing Cooperative) on the definition of catachresis as a rhetorical device
We chose the name catachresis since it has a nice double meaning in line with our mission: it both means “misuse” of language and is the rhetorical device of using an implausible metaphor. We are excited to create many implausible and creative metaphors for rhetorical concepts through our work on this project. We also own the idea of “misuse” as a positive concept: English scholarship is so often inaccessible to audiences outside of academia and we are seeking to use scholarly writing strategies in genres and situations where they do not traditionally “fit” or appear.
Team
Josh Cornelius (he/him) – Writer and Designer
Josh is a PhD student at The Ohio State University’s Department of English studying the intersection of video games and writing instruction. He is interested in investigating how games can be incorporated into the writing classroom as both texts for analysis and pedagogical tools to teach process, digital writing and digital rhetoric.
Emilie Cornelius (she/her) – Artist
Emilie Cornelius (cornflower.archive on Instagram) is a digital artist and aspiring cartoonist interested in sharing their journey learning and testing new styles. They helped found Catachresis Studios because of their previous experience being a librarian and passion for art and digital literacy.
