In Teletheory, Ulmer takes the understanding of grammatology in relation to pedagogy and the name that he developed in Applied Grammatology and turns it toward textuality in contemporary culture. 1989, when Teletheory was published, was a pre-computer boom moment when television was the technology many critics juxtaposed to the book. In a classic high/low polemic, many critics were lamenting the decline of literacy in the face of television culture. Rather than criticize the current age of videocy, Ulmer is trying to cut out a place for electronic cognition. He wants to "invent or discover a genre for academic discourse that could function across all our media—voice, print, and video" (1).

Ulmer proposes "mystory"—a text that integrates public discourse (films, myths, events, etc.), private biographies (memory, real or fantasy) and disciplinary discourse (the subject matter doesn't matter)—as an inventional method that "assumes that one's thinking begins not from generalized classifications of subject formation, but from the specific experiences historically situated, and that one always thinks by means of and through these specifics, even if that thinking is directed against the institutions of one's own formation" (vii-viii). Such a genre is advantageous pedagogically because it does not ask the student to reject his or her culture before starting to enter academic culture. Rather, it uses each person's background as a way to situate him or her to disciplinary discourse.

"Teletheory (the book) offers a rationale and guidelines for a specific genre—mystory—designed to do the work of schooling and popularization in a way that takes into account the new discursive and conceptual ecology interrelating orality, literacy, and videocy. . . . Teletheory offers mystory as a translation (or transduction) process researching the equivalencies among the discourses of science, popular culture, everyday life, and private experience" (Teletheory vii).

In Ulmer's example of the mystory genre in Teletheory, "Derrida at Little Big Horn," he draws on the three storehouses of memory: mental (personal), oral (cultural), and textual (disciplinary). For a private biography, he relies on his personal memories of being a truck driver for his father's company in Miles City, Custer County, Montana. Though his public/mythic story, Custer's Last Stand, has been spread via texts, its primary location is in our oral, cultural mythology. And his disciplinary story, Derrida's grammatology and its dissemination through American academia, is primarily a textual dispersal, even though it too has its element of orality within the discipline.

Even though "Derrida at Little Big Horn" appears in book form, the logic if it's rhetoric, written in fragments and scenes situated around Ulmer's academic vita and contextualized with accompanying images, could easily be re-produced in video form.

"Video images are always framed in verbal discourse and mediated through cultural interpretations available in everyday language (part of the comprehension of images includes paraphrasing). Television organizes information narratively, ordering the complex interaction of sound and image through time by means of a combination of oral and pop culture forms, extending the simple forms of anecdote, joke, proverb, riddle, legend, and the like to new functions of classification and evaluation" (ix).

Mystoriogrpahy, the practice generated out of the genre mystory, is a response to Hayden White's call for a new historiography (method of writing history). Ulmer writes, "An experiment in mystoriogrpahy derives its guidelines from the sciences and arts of our time, just as 'history' was invented based on the naturalistic tenets of nineteenth-century science and art" (44). So Ulmer looks to popular media arts and well as oral folk forms to invent a new form of writing. As a remake of historiography, mystoriography looks to "recognize the peculiar configuration of possibility in one's own moment" by "designating the nexus of history, politics, language, thought, and technology in the last decade of the millenium" (82). Such an approach to history is grounded in our particular experiences of time and place.

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