Building and Sharing (When You’re Supposed to be Teaching)

October 19th, 2011 § 4 comments § permalink

These are my notes “Building and Sharing (When You’re Supposed to be Teaching,” a lightning talk I gave on Tuesday as part of CUNY’s Digital Humanities Initiative. Shannon Mattern (The New School) and I were on a panel called “DH in the Classroom.” Shannon’s enormously inspirational lightning talk was titled Beyond the Seminar Paper, and mine too focused on alternative assignments for students. Our two talks were followed by a long Q&A session, in which I probably learned more from the audience than they did from me. I’ll intersperse my notes with my slides, though you might also want to view the full Prezi (embedded at the end of this post).

I’d like to thank Matt for inviting me to talk tonight, and to all of you too, for coming out this gorgeous evening. I’m extremely flattered to be here—especially since I don’t think I have any earth-shattering  thoughts about the digital humanities in the classroom. There are dozens and dozens of people who could be up here speaking, and I know some of them are here in this room right now.

A lot of what I do in my classroom doesn’t necessary count as “digital humanities”—I certainly don’t frame it that way to my students. If anything, I simply say that we’ll be doing things in our classes they’ve never done before in college, let alone a literature class. And literature is mostly what I teach. Granted I teach literature classes that lend themselves to digital work—electronic literature classes, postmodern fiction, and media studies classes that likewise focus on close readings of texts, such as my videogame studies classes. But even in these classes, I think my students are surprised by how much our work focuses on building and sharing.

If I change point of view of the title of my talk to my students’ perspectives, it might look something like this:

Building and sharing when we’re supposed to be writing. And at the end of this sentence comes one of the greatest unspoken assumptions both students and faculty make regarding this writing:

It’s writing for an audience of one—usually me, the instructor, us, the instructors. This is what counts as an audience to my students. They rarely think of themselves as writing for an audience beyond me. They rarely think of their own classmates as an audience. They often don’t even think of themselves as their own audience. They write for us, their professors and instructors.

So the “sharing” part of my title comes from my ongoing effort—not always successful—to extend my students’ sense of audience. I’ll give some examples of this sharing in a few minutes, but before that I want to address the first part of my title: the idea of building.

Those of you who know me are probably surprised that I’m emphasizing “building” as a way to integrate the digital humanities in the classroom. One of the most popular things I’ve written in the past year is a blog post decrying the hack versus yack split that routinely crops in debates about the definition of digital humanities.

In this post, I argued that the various divides in the digital humanities, which often arise from institutional contexts and professional demands generally beyond our control—these divides are a distracting sideshow to the true power of the digital humanities, which has nothing to do with production of either tools or research. The heart of the digital humanities is not the production of knowledge; it’s the reproduction of knowledge.

The promise of the digital is not in the way it allows us to ask new questions because of digital tools or because of new methodologies made possible by those tools. The promise is in the way the digital reshapes the representation, sharing, and discussion of knowledge.

And I truly believe that this transformative power of the digital humanities belongs in the classroom. Classrooms were made for sharing. So, where does the “building” part of my pedagogy come up? How can I suddenly turn around and claim that building is important when I just said, in a blog post that has shown up on the syllabus of at least three different undergraduate introduction to the digital humanities courses?

Well, let me explain what I mean by building. Building, for me, means to work. Let me explain that.

In an issue of the PMLA from 2007 there’s a fantastic series of short essays by Ed Folsom, Jerry McGann, Peter Stallybrass, Kate Hayles, and others about the role of databases in literary studies. Folsom’s essay leads, and in it he describes what he calls the “epic transformation” of the online Walt Whitman Archive, which Folsom co-edits, along with Ken Price, into a database (1571). All of the other essays in some way respond to either the particulars of the digital Walt Whitman Archive, or more generally, to the impact of archival databases on research and knowledge production. It’s a great batch of essays, pre-dating by several years the prevalence of the term “digital humanities”—but that’s not why I mentioning these essays right now.

I’m mentioning them because Peter Stallybrass’s essay has the provocative title “Against Thinking,” which helps to explain why I mean by working, which Stallybrass explicitly argues stands opposed to thinking.

Thinking, according to Stallybrass is hard and painful. It’s boring, repetitious, and I love this—it’s indolent (1583).

On the other hand, working is easy, exciting, a process of discovery. It’s challenging.

This distinction between thinking and working informs Stallybrass’s undergraduate pedagogy, the way he trains his students to work with archival materials and the STC. In Stallybrass’s mind, students—and in fact, all need to do less thinking and more working. “When you’re thinking,” Stallybrass writes, “you’re usually staring at a blank sheet of paper or a blank screen, hoping that something will emerge from your head and magically fill that space. Even if something ‘comes to you,’ there’s no reason to believe that it is of interest, however painful the process has been” (1584).

Stallybrass goes on to say that “the cure for the disease called thinking is work” (1584). In Stallybrass’s field of Renaissance and Early Modern literature, much of that work has to do with textual studies, discovering variants, paying attention to the material form of the book, and so on. In my own teaching, I’ve attempted to replace thinking with building—sometimes with words, sometimes without. And I want to run through a few examples right now.

In general, these examples fall into two categories:

[And here my planned comments dissolved into a brief tour of some of the ways I incorporate building and sharing into my classes. The collaborative construction category is more self-evident: group projects aimed at building exhibits or formulating knowledge, such as my Omeka-based Portal Exhibit and the current cross-campus Renetworking of House of Leaves. I described my creative analysis category as an antidote to critical thinking---a hazardous term with an all but meaningless definition. In this category I included mapping projects and game design projects that were alternatives to traditional papers. I concluded my lightning talk by noting that students who pursued these creative analysis projects spent far more time on their work than those who wrote papers, and while their end results were often modest, these students were far more engaged in their work than students who wrote papers.]

Full Prezi

Works Cited
  • Folsom, Ed. “Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives.” PMLA 122.5 (2007): 1571-1579. Print.
  • Stallybrass, Peter. “Against Thinking.” PMLA 122.5 (2007): 1580-1587. Print.
  • Stroube, Sam. Radiohead Crowd. 2006. Flickr. Web. 20 Jan. 2009.

Digital Humanities Sessions at the 2012 MLA Conference in Seattle

October 4th, 2011 § 7 comments § permalink

Second and Columbia in Seattle, c. July 1914

Second and Columbia in Seattle, c. July 1914

This is a comprehensive list of digital humanities sessions scheduled for the 2012 Modern Language Association Conference in Seattle, Washington. The 2012 list stands at 58 sessions, up from 44 last year (and 27 the year before). If the trend continues, within the decade it will no longer make sense to compile this list; it’ll be easier to list the sessions that don’t in some way relate in to the influence and impact of digital materials and tools upon language, literary, textual, and media studies.

It’s possible I may have missed a session or two; if so, let me know in the comments and I’ll add the panel to the list. Note that there’s also a pre-convention Getting Started in the Digital Humanities with DHCommons workshop; but because this workshop is application-only, it does not appear in the official MLA program.

You may also want to follow the MLA Tweetup Twitter account for updates on various spontaneous and planned meet-ups in Seattle.

[UPDATE 13 January 2012: I've begun adding links to presentations and papers if they've been posted online.]

Thursday, January 5

Pre-Convention Digital Humanities Project Mixer

1-4 pm in Convention Center, rooms 3A & 3B

Projects looking for collaborators and collaborators looking for projects, come mix and mingle in this informal project poster session that offers a face-to-face DHCommons experience. Representatives from projects looking for collaborators or just wanting to get the word out will share information and materials about their projects. This forum will also offer great opportunities for one-on-one conversations about pursuing projects in the digital humanities. If you would like to share your project, please sign up here, but otherwise there is no need to register.

This event is open to all MLA participants.

1. Evaluating Digital Work for Tenure and Promotion: A Workshop for Evaluators and Candidates

8:30–11:30 a.m., Willow A, Sheraton

Presiding: Alison Byerly, Middlebury Coll.; Katherine A. Rowe, Bryn Mawr Coll.; Susan Schreibman, Trinity Coll. Dublin

The workshop will provide materials and facilitated discussion about evaluating work in digital media (e.g., scholarly editions, databases, digital mapping projects, born-digital creative or scholarly work). Designed for both creators of digital materials (candidates for tenure and promotion) and administrators or colleagues who evaluate those materials, the workshop will propose strategies for documenting, presenting, and evaluating such work. Preregistration required.

9. Large Digital Libraries: Beyond Google Books

12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., 611, WSCC

Presiding: Michael Hancher Univ. of Minnesota, Twin Cities

Speakers: Tanya E. Clement, Univ. of Maryland, College Park; Amanda L. French, George Mason Univ.; George Oates, Open Library; Glenn Roe, Univ. of Chicago; Andrew M. Stauffer, Univ. of Virginia; Jeremy York, HathiTrust Digital Library

For a prospectus, visit mh.cla.umn.edu/MLA2012.pdf.

Aside from Google Books, the two principal repositories for digitized books are Open Library and HathiTrust Digital Library; Digital Public Library of America is now in its planning stage. What are the merits and prospects of these three projects? How can they be improved? What role should scholars play in their improvement? These questions will be addressed by participants in each project and by others experienced in the digital humanities.

12. Transmedia Stories and Literary Games

12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., 615, WSCC

  1. “Hundred Thousand Billion Fingers: Oulipian Games and Serial Players,” Patrick LeMieux Duke Univ.
  2. “Make Love, Not Warcraft: Virtual Worlds and Utopia,” Stephanie Boluk Vassar Coll.
  3. “Oscillation: Transmedia Storytelling and Narrative Theory by Design,” Patrick Jagoda Univ. of Chicago

Responding: Victoria E. Szabo Duke Univ.

For abstracts, visit www.stephanieboluk.com/docs/MLA_2012_abstracts.pdf.

34. The Future of Peer Review

12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., Issaquah, Sheraton

Presiding: Sean Scanlan, New York City Coll. of Tech., City Univ. of New York

  1. “Making Online Peer Review Interactive: Sticky Notes and Highlighters,” Cheryl E. Ball, Illinois State Univ.
  2. “The Bearable Light of Openness: Renovating Obsolete Peer-Review Bottlenecks,” Aaron J. Barlow, New York City Coll. of Tech., City Univ. of New York
  3. “The Law Review Approach: What the Humanities Can Learn,” Allen Mendenhall, Auburn Univ., Auburn

41. Social Networks, Jewish Identity, and New Media

1:45–3:00 p.m. University, Sheraton

Presiding: Jonathan S. Skolnik Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst

  1. “Social Networking, Jewish Identity, and New Jewish Ritual: Tattooed Jews on Facebook,” Erika Meitner Virginia Polytechnic Inst. and State Univ.
  2. “Electronic Apikoros: Searching for the Nineteenth-Century Origins of Contemporary Satire in the Jewish Blogosphere,” Ashley Aronsen Passmore Texas A&M Univ., College Station
  3. “From MySpace to MyJewishSpace: The Role of the Internet in the Self-Definition of New Jews in Austria and Germany,” Andrea Reiter Univ. of Southampton

47. Old Books and New Tools

1:45–3:00 p.m. 606, WSCC

Presiding: Sarah Werner Folger Shakespeare Library

Speakers: Katherine D. Harris, San José State Univ.; Jeffrey Knight, Univ. of Washington, Seattle; Matt Thomas, Univ. of Iowa; Whitney Trettien, Duke Univ.; Meg Worley, Palo Alto, CA

This roundtable will consider how the categories of old books and new tools might illuminate each other. Speakers will provide individual reflections on their experiences with old books and new tools before opening up the conversation to the theoretical and practical concerns driving the use and interactions of the two.

For abstracts, see http://sarahwerner.net/blog/index.php/old-books-and-new-tools/.

52. Post-Operaismo, Techne, and the Common

1:45–3:00 p.m., 304, WSCC

Presiding: Robert A. Wilkie Univ. of Wisconsin, La Crosse

  1. “Biotechnical Ecologies: Common Life in Los Angeles,” Allison Schifani Univ. of California, Santa Barbara
  2. “Cyber Communism: Left Ethics and Right Theory,” Stephen C. Tumino Kingsborough Community Coll., City Univ. of New York
  3. “Copyleft as Training Ground: The Digital Horizons of Intellectual Property,” Zachary Zimmer Virginia Polytechnic Inst. and State Univ.
  4. “The Romance of Techne,” Kimberly DeFazio Univ. of Wisconsin, La Crosse

67. Race and Digital Humanities

1:45–3:00 p.m., 611, WSCC

Presiding: Howard Rambsy Southern Illinois Univ.

  1. “Digitizing the Past: The Technologies of Recovering Black Lives,” Kimberly D. Blockett Penn State Univ., Brandywine
  2. “Digital Africana Studies 3.0: Singularity, Performativity, and Technologizing the Field,” Bryan Carter Univ. of Central Missouri
  3. “The Project on the History of Black Writing and Digital Possibilities,” Maryemma Graham Univ. of Kansas

For abstracts, write to hrambsy@siue.edu.

69. The Future of Higher Education

3:30–5:15 p.m. Grand C, Sheraton

Presiding: Kathleen Woodward Univ. of Washington, Seattle

  1. “Emergent Projects, Processes, and Stories,” Sidonie Ann Smith Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor
  2. “Learning Collaboratories, Now and in the Future,” Curtis Wong Microsoft Research
  3. “It’s the Data, Stupid!,” Ed Lazowska Univ. of Washington, Seattle
  4. “How to Crowdsource Thinking,” Cathy N. Davidson Duke Univ.

Scholars from the human, natural, and computational sciences will address the future of higher education in a digital age. They will identify problems in higher education today and provide recommendations for what is needed as we go forward. What pressure does this information age exert on the current ways we think about higher education? How does a conversation across the computational sciences and the humanities address, ease, or exacerbate that pressure?

87. Digital Literary Studies: When Will It End?

3:30–4:45 p.m. 304, WSCC

Presiding: David A. Golumbia Virginia Commonwealth Univ.

  1. “Digital Birth, Digital Adoption, Digital Disownment: Reconceiving Computational Textuality,” John David Zuern Univ. of Hawai’i, Manoa
  2. “Digital Literary Studies circa 1954: Lacan’s Machines and Shannon’s Minds,” Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan Northwestern Univ.
  3. “Digital Anamnesis,” Benjamin J. Robertson Univ. of Colorado, Boulder

121. Writing the Jasmine Revolution and Tahrir Square: Graffiti, Film, Collage, Poetry

5:15–6:30 p.m., Cedar, Sheraton

Presiding: Kathryn Lachman Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst

  1. “Tagging the Jasmine Revolution: Social Media and Graffiti in the Tunisian Uprising,” David Fieni Cornell Univ.
  2. “Quand la révolution filmique anticipe la révolution populaire,” Mirvet Médini Kammoun Institut Supérieur des Beaux-Arts de Tunis
  3. “The Women’s Manifesto: Thinking Egypt 2011 Transnationally,” Basuli Deb Univ. of Nebraska, Lincoln
  4. “Poetic Responses to the North African Revolutions,” Mahdia Benguesmia Univ. of Batna

For abstracts, write to klachman@llc.umass.edu.

125. What’s Still Missing? What Now? What Next? Digital Archives in American Literature

5:15–6:30 p.m., 608, WSCC

Presiding: Brad Evans, Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick

Speakers: Donna M. Campbell, Washington State Univ., Pullman; Julia H. Flanders, Brown Univ.; Kenneth M. Price, Univ. of Nebraska, Lincoln; Oya Rieger, Cornell Univ.; Robert Scholes, Brown Univ.; Jeremy York, HathiTrust Digital Library

This roundtable has two goals: (1) to provide a forum for reflection on the first twenty years of the digital archive, especially as it relates to American materials, which might include consideration of what is still missing and of methodologies for making use of what is there now, and (2) to offer an opportunity for researchers who have become dependent on the archive to talk with major players in its production, in the hope of fostering new avenues for cooperation.

150. Digital Humanities and Internet Research

7:00–8:15 p.m., 613, WSCC

Presiding: John Jones Univ. of Texas, Dallas

  1. “Creating a Conceptual Search Engine and Multimodal Corpus for Humanities Research,” Robin A. Reid Texas A&M Univ., Commerce
  2. “What the Digital Can’t Remember,” John Jones
  3. “Toward a Rhetoric of Collaboration: An Online Resource for Teaching and Learning Research,” Jennifer Sano-Franchini Michigan State Univ.

For abstracts, visit robin_anne_reid.dreamwidth.org.

161. The Webs We Weave: Online Pedagogy in Community Colleges

7:00–8:15 p.m., 615, WSCC

Presiding: Linda Weinhouse, Community Coll. of Baltimore County, MD

  1. “Blended Learning: The Best of Both Worlds?,” Pamela Sue Hardman, Cuyahoga Community Coll., Western Campus, OH
  2. “Magic in the Web,” Michael R. Best, Univ. of Victoria; Jeremy Ehrlich, Univ. of Victoria
  3. “The Digital-Dialogue Journal: Tool for Enhanced Classic Communication,” Bette G. Hirsch, Cabrillo Coll., CA
  4. “Delivering Literary Studies in the Twenty-First Century: The Relevance of Online Pedagogies,” Kristine Blair, Bowling Green State Univ.

Friday, January 6

187. Digital Humanities and Hispanism

8:30–9:45 a.m. Grand A, Sheraton

Presiding: Kyra A. Kietrys Davidson Coll.

Speakers: Mike Blum, Coll. of William and Mary; Francie Cate-Arries, Coll. of William and Mary; Kyra A. Kietrys; Kathy Korcheck, Central Coll.; William Anthony Nericcio, San Diego State Univ.; Rocío Quispe-Agnoli, Michigan State Univ.; Amaranta Saguar García, Univ. of Oxford, Lady Margaret Hall; David A. Wacks, Univ. of Oregon

For abstracts and Web links, write to kykietrys@davidson.edu.

Demonstrations by Hispanists who use technology in their scholarship and teaching. The presenters include a graduate student; junior and senior Latin American, Peninsular, and comparativist colleagues whose work spans medieval to contemporary times; and an academic technologist. After brief presentations of the different digital tools, the audience will circulate among the stations to participate in interactive demonstrations.

202. The Presidential Forum: Language, Literature, Learning

10:15 a.m.–12:00 noon, Metropolitan A, Sheraton

Presiding: Russell A. Berman, Stanford Univ.

  1. “Networking the Field,” Kathleen Fitzpatrick, MLA
  2. “Of Degraded Tongues and Digital Talk: Race and the Politics of Language,” Imani Perry, Princeton Univ.
  3. “Learning to Unlearn,” Judith Halberstam, Univ. of Southern California
  4. “Borrowing Privileges: Dreaming in Foreign Tongues,” Bala Venkat Mani, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison
  5. “Teaching Literature and the Bitter Truth about Starbucks,” Christopher Freeburg, Univ. of Illinois, Urbana

The forum addresses three fundamental points of orientation for our profession: language, in its various materialities; literature, broadly understood; and learning, especially student learning and our educational missions. The language and literature classroom has to serve the needs of today’s students. How do changing understandings of identity, performance, and media translate into transformations in teaching and learning?

215. Digital South, Digital Futures

10:15–11:30 a.m. 606, WSCC

Presiding: Vincent J. Brewton Univ. of North Alabama

  1. “Documenting the American South,” Natalia Smith Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
  2. “Space, Place, and Image: Mapping Farm Securities Administration (FSA) Photographs and the Photogrammar Project,” Lauren Tilton Yale Univ.
  3. “Southern Spaces: The Development of a Digital Southern Studies Journal,” Frances Abbott Emory Univ.
  4. “Mapping a New Deal for New Orleans Artists,” Michael Mizell-Nelson Univ. of New Orleans

For abstracts, visit http://ach.org/ach-sessions-2012-mla-convention after 20 Dec.

217. Reconfiguring the Scholarly Editor: Textual Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle

10:15–11:30 a.m., 613, WSCC

Presiding: Míceál Vaughan, Univ. of Washington, Seattle

  1. “Neither Editor nor Librarian: The Interventions Required in the New Context of Texts in the Digital World,” Joseph Tennis, Univ. of Washington, Seattle
  2. “Revealing a Coronation Tribute: Decoding the Hidden Aural and Visual Symbols,” JoAnn Taricani, Univ. of Washington, Seattle
  3. “Mapping Editors,” Meg Roland, Marylhurst Univ.
  4. “The Editor as Curator: Early Histories of Collected Works Editions in English,” Jeffrey Knight, Univ. of Washington, Seattle

249. Building Digital Humanities in the Undergraduate Classroom

12:00 noon–1:15 p.m. Grand A, Sheraton

Presiding: Kathi Inman Berens Univ. of Southern California

Speakers: Kathryn E. Crowther, Georgia Inst. of Tech.; Brian Croxall, Emory Univ.; Maureen Engel, Univ. of Alberta; Paul Fyfe, Florida State Univ.; Kathi Inman Berens; Janelle A. Jenstad, Univ. of Victoria; Charlotte Nunes, Univ. of Texas, Austin; Heather Zwicker, Univ. of Alberta

For abstracts, visit briancroxall.net/buildingDH after 1 Dec.

This electronic roundtable assumes that “building stuff” is foundational to the digital humanities and that the technical barriers to participation can be low. When teaching undergraduates digital humanities, simple tools allow students to focus on the simultaneous practices of building and interpreting. This show-and-tell presents projects of variable technical complexity that foster robust interpretation.

259. Representation in the Shadow of New Media Technologies

12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., 304, WSCC

Presiding: Lan Dong Univ. of Illinois, Springfield

  1. “Web Video and Ethnic Media: Linking Representation and Distribution,” Aymar Jean Christian Univ. of Pennsylvania
  2. “Among Friends: Comparing Social Networking Functions in the Baltimore Sun and Baltimore Afro-American in 1904 and 1933,” Daniel Greene Univ. of Maryland, College Park
  3. “Digital Trash Talk: The Rhetoric of Instrumental Racism as Procedural Strategy,” Lisa Nakamura Univ. of Illinois, Urbana

276. Getting Funded in the Humanities: An NEH Workshop

1:30–3:30 p.m. 3B, WSCC

Presiding: Jason C. Rhody National Endowment for the Humanities

This workshop will highlight recent awards and outline current funding opportunites. In addition to emphasizing grant programs that support individual and collaborative research and education, the workshop will include information on the NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities. A question-and-answer period will follow.

301. Reconfiguring Publishing

1:45–3:00 p.m., Grand A, Sheraton

Presiding: Carolyn Guertin Univ. of Texas, Arlington; William Thompson Western Illinois Univ.

Speakers: James Copeland, Ugly Duckling Presse; Gail E. Hawisher, Univ. of Illinois, Urbana; James MacGregor, Public Knowledge Project; Rita Raley, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara; Avi Santo, Old Dominion Univ.; Cynthia L. Selfe, Ohio State Univ., Columbus; Raymond G. Siemens, Univ. of Victoria

For abstracts, visit www.wiu.edu/users/wat100/2012_reconfigure/.

This session intends not to bury publishing but to raise awareness of its transformations and continuities as it reconfigures itself. New platforms are causing publishers to return to their roots as booksellers while booksellers are once again becoming publishers. Open-access models of publishing are creating new models for content creation and distribution as small print-focused presses are experiencing a renaissance. Come see!

315. The New Dissertation: Thinking outside the (Proto-)Book

3:30–4:45 p.m., 606, WSCC

Presiding: Kathleen Woodward, Univ. of Washington, Seattle

Speakers: David Damrosch, Harvard Univ.; Kathleen Fitzpatrick, MLA; Richard E. Miller, Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick; Sidonie Ann Smith, Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Kathleen Woodward

In 2010 the Executive Council appointed a working group to explore the state of the doctoral dissertation: How can it adapt to digital innovation, open access, new concepts of “authorship”? What counts as scholarship in the world today? How do we address the national problems of cost and time to degree? This roundtable will offer members of the working group an opportunity to make the case that as we shift the terminology from scholarly publication to scholarly communication we need to expand the forms of the dissertation and to reconceptualize what the dissertation is and how it can prepare graduates for academic careers in the coming decades.

332. Digital Narratives and Gaming for Teaching Language and Literature

3:30–4:45 p.m. Aspen, Sheraton

Presiding: Barbara Lafford Arizona State Univ.

  1. “Narrative Expression and Scientific Method in Online Gaming Worlds,” Steven Thorne Portland State Univ.
  2. “Designing Narratives: A Framework for Digital Game-Mediated L2 Literacies Development,” Jonathon Reinhardt Univ. of Arizona; Julie Sykes Univ. of New Mexico, Albuquerque
  3. “Close Playing, Paired Playing: A Practicum,” Edmond Chang Univ. of Washington, Seattle; Timothy Welsh Loyola Univ., New Orleans

Responding: Dave McAlpine Univ. of Arkansas, Little Rock

343. The Cultural Place of Nineteenth-Century Poetry

3:30–4:45 p.m., 611, WSCC

Presiding: Charles P. LaPorte, Univ. of Washington, Seattle

  1. “Lyric and Music at the Fin de Siècle: The Cultural Place of Song,” Emily M. Harrington, Penn State Univ., University Park
  2. “What Can ‘Digital Reading’ Tell Us about the Material Places of Victorian Poetry?,” Natalie M. Houston, Univ. of Houston, University Park
  3. “Olympics 2012 and Victorian Poetry for All Time,” Margaret Linley, Simon Fraser Univ.

349. Digital Pedagogy

5:15–6:30 p.m., Grand A, Sheraton

Presiding: Katherine D. Harris San José State Univ.

Speakers: Sheila T. Cavanagh, Emory Univ.; Elizabeth Chang, Univ. of Missouri, Columbia; Lori A. Emerson, Univ. of Colorado, Boulder; Adeline Koh, Richard Stockton Coll. of New Jersey; John Lennon, Univ. of South Florida Polytechnic; Kevin Quarmby, Shakespeare’s Globe Trust; Katherine Singer, Mount Holyoke Coll.; Roger Whitson, Georgia Inst. of Tech.

Discussions about digital projects and digital tools often focus on research goals. For this electronic roundtable, we will instead demonstrate how these digital resources, tools, and projects have been integrated into undergraduate and graduate curricula.

378. Old Labor and New Media

5:15–6:30 p.m., 608, WSCC

Presiding: Alison Shonkwiler Rhode Island Coll.

  1. “America Needs Indians: Representations of Native Americans in Counterculture Narrative and the Roots of Digital Utopianism,” Lisa Nakamura Univ of Illinois, Urbana
  2. “The Eyes of Real Labor and the Illusions of Virtual Reality,” Matt Goodwin Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst
  3. “Digital Voices: Representations of Migrant Workers in Dubai and Los Angeles,” Anne Cong-Huyen Univ. of California, Santa Barbara

Responding: Seth Perlow Cornell Univ.

Saturday, January 7

410. Reconfiguring the Literary: Narratives, Methods, Theories

8:30–9:45 a.m. 608, WSCC

Presiding: Susan Schreibman Trinity Coll., Dublin

Speakers: Alison Booth, Univ. of Virginia; Mark Stephen, Byron Univ. of Sydney; Øyvind Eide, Univ. of Oslo; Alexander Gil, Univ. of Virginia; Rita Raley, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara

For abstracts, visit http://ach.org/ach-sessions-2012-mla-convention after 1 Dec.

This roundtable will include projects that show how notions of the literary (narrative, method, and theory) can be fundamentally reconfigured by digital (con)texts.

421. Rhetorical Historiography and the Digital Humanities

8:30–9:45 a.m., 611, WSCC

Presiding: Janice Fernheimer Univ. of Kentucky

  1. “Touch Memory Death Technology Argument: Reading Onscreen,” Anne Frances Wysocki Univ. of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
  2. “Digital Archives as Rhetoric: Emerging Opportunities for Research and Design,” William Hart-Davidson Michigan State Univ.; Jim Ridolfo Univ. of Cincinnati
  3. “Feminist Historiography and the Digital Humanities,” Jessica Enoch Univ. of Pittsburgh

422. Public Intellectuals and the Question of Media

8:30–9:45 a.m. 310, WSCC

Presiding: Brian J. Norman Loyola Univ., Baltimore

  1. “Debating Form: Enlightenment Serial Publishing as Prehistory?,” Richard Squibbs DePaul Univ.
  2. “Truth and Conviction: Going Public with the Archive of Mary Suratt,” Augusta Rohrbach Washington State Univ., Pullman
  3. “New Left versus New Media? Latin American Encounters with Social(ist) Media,” Russell St Clair Cobb Univ. of Alberta
  4. “Professors in Public,” Susan H. Lurie Rice Univ.

Responding: Hortense Jeanette Spillers Vanderbilt Univ.

425. Composing New Partnerships in the Digital Humanities

8:30–9:45 a.m., 606, WSCC

Presiding: Catherine Jean Prendergast Univ. of Illinois, Urbana

Speakers: Matthew K. Gold, New York City Coll. of Tech., City Univ. of New York; Catherine Jean Prendergast; Alexander Reid, Univ. at Buffalo, State Univ. of New York; Spencer Schaffner, Univ. of Illinois, Urbana; Annette Vee, Univ. of Pittsburgh

The objective of this roundtable is to facilitate interactions between digital humanists and writing studies scholars who, despite shared interests in digital authorship, intellectual property, peer review, classroom communication, and textual revision, have often failed to collaborate. An extended period for audience involvement has been designed to seed partnerships beyond the conference.

428. Technology and Chinese Literature and Language

10:15–11:30 a.m., Boren, Sheraton

Presiding: Xiaoping Song Norwich Univ.

  1. “Adaptation: Rewriting Modern Chinese Literary Masterpieces,” Paul Manfredi Pacific Lutheran Univ.
  2. “Technology in Chinese Instruction: A Web-Based Extensive Reading Program,” Helen Heling Shen Univ. of Iowa
  3. “Technology and Teaching Chinese Literature in Translation,” Keith Dede Lewis and Clark Coll.
  4. “Text-Image-Imagined Words: An Approach to Teaching Chinese Literature,” Xiaoping Song

For abstracts, write to xsong@norwich.edu.

429. New Directions in Earlier Tudor Drama

10:15–11:30 a.m., 306, WSCC

Presiding: Maura Giles Watson Univ. of Nebraska, Lincoln; Erin E. Kelly Univ. of Victoria

  1. “‘They Make the Chronicles Themselves’: Paranoid History in John Bale’s King Johan,” Philip Schwyzer Univ. of Exeter
  2. “Theater as Politics, Theater as Art: William Briton, an Early Reader of Gorboduc,” Laura Estill Univ. of Victoria
  3. “Ecocritical Heywood and The Play of the Wether,” Jennifer L. Ailles Chicago, IL
  4. “‘To See the Playes of Theatre Newe Wrought’: Electronic Editions of Early Tudor Drama,” Brett Hirsch Univ. of Western Australia

442. New Media, New Pedagogies

10:15–11:30 a.m., 613, WSCC

Presiding: Rebecca L. Walkowitz Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick

  1. “Steampunk Wells: Game Design as Narrative Pedagogy,” Jay Clayton Vanderbilt Univ.
  2. “Technologies That Describe: Data Visualization and Contemporary Fiction,” Heather Houser Univ. of Texas, Austin
  3. “Better Looking, Close Reading: How Online Fiction Builds Literary-Critical Skills,” John David Zuern Univ. of Hawai’i, Manoa

444. Preservation Is (Not) Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose

10:15–11:30 a.m., 307, WSCC

Presiding: Robert H. Kieft, Occidental Coll.

Speakers: Rod Gauvin, ProQuest; John Kiplinger, JSTOR; Laura C. Mandell, Texas A&M Univ., College Station; John Wilkin, HathiTrust Digital Library

Responding: Joan Lippincott, Coalition for Networked Information

For abstracts, visit www.wiu.edu/users/wat100/2012/ after 1 Dec.

The speakers will discuss the preservation of texts as a core purpose of libraries, engaging questions regarding the tasks of deciding what materials to preserve and when and which to let go: best practices; institutional and collective roles for the preservation of materials in various formats; economics and governance structures of preserving materials; issues of tools, standards, and platforms for digital materials.

450. Digital Faulkner: William Faulkner and Digital Humanities

10:15–11:30 a.m. 615, WSCC

Presiding: Steven Knepper Univ. of Virginia

Speakers: Keith Goldsmith, Vintage Books; John B. Padgett Brevard, Coll.; Noel Earl Polk, Mississippi State Univ.; Stephen Railton, Univ. of Virginia; Peter Stoicheff, Univ. of Saskatchewan

For abstracts, visit faulknersociety.com/panels.htm after 15 Dec.

A roundtable on digital humanities and its implications for teaching and scholarship on the work of William Faulkner.

467. The Future of Teaching

12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., Grand C, Sheraton

Presiding: Priscilla B. Wald, Duke Univ.

  1. “Gaming the Humanities Classroom,” Patrick Jagoda, Univ. of Chicago
  2. “Intimacy in Three Acts,” Margaret Rhee, Univ. of California, Berkeley
  3. “One Course, One Project,” Jentery Sayers, Univ. of Victoria
  4. “The Meta Teacher,” Bulbul Tiwari, Stanford Univ.

This session features innovative advanced doctoral students and junior scholars who are making their mark as scholars and as teachers using new interactive, multimedia technologies of writing and publishing in their research and classrooms. The panelists cross the boundaries of the humanities, arts, sciences, and technology and are committed to new forms of scholarship and pedogogy. They practice the virtues of open, public, digitally accessible thinking and represent the vibrancy of our profession. Fiona Barnett, Duke Univ., will coordinate live Twitter feeds and other input during the session.

468. Networks, Maps, and Words: Digital-Humanities Approaches to the Archive of American Slavery

12:00 noon–1:15 p.m. 615, WSCC

Presiding: Lauren Klein Georgia Inst. of Tech.

  1. “‘A Report Has Come Here’: Social-Network Analysis in the Papers of Thomas Jefferson,” Lauren Klein
  2. “Slave Narratives in Space: Mapping the World of Venture Smith,” Cameron Blevins Stanford Univ.
  3. “Using Digital Tools to Explore Narrative Conventions in the North American Antebellum Slave Narratives,” Aditi Muralidharan Univ. of California, Berkeley

Responding: Amy Earhart Texas A&M Univ., College Station

479. Digital Humanities in the Italian Context

12:00 noon–1:15 p.m. Cedar, Sheraton

Presiding: Manuela Marchesini Texas A&M Univ., College Station

  1. “Digital Humanities in the Italian Culture Landscape,” Stefano Franchi Texas A&M Univ., College Station
  2. “Life and the Digital: On Esposito and Tarizzo’s Inventions of Life,” Alberto Moreiras Texas A&M Univ., College Station
  3. “Humanist Studies and the Digital Age,” Massimo Lollini Univ. of Oregon
  4. “Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone: From Card Index to Hypertext,” Silvia Stoyanova Princeton Univ.

For abstracts, write to mmarchesini@tamu.edu after 19 Dec.

482. Of Kings’ Treasuries and the E-Protean Invasion: The Evolving Nature of Scholarly Research

12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., 613, WSCC

Presiding: Jude V. Nixon, Salem State Univ.

Speakers: Douglas M. Armato, Univ. of Minnesota Press; Harriett Green, Univ. of Illinois, Urbana; Dean J. Smith, Project MUSE; Pierre A. Walker, Salem State Univ.

This roundtable addresses the veritable explosion of emerging technologies (Google Books, Wikipedia, and e-readers) currently available to faculty members to enhance their scholarly research and how these resources are altering fundamentally the method of scholarly research. The session also wishes to examine access to these technologies and how they interact with the traditional research library and the still meaningful role, if any, it plays in scholarly research.

487. Context versus Convenience: Teaching Contemporary Business Communication through Digital Media

12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., 306, WSCC

Presiding: Mahli Xuan Mechenbier, Kent State Univ.

  1. “Reenvisioning and Renovating the Twenty-First-Century Business Communication Classroom,” Lara Smith-Sitton, Georgia State Univ.
  2. “Contextualizing Conventions: Technology in Business Writing Classrooms,” Suanna H. Davis, Houston Community Coll., Central Coll., TX
  3. “Teaching Business Communication through Simulation Games,” Katherine V. Wills, Indiana Univ.–Purdue Univ., Columbus

490. Reconfiguring the Scholarly Edition

12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., 611, WSCC

Presiding: Susan Schreibman, Trinity Coll. Dublin

Speakers: Michael R. Best, Univ. of Victoria; John Bryant, Hofstra Univ.; Alexander Gil, Univ. of Virginia; Elizabeth Grove-White, Univ. of Victoria; Grant Simpson, Indiana Univ., Bloomington; John A. Walsh, Indiana Univ., Bloomington

New theories of editing have broadened the approaches available to editors of scholarly editions. Noteworthy amongst these are the changes brought about by editing for digital publication. New methods for digital scholarship, forms of editions, theories informing digital publication, and tools offer exciting alternatives to traditional notions of the scholarly edition.

513. Principles of Exclusion: The Future of the Nineteenth-Century Archive

1:45–3:00 p.m., 611, WSCC

Presiding: Lloyd P. Pratt, Univ. of Oxford, Linacre Coll.

  1. “Missing Links; or, Girls of Today, Archives of Tomorrow,” William A. Gleason, Princeton Univ.
  2. “Anonymity, Authorship, and Digital Archives in American Literature,” Elizabeth Lorang, Univ. of Nebraska, Lincoln
  3. “Dashed Hopes: Small-Scale Digital Archives of the 1990s,” Amy Earhart, Texas A&M Univ., College Station

532. Reading Writing Interfaces: Electronic Literature’s Past and Present

1:45–3:00 p.m. 613, WSCC

Presiding: Marjorie Luesebrink Irvine Valley Coll., CA

  1. “Early Authors of E-Literature, Platforms of the Past,” Dene M. Grigar Washington State Univ., Vancouver
  2. “Seven Types of Interface in the Electronic Literature Collection Volume Two,” Marjorie Luesebrink ; Stephanie Strickland New York, NY
  3. “The Digital Poem against the Interface Free,” Lori A. Emerson Univ. of Colorado, Boulder
  4. “Strange Rain and the Poetics of Motion and Touch,” Mark L. Sample George Mason Univ.

For abstracts, visit http://loriemerson.net/2011/10/04/mla-2012-special-session/.

539. #alt-ac: Alternative Paths, Pitfalls, and Jobs in the Digital Humanities

3:30–4:45 p.m. 3B, WSCC

Presiding: Sara Steger Univ. of Georgia

Speakers: Brian Croxall, Emory Univ.; Julia H. Flanders, Brown Univ.; Jennifer Howard, Chronicle of Higher Education; Matthew Jockers, Stanford Univ.; Shana Kimball, Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Bethany Nowviskie, Univ. of Virginia; Lisa Spiro, National Inst. for Tech. in Liberal Education

This roundtable brings together various perspectives on alternative academic careers from professionals in digital humanities centers, libraries, publishing, and humanities labs. Speakers will discuss how and whether digital humanities is especially suited to fostering non-tenure-track positions and how that translates to the role of alt-ac in digital humanities and the academy. Related session: “#alt-ac: The Future of ‘Alternative Academic’ Careers” (595).

566. Ending the Edition

3:30–4:45 p.m., 303, WSCC

Presiding: Carol DeBoer-Langworthy, Brown Univ.

  1. “Mary Moody Emerson’s Almanacks: Digital Editions and Imagined Endings,” Noelle A. Baker, Neenah, WI
  2. “Closing the Book on a Multigenerational Edition: Harvard’s The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson,” Ronald A. Bosco, Univ. at Albany, State Univ. of New York; Joel Myerson, Univ. of South Carolina, Columbia
  3. “‘Letting Go’: The Final Volumes of the Cambridge Fitzgerald Edition,” James L. W. West, Penn State Univ., University Park

581. Digital Humanities versus New Media

5:15–6:30 p.m., 611, WSCC

  1. ” Everything Old Is New Again: The Digital Past and the Humanistic Future,” Alison Byerly Middlebury Coll.
  2. “As Study or as Paradigm? Humanities and the Uptake of Emerging Technologies,” Andrew Pilsch Penn State Univ., University Park
  3. “Digital Tunnel Vision: Defining a Rhetorical Situation,” David Robert Gruber North Carolina State Univ.
  4. “Digital Humanities Authorship as the Object of New Media Studies,” Victoria E. Szabo Duke Univ.

For abstracts, visit www.duke.edu/~ves4/mla2012.

595. #alt-ac: The Future of “Alternative Academic” Careers

5:15–6:30 p.m., 3B, WSCC

Presiding: Bethany Nowviskie, Univ. of Virginia

Speakers: Donald Brinkman, Microsoft Research; Neil Fraistat, Univ. of Maryland, College Park; Robert Gibbs, Univ. of Toronto; Charles Henry, Council on Library and Information Resources; Bethany Nowviskie; Jason C. Rhody, National Endowment for the Humanities; Elliott Shore, Bryn Mawr Coll.

In increasing numbers, scholars are pursuing careers as “alternative academics”—embracing hybrid and non-tenure-track positions in libraries, presses, humanities and cultural heritage organizations, and digital labs and centers. Speakers represent organizations helping to craft alternatives to the traditional academic career. Related session: “#alt-ac: Alternative Paths, Pitfalls, and Jobs in the Digital Humanities” (539).

603. Innovative Pedagogy and Research in Technical Communication

5:15–6:30 p.m., 615, WSCC

Presiding: William Klein Univ. of Missouri, St. Louis

1. “The New Normal of Public Health Research by Technical Communication Professionals,” Thomas Barker Texas Tech Univ.

2. “Teaching the New Paradigm: Social Media inside and outside the Classroom,” William Magrino Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick; Peter B. Sorrell Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick

3. “Technical and Rhetorical Communication through DIY (Do-It-Yourself) Digital Video,” Crystal VanKooten Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor

For abstracts, write to bill_klein@umsl.edu.

606. Text:Image Visual Studies in the English Major

5:15–6:30 p.m., 304, WSCC

Presiding: Meg Roland, Marylhurst Univ.

  1. “Aesthetic Literacy and Interdisciplinary Vocabularies,” M. Stephanie Murray, Carnegie Mellon Univ.
  2. “Curricular Challenges, Pedagogical Opportunities: Charting Modernism across Departmental Boundaries,” David M. Ball, Dickinson Coll.; Elizabeth Lee, Dickinson Coll.
  3. “Text:Image Visual Studies in the English Department,” Perrin Maurine Kerns, Marylhurst Univ.
  4. “Mapping the Antebellum Culture of Reprinting,” Ryan Cordell, Saint Norbert Coll.

For abstracts, write to mroland@marylhurst.edu.

Sunday, January 8

636. Not What We Thought: Representations of the Digital Everyday

8:30–9:45 a.m., 307, WSCC

Presiding: Mark Bresnan New York Univ.

  1. “Enter eBay: Representations of the Digital Everyday in Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City,” Zara Dinnen Univ. of London, Birkbeck Coll.
  2. “The Work of Viral Video in the Age of Networked Transmission,” Kimberly Knight Univ. of Texas, Dallas
  3. “@Margaret Atwood: Interactive Media and the Management of Literary Celebrity,” Lorraine M. York McMaster Univ.

658. The Literary Archive in an Age of Quantification: Evidence, Method, Imagination

10:15–11:30 a.m., 307, WSCC

Presiding: Justine S. Murison Univ. of Illinois, Urbana

  1. “Cause for Idealism? The Scientization of Literary Studies,” Jared Hickman Johns Hopkins Univ., MD
  2. “Can We Have Sex in the Archives?,” Jordan Alexander Stein Univ. of Colorado, Boulder
  3. “How to Build Tools That Foster the Kind of Brainstorming You Want,” Ted Underwood Univ. of Illinois, Urbana

Responding: Justine S. Murison

665. Debates in the Digital Humanities

10:15–11:30 a.m. 615, WSCC

Presiding: Alexander Reid Univ. at Buffalo, State Univ. of New York

  1. “Whose Revolution? Toward a More Equitable Digital Humanities,” Matthew K. Gold New York City Coll. of Tech., City Univ. of New York
  2. “Hacktivism and the Humanities: Programming Protest in the Era of the Digital University,” Elizabeth Mathews Losh Univ. of California, San Diego
  3. “Twenty-First-Century Literacy: Searching the Story of Billy the Kid,” Jeff Rice Univ. of Missouri, Columbia
  4. “Why the Digital Humanities Needs Theory,” Jentery Sayers Univ. of Victoria

For abstracts and discussion, visit dhdebatesmla12.wordpress.com/.

674. Giving It Away: Sharing and the Future of Scholarly Communication

10:15–11:30 a.m., Willow A, Sheraton

Presiding: Nicholas Birns, New School

“Giving It Away: Sharing and the Future of Scholarly Communication,” Kathleen Fitzpatrick, MLA

691. Gertrude Stein and Music

12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., Cedar, Sheraton

Presiding: Jeff Dailey, Five Towns Coll.

  1. “Sounding Stein’s Texts by Using Digital Tools for Distant Listening,” Tanya E. Clement, Univ. of Maryland, College Park
  2. “Gertrude’s Glee and Jazz Mislaid Jazz,” Judith A. Roof, Rice Univ.
  3. “‘This Is How They Do Not Like It’: Queer Abjection in Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts,” Brandon Masterman, Univ. of Pittsburgh
  4. “‘Come to Paris Where You Can Be Looked After’: Paul Bowles Remediates Gertrude Stein,” Christopher Leslie, Polytechnic Inst. of New York Univ.

For abstracts, visit www.lyricasociety.org.

716. Digital Material

12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., 613, WSCC

Presiding: Charles M. Tung Seattle Univ.; Benjamin Widiss Princeton Univ.

Speakers: Paul Benzon, Temple Univ., Philadelphia; Cara Elisabeth, Ogburn Univ. of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; Charles M. Tung; Benjamin Widiss; Zachary Zimmer, Virginia Polytechnic Inst. and State Univ.

For abstracts, write to bwidiss@princeton.edu.

Is there gravity in digital worlds? Moving beyond both lamentations and celebrations of the putatively free-floating informatic empyrean, this roundtable will explore the ways in which representations in myriad digital platforms—verbal, visual, musical, cinematic—might bear the weight of materiality, presence, and history and the ways in which bodies—both human and hardware—might be recruited for or implicated in the effort.

730. New Media Narratives and Old Prose Fiction

1:45–3:00 p.m., 310, WSCC

Presiding: Amy J. Elias Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville

  1. “New Media: Its Use and Abuse for Literature and for Life,” Joseph Paul Tabbi Univ. of Illinois, Chicago
  2. “Contrasts and Convergences of Electronic Literature,” Dene M. Grigar Washington State Univ., Vancouver
  3. “Computing Language and Poetry,” Nick Montfort Massachusetts Inst. of Tech.

736. Close Playing: Literary Methods and Video Game Studies

1:45–3:00 p.m., University, Sheraton

Presiding: Mark L. Sample George Mason Univ.

Speakers: Edmond Chang, Univ. of Washington, Seattle; Steven E. Jones, Loyola Univ., Chicago; Jason C. Rhody, National Eudowment for the Humanities; Anastasia Salter, Univ. of Baltimore; Timothy Welsh, Loyola Univ., New Orleans; Zach Whalen, Univ. of Mary Washington

For abstracts, visit www.samplereality.com/mla12 after December 1.

This roundtable moves beyond the games-versus-stories dichotomy to explore the full range of possible literary approaches to video games. These approaches include the theoretical and methodological contributions of reception studies, reader-response theory, narrative theory, critical race and gender theory, disability studies, and textual scholarship.

738. Textual Remediation in the Digital Age

1:45–3:00 p.m., 307, WSCC

Presiding: Andrew M. Stauffer, Univ. of Virginia

Speakers: Mark Algee-Hewitt, McGill Univ.; Alison Booth, Univ. of Virginia; Amanda Gailey, Univ. of Nebraska, Lincoln; Laura C. Mandell, Texas A&M Univ., College Station

Roundtable on the theoretical, practical, and institutional issues surrounding the transformation of print-era texts into digital forms for scholarly use. What forms of editing need to be done, and by whom? What new research questions are becoming possible? How will the global digital library change professional communication? What is the future of the academic research library? How can we make sustainable digital textual resources for literary studies?

Second and Columbia, c. July 1914 photograph courtesy of Rob Ketcherside, Creative Commons Licensed

On Reading Aloud in the Classroom

September 14th, 2011 § 9 comments § permalink

Sky Spoke to FairiesOne of the greatest mistakes we make in literary studies—and as teachers of literature—is privileging one form of literacy above all others. Namely, literacy as silent reading.

In our classrooms, we view reading aloud with disdain. Asking students to take turns reading a text aloud offends our sensibilities as literature professors. It’s remedial. Childish. Appropriate for an elementary school classroom, perhaps, but it has no place in our hallowed halls of higher learning.

How odd it is, then, that so many academic conferences in the humanities consist of nothing but rooms full of professors looking down at papers, reading them aloud. I can only imagine that this form of reading aloud is valid in our eyes while students reading aloud in our classes is not, because it is pedagogically and historically aligned with that realm of culture in which it is legitimate to read texts aloud—the realm of the sacred, the rite of the scripture, the ritual of someone we presume to be intellectually and spiritually superior exulting and professing before the masses. Which explains why we deem it acceptable for ourselves to read passages aloud in class, so long as it is done in a tremulous, dramatic voice.

Reading aloud is a right reserved for the professor.

And how wrong this is. How drearily, dreadfully, dismally wrong this is.

Sheridan Blau argues in The Literature Workshop that one of the most powerful tools at the disposal of readers is rereading. And reading aloud—reading out loud—is in turn one of the most powerful ways of rereading. It’s active, performative, and engaging, an incredibly rewarding strategy for understanding difficult texts. And it’s a technique too easily tossed aside in the undergraduate classroom—and in the graduate student classroom for that matter.

Not every professor has abandoned this seemingly elementary technique, of course; for example, my ProfHacker colleague Jason Jones has long defended the value of reading aloud. And last week in my Science Fiction course I was reminded of exactly how indispensable—and fun—reading aloud can be for students.

This course is an upper level class full of English majors. And I mean full. There are 53 students enrolled, just about double my usual size of 27 students. And yet I try to lead this class with as much discussion and participation as a graduate seminar. We’re only three weeks in, but I’m delighted so far that I’ve been able to involve so many students, and hear so many voices over the course of our 75-minute sessions.

Because my class last Thursday went particularly well, and because it highlights the value of students reading aloud, I want to walk through two activities we did. Both led to vigorous discussions that helped to illuminate some questions troubling my students about Volume I of Frankenstein, our first novel of the semester.

Victor Frankenstein robbing a grave.

Victor Frankenstein robbing a grave. Woodcut by Lynd Ward (1934)

Reading Frankenstein Aloud

I picked the following passage to read aloud in class, because it contains some of the most telling imagery concerning Frankenstein’s loss of humanity as he attempts to create life. It’s a rich paragraph, complicating the reductive and moralistic dictum that Frankenstein was “playing God.”

From Frankenstein (1818), Chapter 3, paragraph 9:

These thoughts supported my spirits, while I pursued my undertaking with unremitting ardour. My cheek had grown pale with study, and my person had become emaciated with confinement. Sometimes, on the very brink of certainty, I failed; yet still I clung to the hope which the next day or the next hour might realise. One secret which I alone possessed was the hope to which I had dedicated myself; and the moon gazed on my midnight labours, while, with unrelaxed and breathless eagerness, I pursued nature to her hiding-places. Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil, as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave, or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay? My limbs now tremble, and my eyes swim with the remembrance; but then a resistless, and almost frantic impulse, urged me forward; I seemed to have lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit. It was indeed but a passing trance, that only made me feel with renewed acuteness so soon as, the unnatural stimulus ceasing to operate, I had returned to my old habits. I collected bones from charnel houses; and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame. In a solitary chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the house, and separated from all the other apartments by a gallery and staircase, I kept my workshop of filthy creation; my eyeballs were starting from their sockets in attending to the details of my employment. The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials; and often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation, whilst, still urged on by an eagerness which perpetually increased, I brought my work near to a conclusion.
  1. We began by reading the passage aloud using what Blau calls the “jump-in” method. I’ve heard other people call it popcorn-style. We simply bounce around the room, with students voluntarily jumping in to read a few sentences to the class, after which somebody else jumps in, as if taking the baton from the previous reader. The professor doesn’t interrupt or call on anybody to read; the reading is totally student generated.
  2. After we finished reading the passage, we took nominations for the most important sentence or phrase from the paragraph—the sentence or phrase most pivotal or rich with interpretive potential. Peter Elbow would call it “the center of gravity” of the paragraph. The students shouted out these lines, and I typed them into this Google Doc, displayed live on the projection screen in the front of the lecture hall.
  3. With no debate of the nominees, we voted (by hand count) for the most significant of these ten lines.
  4. Finally, we had a class discussion, in which supporters of each line defended their vote. We didn’t discuss every line, especially since there was one clear “winner” and two runner-ups. But even limiting our debate to three lines of the paragraph gave us three entryways into the passage, three facets which, when angled just right, revealed something new about Frankenstein—or rather, Shelley’s indictment of Frankenstein.

I’m convinced that such a productive discussion wouldn’t have occurred if the students hadn’t first reread the passage aloud. I’m likewise convinced that merely asking students to reread the passage silently before the exercise wouldn’t have yielded such rich interpretive fruits. It’s the reading aloud that does it. The vocalization for the students who did the reading, the texture of the voices for the students who listened, the attentive anticipation of everyone as they awaited the next reader to jump in from the seat next to them or from across the room.

Hand of the Creator, Creature. Woodcut by Lynd Ward (1934)

Hand of the Creator, Creature. Woodcut by Lynd Ward (1934)

Reading Aloud and Touching Frankenstein

We read yet another passage aloud, again jump-in fashion, afterwards. My goal this time was to pinpoint the precise moment when Victor Frankenstein goes from praising his act of creation to being repulsed by it. I was motivated by a student’s blog post, in which she had wondered why Frankenstein suddenly became horrified by his creature, when he had worked so hard to create it. To answer this question of why, we need to know when he became afraid.

So our class read aloud, popcorn style, from the first three paragraphs of Chapter 4:

IT was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!—Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion, and straight black lips.

The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature. I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.

After we finished reading this passage aloud—again, a fundamental kind of rereading—I asked students to point to the exact word when Frankenstein’s attitude toward his creation changes from delight to revulsion. Literally—I asked students to point with their finger to the spot on the page where this transformation occurs. They had to physically touch the page with their index finger, and leave it there, while we consider the class’s various answers.

I’ve borrowed this pointing method from Peter Elbow, who uses it in the context of teaching composition. In Elbow’s method, peer readers help their fellow writers by pointing to words that resonate with them. But pointing works just as well when reading literary works. There’s something about that tactile connection with the page that for a moment is far more meaningful to the student than anything he or she might have underlined or highlighted. And here, in this exercise, pointing forces students to make a choice, to take a stance with the text. There’s no hemming and hawing, no vague determination that the transformation in question happens somewhere on page 85 or wherever.

Of course, with Frankenstein there is no single correct answer of when his disgust takes shape. It is a contested question, minor perhaps, but yet our tentative answers, backed with literally physical evidence in the form of the finger on the page, opens up the text. Questions of tone and narrative perspective arise. Irony enters in. Even punctuation, as when a student convincingly argued that the reversal occurs in the em dash between “Beautiful!” and “Great God!”

None of these considerations would have been as easily accessible to us without, first, reading the passage, and then, rereading it. And more precisely, rereading it aloud. When students read aloud they become voices in the classroom, authorities in the classroom, empowered to speak both during the reading and even more critically, after the reading.

[Sky Spoke to Fairies photography courtesy of Georgia Brooke North / Creative Commons Licensed]

Hacking the Academy: The Ebook Volume

September 10th, 2011 § 10 comments § permalink

Hacking the Academy LogoOn September 8, the DigitalCultureBooks imprint of the University of Michigan Library and University Michigan Press released the online edition of Hacking the Academy. Conceived of by Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt at GMU’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, Hacking the Academy is an experiment in publishing. It’s a crowdsourced book, in which contributors had merely one week (May 21-28, 2010) to come up with and submit material. It’s also heavily edited, with Dan and Tom shaping the mass—the mess?—of possible submissions into a cohesive, coherent work. Authors include professors, graduate students, journalists, archivists, and alternate academic career visionaries. (Full disclosure: I’m in there too.)

As Jason Jones notes on ProfHacker, the book has been coming out in stages. From the first, a unedited, raw collection of all the submissions was aggregated at Hacking the Academy. Now, the edited online volume has been released. In 2012, a print edition will be available as well.

Because the book is being published under a Creative Commons non-commercial license, anybody is free to share or remix the work, as long the original authors and editors are properly attributed. This license is another way the book is an experiment—a major academic publisher is giving free license to anyone to shape, circulate, or reimagine the book.

Here, then, is my initial contribution to the Hacking the Academy ecology: I’ve compiled and formatted the online edited volume into ebook form, suitable for reading on Kindles, Nooks, iPads, and so on. (Hat tip to my colleague Mills Kelly for giving me the idea.)

  • Hacking the Academy epub (for Nooks and iPads)
  • Hacking the Academy mobi (for Kindles)
  • Hacking the Academy PDF

 

Renetworking House of Leaves in the Digital Humanities

August 18th, 2011 § 8 comments § permalink

House Of LeavesMark Z. Danielewski’s debut novel House of Leaves (2000) presents a paradox to the literary scholar working within the digital humanities. On one hand the massive, labyrinthine novel offers so many ambiguities and playful metaleptic moments that it would seem to be a literary critic’s dream text, endlessly interpretable, boundlessly intertextual. On the other hand, with its layers of footnotes, metacommentary, and self-conscious invocation of literary theory, the novel seems to preemptively foreclose any and all possible interpretative moves.

Indeed, as Danielewski himself has said, “I have yet to hear an interpretation of House of Leaves that I had not anticipated”1 While we should take Danielewski’s proclamation as a kind of reverse echo of Warhol’s disingenuous denial of any intention in his artwork, the fact remains that the novel’s hyperconscious awareness of itself, combined with the important scholarly criticism from the likes of Katherine Hayles and Mark Hansen, as well as the continuing exegetical flood generated by legions of fans online—take all this together and it seems impossible that there is anything new to say about House of Leaves.

What do you say about a book that attempts to say everything about itself?

How do you say something new about a text that has been discussed, dissected, and picked over by thousands of persistent and incisive minds?

And how might a digital humanities sensibility reinvigorate a thoroughly worked-over literary text?

Jessica Pressman has convincingly argued that House of Leaves is a “networked” novel in at least two senses: the novel is acutely aware of digital networks and the circulation of knowledge online; and ideal readers will adapt a “networked reading strategy” as they make sense of the book, encountering companion works such as the album Haunted by Poe (aka Danielewski’s sister) and Danielewski’s own The Whalestoe Letters.2 To these two forms of the networked novel, my ProfHacker colleague Brian Croxall recently suggested another: reading the novel as part of a network. That is, Brian wants his upcoming undergraduate class at Emory University to read House of Leaves alongside of other classes at other institutions.

After some wrangling of syllabi and schedules, Brian Croxall has gathered a group of us who are teaching House of Leaves at the same time toward the end of October: Paul Benzon (Temple University), Erin Templeton (Converse College), Zach Whalen (University of Mary Washington), and myself at George Mason. The context for each of our classes is different: Paul’s class is a capstone course on literature, media, and the archive; Erin’s is an honors course on the contemporary novel; Zach’s is a senior seminar; Brian’s is a digital humanities class; and my own course is post-print fiction. Because of the varied courses involved (not to mention diverse institutional contexts), we see great value in reading House of Leaves as a network.

Networked Assignments

Right now we are in the process of determining what kind of assignments our five classes can share. They range from the simple to the complex, including the following:

  • Blog Commenting. If we’re all using course blogs, we can have each class read and comment on the posts of the other classes. This is the easiest assignment to implement and has the benefit of being asynchronous.
  • A Group Blog/Tumble Log. All of our students (which will likely add up to 50-60 students) join one massive group blog or tumble log for the three weeks that we’re reading House of Leaves. There’s some flexibility in how dialogic this group effort would be. Students could use Tumblr simply to post quotes and images related to the book, or we could have a full-fledged blog, with layers of comments.
  • Constructive Class projects. I suggested converting my mapping House of Leaves assignment into a studio-type project, in which one class presents two or three group projects to the other classes, and those classes “critique” them. This assignment requires more overhead than the other options, and involves a greater commitment from the students (versus commenting on blogs, where the stakes are lower).

In addition to these fairly predictable shared assignments, I’ve been thinking about a more radical one, which tackles head-on the challenge any teacher of House of Leaves faces: the forum. The House of Leave forum is a massive discussion board of tens of thousands of posts, ranging from the puerile to the brilliant. And, since this is House of Leaves, sometimes both at once. Nearly every puzzle, every ambiguity, every nuance of House of Leaves has had a discussion thread devoted to it. The forum is so overwhelming that it can easily suck the air out of a literary reading of House of Leaves. And, as Rita Raley noted in a message to Richard Grusin and myself, the forum has an unassailable authority about it:

@ @ It’s been a few years since I last taught it; now one has to compete with the authority of The Forum.
February 14, 2011 6:17 pm via Twitter for AndroidReplyRetweetFavorite
@ritaraley
Rita Raley

Just as House of Leaves presents a paradox to the literary scholar, so too does the forum present a dilemma to the digital humanist. On one hand, the forum is a vast crowd-sourced literary interpretation, complete with user-generated concordances, digitizations, and transcriptions—all of the familiar tools of digital humanists. On the other hand, this work is produced by non-scholars. By fans. Amateurs. It’s not vetted in a way recognizable to most academics (though it’s foolish to believe that the forum does not have its own system of peer review and prestige ranking).

Different professors have different ways of dealing with the forum. Some ban their students from reading it outright. Others acknowledge the forum in an offhand way, hoping that their students never investigate for themselves the breadth and depth of the discussions. In either of these cases, I think the tiptoeing around the forum is due to pedagogical expediencies rather than a high-brow dismissal of low-brow work.

There is a third option, of course, which is to face the forum head-on and incorporate the discussion threads into the class (which certainly fits the networked reading strategy Pressman describes).

And now, I want to propose a fourth option.

Renetworking the Novel

Let’s bring the forum to the fore by starting it anew.

That is, I propose starting the forum from scratch. In our classes we’ll explicitly (and temporarily) forbid students from reading the House of Leave forum. Instead, we create an alternate forum of our own, seeded with a few initial threads that appeared in the original forum. The idea is to recreate the forum, and see how its trajectory would play out ten years later, in the context of a literature class. The 50-60 students from the five classes seems a manageable number to launch a new iteration of the forum; enough to generate a sense of “there” there, but not such an overwhelming number that keeping up with the forum becomes unmanageable (though that would in fact replicate the feel of the original forum).

After three weeks of intensive cross-class use of the renetworked forum, the final step would be to lift the ban on reading the official forum, giving students the opportunity to compare the alternate forum with the original, and draw some conclusions from that comparison.

The five of us haven’t decided yet what kind of shared assignment we’ll use. And my post here is not meant to sway anybody; it’s more of a thought experiment. What would happen if we truly renetworked an already networked novel? And do so using the same modes that made the novel networked in the first place? What would we learn? About House of Leaves? About networks? About crowdsourcing? About the blurry lines between academics and fans?

[Creative Commons photo credit: Simon Scott ]

  1. McCaffery, Larry, and Sinda Gregory. “Haunted House—An Interview with Mark Z. Danielewksi.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 44.2 (2003) : 106. ↩
  2. Pressman, Jessica. “House of Leaves: Reading the Networked Novel.” Studies in American Fiction 34.1 (2006) : 107-128. ↩

Reading List for Science Fiction Course (ENGL 451)

August 8th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

Prosthesis' Oświęcim/AuschwitzAfter much deliberation—and with your feedback, both here and twice on Twitter—I have finalized the reading list for my upcoming Science Fiction class. Actually, I finalized it months ago, but I haven’t had a chance to post it here until now.

This list isn’t everything we’re reading; there’ll be short stories, critical essays, other nonfiction works, as well as some experimental writing and film. But the novels below are the texts officially available at the university bookstore or Amazon.

Students: you need not buy the paper versions of these books. You can purchase e-book versions for your Kindle, Nook, or iWhatever. In the case of We3, you can purchase digital copies of the three issues that make up Morrison and Quitely’s graphic novel from Comixology.

I’m excited for the class, and I hope my students are too. All of these novels stick to my original goal of exploring and challenging what counts as “human” in our increasingly inhuman world. And all of them are excellent, provocative reads.

[ Creative Commons photo credit: CxOxS ]

Post-Print Fiction Reading List (the print stuff, at least)

June 17th, 2011 § 3 comments § permalink

A Shredded Book

Ex-Book by James Bridle

I’m excited to announce the print side of my post-print fiction reading list:

Each of these works offers a meditation upon the act of reading or writing, the power of stories, the role of storytellers, and the materiality of books themselves as physical objects. In addition to these printed and (mostly) bound texts, my English Honors Seminar students will encounter a range of other unconventional narrative forms, from Jonathan Blow’s Braid to Kate Pullinger’s Inanimate Alice, from Christopher Strachey’s machine-generated love letters to Robert Coover’s deck of storytelling playing cards. Along the way we’ll also consider mash-ups, databased stories, role-playing games, interactive fiction, and a host of other narrative forms. We’ll also (a heads-up to my students) create some of our own post-print beasties…

•    Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (Harvest Books, ISBN 0156439611)
•    Don DeLillo, Mao II (Penguin, ISBN 978-0140152746)
•    Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves (Pantheon, ISBN 978-0375703768)
•    Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper (Mariner, ISBN 978-0156032117)
•    Anne Carson, Nox (New Directions, ISBN 978-0811218702)

The digital humanities is not about building, it’s about sharing

May 25th, 2011 § 22 comments § permalink

Radiohead CrowdEvery scholarly community has its disagreements, its tensions, its divides. One tension in the digital humanities that has received considerable attention is between those who build digital tools and media and those who study traditional humanities questions using digital tools and media. Variously framed as do vs. think, practice vs. theory, or hack vs. yack, this divide has been most strongly (and provocatively) formulated by Stephen Ramsay. At the 2011 annual Modern Language Association convention in Los Angeles, Ramsay declared, “If you are not making anything, you are not…a digital humanist.”

I’m going to step around Ramsay’s argument here (though I recommend reading the thoughtful discussion that ensued on Ramsay’s blog). I mention Ramsay simply as an illustrative example of the various tensions within the digital humanities. There are others too: teaching vs. research, universities vs. liberal arts colleges, centers vs. networks, and so on. I see the presence of so many divides—which are better labeled as perspectives—as a sign that there are many stakeholders in the digital humanities, which is a good thing. We’re all in this together, even when we’re not.

I’ve always believed that these various divides, which often arise from institutional contexts and professional demands generally beyond our control, are a distracting sideshow to the true power of the digital humanities, which has nothing to do with production of either tools or research. The heart of the digital humanities is not the production of knowledge; it’s the reproduction of knowledge. I’ve stated this belief many ways, but perhaps most concisely on Twitter:

DH shouldn’t only be about the production of knowledge. It’s about challenging the ways that knowledge is represented and shared.
October 6, 2010 6:51 am via Twitter for iPadReplyRetweetFavorite
@samplereality
Mark Sample

The promise of the digital is not in the way it allows us to ask new questions because of digital tools or because of new methodologies made possible by those tools. The promise is in the way the digital reshapes the representation, sharing, and discussion of knowledge. We are no longer bound by the physical demands of printed books and paper journals, no longer constrained by production costs and distribution friction, no longer hampered by a top-down and unsustainable business model. And we should no longer be content to make our work public achingly slowly along ingrained routes, authors and readers alike delayed by innumerable gateways limiting knowledge production and sharing.

I was riffing on these ideas yesterday on Twitter, asking, for example, what’s to stop a handful of of scholars from starting their own academic press? It would publish epub books and, when backwards compatibility is required, print-on-demand books. Or what about, I wondered, using Amazon Kindle Singles as a model for academic publishing. Imagine stand-alone journal articles, without the clunky apparatus of the journal surrounding it. If you’re insistent that any new publishing venture be backed by an imprimatur more substantial than my “handful of scholars,” then how about a digital humanities center creating its own publishing unit?

It’s with all these possibilities swirling in my mind that I’ve been thinking about the MLA’s creation of an Office of Scholarly Communication, led by Kathleen Fitzpatrick. I want to suggest that this move may in the future stand out as a pivotal moment in the history of the digital humanities. It’s not simply that the MLA is embracing the digital humanities and seriously considering how to leverage technology to advance scholarship. It’s that Kathleen Fitzpatrick is heading this office. One of the founders of MediaCommons and a strong advocate for open review and experimental publishing, Fitzpatrick will bring vision, daring, and experience to the MLA’s Office of Scholarly Communication.

I have no idea what to expect from the MLA, but I don’t think high expectations are unwarranted. I can imagine greater support of peer-to-peer review as a replacement of blind review. I can imagine greater emphasis placed upon digital projects as tenurable scholarship. I can imagine the breadth of fields published by the MLA expanding. These are all fairly predictable outcomes, which might have eventually happened whether or not there was a new Office of Scholarly Communication at the MLA.

But I can also imagine less predictable outcomes. More experimental, more peculiar. Equally as valuable though—even more so—than typical monographs or essays. I can imagine scholarly wikis produced as companion pieces to printed books. I can imagine digital-only MLA books taking advantage of the native capabilities of e-readers, incorporating videos, songs, dynamic maps. I can image MLA Singles, one-off pieces of downloadable scholarship following the Kindle Singles model. I can imagine mobile publishing, using smartphones and GPS. I can imagine a 5,000-tweet conference backchannel edited into the official proceedings of the conference backchannel.

There are no limits. And to every person who objects, But, wait, what about legitimacy/tenure/cost/labor/& etc, I say, you are missing the point. Now is not the time to hem in our own possibilities. Now is not the time to base the future on the past. Now is not the time to be complacent, hesitant, or entrenched in the present.

William Gibson has famously said that “the future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed.” With the digital humanities we have the opportunity to distribute that future more evenly. We have the opportunity to distribute knowledge more fairly, and in greater forms. The “builders” will build and the “thinkers” will think, but all of us, no matter where we fall on this false divide, we all need to share. Because we can.

(Radiohead Crowd photograph courtesy of Flickr user Samuel Stroube / Creative Commons Licensed]

Close Playing: Literary Methods and Videogame Studies (MLA 2012 Roundtable)

May 16th, 2011 § 6 comments § permalink

Pac ManI recently received word that my proposal for a roundtable on videogame studies was accepted for the annual Modern Language Association Convention, to be held next January in Seattle, Washington. I’m very excited for myself and my fellow participants: Ed Chang, Steve Jones, Jason Rhody, Anastasia Salter, Tim Welsh, and Zach Whalen.

This roundtable is particularly noteworthy in two ways. First, it’s a departure from the typical conference model in the humanities, namely three speakers each reading twenty-minute essays at an audience, followed by ten minutes of posturing and self-aggrandizement thinly disguised as Q&A. Instead, each speaker on the “Close Playing” roundtable will briefly (no more than six minutes each) lay out opening remarks or provocations, and then we’ll invite the audience to a long open discussion. Last year’s Open Professoriate roundtable followed a similar model, and the level of collegial dialogue between the panelists and the audience was inspiring (and even newsworthy)—and I hope the “Close Playing” roundtable can emulate that success.

The second noteworthy feature of the roundtable is the topic itself. Videogames—an incredibly rich form of cultural expression—have been historically unrepresented, if not entirely absent from the MLA. I noted this silence in the midst of the 2011 convention in Los Angeles:

How is it possible that I am the only person talking about videogames at #MLA11?
November 9, 2010 3:56 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite
@samplereality
Mark Sample

This is not to say there isn’t an interest in videogames at the MLA; indeed, I am convinced from the conversations I’ve had at the conference that there’s a real hunger to discuss games and other media forms that draw from the same cultural well as storytelling. Partly in the interest of promoting the critical study of videogames, and partly to serve as a successful model for future roundtable proposals (which I can assure you, the MLA Program Committee wants to see more of), I’m posting the “Close Playing” session proposal here (see also the original CFP).

We hope to see you in Seattle in January!

CLOSE PLAYING: LITERARY METHODS AND VIDEOGAME STUDIES

(As submitted to the MLA Program Committee
for the 2012 conference in Seattle, Washington)

Nearly fifteen years ago a contentious debate erupted in the emerging field of videogame studies between self-proclaimed ludologists and the more loosely-defined narratologists. At stake—or so it seemed at the time—was the very soul of videogame studies. Would the field treat games as a distinct cultural form, which demanded its own theory and methodology? Or were videogames to be considered “texts,” which could be analyzed using the same approaches literary scholars took to poetry, drama, and fiction? Were games mainly about rules, structure, and play? Or did games tell stories and channel allegories? Ludologists argued for the former, while many others defended the latter. The debate played out in conferences, blogs, and the early issues of scholarly e-journals such as Game Studies and Electronic Book Review.

In the ensuing years the debate has dissipated, as both sides have come to recognize that no single approach can adequately explore the rich and diverse world of videogames. The best scholarship in the field is equally attune to both the formal and thematic elements of games, as well as to the complex interplay between them. Furthermore, it’s become clear that ludologists mischaracterized literary studies as a strictly New Critical endeavor, a view that woefully overlooks the many insights contemporary literary scholarship can offer to this interdisciplinary field.

In the past few years scholars have begun exploring the whole range of possible literary approaches to games. Methodologies adopted from reception studies, reader-response theory, narrative theory, critical race and gender theory, queer studies, disability studies, rhetoric and composition, and textual studies have all contributed in substantive ways to videogames studies. This roundtable will focus on these contributions, demonstrating how various methods of literary studies can help us understand narrative-based games as well as abstract, non-narrative games (for example, Tetris). And as Jameson’s famous mantra “always historicize” reminds us, the roundtable will also address the wider social and historical context that surrounds games.

This topic is ideally suited for a roundtable format (rather than a panel of three papers) precisely because of the diversity of approaches, which are well-represented by the roundtable participants. Moreover, each presenter will limit his or her opening remarks to a nonnegotiable six minutes, focusing on the possibilities of one or two specific methodologies for close-reading videogames, rather than a comprehensive close reading of a single game. With six presenters, this means the bulk of the session time (roughly thirty-five minutes) will be devoted to an open discussion, involving both the panel and the audience.

“Close Playing: Literary Methods and Videogame Studies” will appeal to a broad swath of the MLA community. While many will find subject of videogames studies compelling enough by itself, the discussion will be relevant to those working in textual studies, media studies, and more broadly, the digital humanities. The need for this roundtable is clear: as we move toward the second decade of videogames studies, the field can no longer claim to be an emerging discipline; the distinguished participants on this panel—with the help of the audience—will survey the current lay of the land in videogame studies, but more importantly, point the way forward.

Moderator
Mark Sample, George Mason University

Participatants
Edmond Chang, University of Washington
Steven E. Jones, Loyola University, Chicago
Jason Rhody, Office of Digital Humanities, NEH
Anastasia Salter, University of Baltimore
Timothy Welsh, Loyola University, New Orleans
Zach Whalen, University of Mary Washington

[Pac Man photo courtesy of Flick user joyrex / Creative Commons Licensed]

Time: The High Cost of Commuting

May 12th, 2011 § 9 comments § permalink

Sad Face, by NikoClasses are over, final projects are coming in, and I’ve just wrapped up another year of my high-flying, jet-setting lifestyle. Which is just a sexier way of saying I commute. Which is just shorthand for: every Tuesday I wake up at 5am, drive 30 miles to Charlotte Douglas International Airport, fly at dawn to Washington Dulles International Airport, get myself over to George Mason’s campus, where I teach, advise, write, collaborate, work, eat, and occasionally sleep until Thursday at 7:45pm, when I fly back to Charlotte, making it home in the best of times by 10:30pm. And then I repeat the following week. And the week after that. And so on.

Minus one year my wife was on sabbatical from her institution, when we moved the entire family up to Fairfax, and minus another year when I was half on sabbatical and half on personal leave, I’ve been doing this Tuesday through Thursday commute since 2005. It seems that every year I attempt to make sense of commuting in a new way. Last year I tried to be practical about it. Another year I tried to be funny. Once I wrote poems assembled from the caution signs on airplane wings.

This year I’m simply going to be honest.

The commute is costing me the one treasure I can never get back: time.

Friends, families, and colleagues often say to me, You’re away from home two nights a week? That’s not so bad. It could be a lot worse.

Dear friends, families, and colleagues: this is the worst possible thing you could say to me, my wife, or my children.

Two nights a week? It could be a lot worse.

To those who mean well but nevertheless end up minimizing the difficulty of my weekly commute, let me do some math for you.

I have two semesters. Each semester is fifteen weeks long. I’m away from my family three days and two nights every single one of those weeks. Throw in a couple of other nights when I’ve had to be away for flight cancellations, extra travel time, and extraordinary commitments bringing me to campus early or keeping me late. Add it up, and I’ve been away from my home just over ninety days and sixty nights since August 2010.

Now look me in the eye and try to minimize the pain and sorrow of missing two months of my sons’ lives. Three months, if you count the days. Three months is hard enough to be apart from my wife, but we’re adults, and we made the decision together to be an academic commuter couple, at least for a while. But three months means something entirely different when children are involved, a four- and six-year-old, making great physical, cognitive, and social leaps in a matter of weeks—even in a matter of days. Imagine missing crucial milestones, the kind we usually celebrate with hugs and kisses, joy and smiles. Imagine leaving behind your most cherished loved ones two or three months out of every year. Compound this absence by four, the number of years I’ve had to travel, and I’ve missed an entire year of my children’s daily lives. A year when I was not there.

Certainly there are people who are away from their families more than I am. Soldiers on extended tours of duty, businessmen and women traveling across the globe. Diplomats, spies, the pilots of the planes themselves. But I am neither making a sacrifice in the name of my country nor earning a generous salary that allows me to buy figments of happiness. I’m a poor English professor, teaching and studying words, images, and ideas.

That I love my career—working with kind and collegial people, teaching engaging and challenging courses— only makes the commute harder. Sweet as well as bitter. Several months ago, in the dead of winter, the bitterest time of the semester, I wrote on Twitter:

Commuting every week is hard enough already, but in the cold dark days of February and March the hard enough grows harder.
February 3, 2011 5:22 pm via Osfoora HDReplyRetweetFavorite
@samplereality
Mark Sample

Now it’s spring, now it’s May. And there is the summer to rejuvenate, to be present. But the shadow of another semester already looms ahead, and my mind is soaked through even now with work and writing that calls me away from my family though I’m still home. The hard enough grows harder, and it never gets easy.

[Crazy Sad Face Drawing by my son, Niko]

Gamifying Gamification by Making It Less Gamely

May 6th, 2011 § 3 comments § permalink

Guard TowerIn a recent post on the group blog Play the Past, I wrote about the way torture-interrogation is often described by its proponents as a kind of game. I wrestled for a long time with the title of that post: “The Gamification of Interrogation.” Why? Because I oppose the general trend toward “gamifying” real world activities—mapping game-like trappings such as badges, points, and achievements onto otherwise routine or necessary activities.

A better term for such “gamification” is, as Margaret Robertson argues, pointsification. And I oppose it. I oppose pointsification and the gamification of life. Instead of “gamifying” activities in our daily life, we need to meanify them—imbue them with meaning. The things that we do to live, breathe, eat, laugh, love, and die, we need to see as worth doing in order to live, breathe, eat, laugh, love, and die. A leaderboard is not the path toward discovering this worthwhileness.

So, back to my title and what troubled me about it: “The Gamification of Interrogation.” I didn’t want this title to appear to be an endorsement of gamification. Perhaps the most cogent argument against both the practice of gamification and the rhetoric of the word itself comes from Ian Bogost, who observes that the contorted noun “gamification” acts as a kind of magic word, making “something seem easy to accomplish, even if it is in fact difficult.”

Ian proposes that we begin calling gamification what it really is. Because gamification seeks to “replace real incentives with fictional ones,” he argues that we call it “exploitationware”—a malevolent practice that exploits a user’s loyalty with fake rewards.

I’m skeptical that “exploitationware” will catch on, even among the detractor’s of gamification. It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. Its five syllables are so confrontational that even those who despise gamification might not be sympathetic to the word. Yet Ian himself suggests the way forward:

the best move is to distance games from the concept [of gamification] entirely, by showing its connection to the more insidious activities that really comprise it.

And this is where my title comes in. I’ve connected gamification to an insidious activity, interrogation. I’m not trying to substitute a more accurate word for gamification. Rather, I’m using “gamification,” but in conjunction with human activities that absolutely should not be turned into a game. Activities that most people would recoil to conceive as a game.

The gamification of torture.

The gamification of radiation poisoning.

The gamification of child pornography.

This is how we disabuse the public of the ideology of gamification. Not by inventing another ungainly word, but by making the word itself ungainly. Making it ungamely.

Prison Tower Barb photo courtesy of Flickr user Dana Gonzales / Creative Commons License]

“A Very Kind and Peaceful People”: Geronimo and the World’s Fair

May 3rd, 2011 § 3 comments § permalink

(Exactly ten years ago this week I turned in my last graduate seminar paper, for a class on late 19th and early 20th century American literature taught by the magnificent Nancy Bentley. The paper was about the 1904 World’s Fair and Geronimo, a figure I’ve been thinking about deeply since Sunday night. Because of the strange resonances between the historical Geronimo and the code name for Osama Bin Laden, I’ve posted that paper here, hoping it helps others to contextualize Geronimo, and to acknowledge his own voice.)


If I could say in one word the symbol, though not the entire source, of my unease since Sunday, that one word would be “Geronimo.”
May 3, 2011 3:51 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite
@samplereality
Mark Sample

“A Very Kind and Peaceful People”:

Geronimo and the World’s Fair

St. Louis had an “Exposition” in 1904. Of course, Geronimo was there, was becoming a permanent exposition exhibit, basking in hero-worship, selling postcards, bows and arrows, putting money in his pockets.

- The son of Indian agent John P. Clum, in the latter’s biography, Apache Agent1

Geronimo (Guiyatle)—Apache, by F. A. Rinehart, Omaha, 1898. Courtesy of Western History/Genealogy Department, Denver Public Library.

Nearly twenty years after he had surrendered for the last time and became a permanent prisoner of war at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, instead of a renegade Indian whose name struck terror in the hearts of Americans and Mexicans alike across the Southwest, the Chiricahua Apache leader Geronimo attended, or rather, appeared at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. Also known as the Louisiana Purchase Exposition—the event commemorated “the greatest peaceable acquisition of territory the world has known”2—the Fair devoted a number of exhibits to traditional Native American culture, including an “Apache Village” that had been constructed along the midway.

There under the strict supervision of the War Department was Geronimo, nestled between a stall of Pueblo women pounding corn and a group of Indian pottery makers. Here the seventy-five-year-old war chief sat in his own booth, making bows and arrows and selling signed photographs of himself for as much as two dollars apiece.3 Two interpretations of Geronimo’s participation in the Louisiana Purchase Exposition have long prevailed. On the one hand, Geronimo is derided as a self-serving scoundrel, “basking in hero-worship,” whose fame, or more appropriately, whose infamy had been earned at the expense of the blood of dozens of American settlers and soldiers. This is the view Woodworth Clum adopts in Apache Agent, the biography he writes of his father, who was once the acting governor of the New Mexico Territory and an Indian agent who had negotiated with the Apaches.

On the other hand, Geronimo is celebrated as a hero, a noble warrior from a lost age, one who has successfully and with dignity (and business acumen) assimilated into American society. It is fascinating that while both of these views presume some form of agency on Geronimo’s part, they take for granted that Geronimo is present at the Fair as an attraction, a crowd-pleasing museum piece. Neither of these views take into account what that museum piece himself might have thought about his experiences at the Exposition. What happens when the attraction talks back? What happens when one exhibit walks among other exhibits and comments upon them? What happens when Geronimo the fiend and Geronimo the hero give way to Geronimo the spectator? In the brief essay that follows I hope to tentatively answer these questions by setting in dialogue with each other two collections of texts: the first, what was written about Native American exhibits at the St. Louis World’s Fair and other spectacles like it by the events’ organizers and contemporary journalists and visitors; and the second, Geronimo’s own life story, taken down in 1906, in which he offers his account of what he did and what he saw at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition.

Native Americans on display

The display of Native Americans as exotic curiosities or specimens of a disappearing culture was of course nothing new by the time of the St. Louis World’s Fair. A half century earlier P. T. Barnum was one of the first “curators” of such displays. In his Struggles and Triumphs Barnum remembers one exhibit of American Indians from the “far West” that demonstrates his consummate showmanship, in which he transforms a group of Indian chiefs into museum pieces supposedly without their even realizing it. Capitalizing on the language barrier between the chiefs and himself, Barnum “convinces” the Indians that visitors to his American Museum in New York are there to honor the Indians. The chiefs appear to be pleased with this news and they welcome the endless, seemingly adoring crowds who come to pay them “respect.” The success of the exhibit depends upon the Indians remaining ignorant—or at least acting ignorant—of the museum’s true function. “If they suspected that your Museum was a place where people paid for entering,” the Indian’s interpreter tells Barnum, “you could not keep them a moment after the discovery”4—a claim that heightened the audience’s sense of witnessing savagery from a position of safety.

The language barrier worked to Barnum’s advantage especially when he introduced one Kiowa chief, Yellow Bear, to the audience. Smiling and genially patting Yellow Bear on the shoulder, Barnum “pretended to be complimenting him to the audience” when he was in fact saying the opposite:

[Yellow Bear] has killed, no doubt, scores of white persons, and he is probably the meanest, black-hearted rascal that lives in the far West. […] If the blood-thirsty little villain understood what I was saying, he would kill me in a moment; but as he thinks I am complimenting him, I can safely state the truth to you, that he is a lying, thieving, treacherous, murderous monster. He has tortured to death poor, unprotected women, murdered their husbands, brained their helpless little ones; and he would gladly do the same to you or to me, if he though he could escape punishment.5

The incongruity of Barnum’s inflammatory words and his affectionate manner creates a humorous effect for his readers, if not for those in attendance at the museum, and establishes a pattern to how Native American “savages” would be described to the masses for generations to come.

Though the problem of translation is one with which Geronimo would have to contend, in more subtle ways, when he told his own life story, later exhibits of American Indians did not depend upon gross misrepresentations of which those being represented were supposedly unaware. Instead, the exhibits relied on the ready complicity of Native Americans. Spectacles like Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and his competitors, which were immensely popular from the 1880s through the 1920s, actively sought out willing Native Americans, including Geronimo. And many of the traits Barnum attributed to Yellow Bear—lying, thieving, treachery—were said of Geronimo as well. After the 1904 World’s Fair Geronimo briefly joined Pawnee Bill’s Wild West show (again, with the permission of the U. S. government, since he was still technically a prisoner of war). Geronimo’s act, never mind that Apaches were not buffalo hunters like the Plains Indians, was to shoot a buffalo from a moving automobile. In a move reminiscent of Barnum, Pawnee Bill billed Geronimo for this performance as “The Worst Indian That Ever Lived.”6

And Geronimo went along with the billing. By 1904, the Apache warrior was a seasoned showman and knew how to sell himself (or how to avail himself to be sold by others). He had appeared at the Pan-American Exposition in 1901, and even earlier he was paraded at the 1898 Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition in Omaha, Nebraska.7 This expo was Geronimo’s debut, so to speak, his first time appearing in public as an attraction. Like the other Native Americans showcased in the exposition’s “Congress of American Indians,” Geronimo was subject to the crowd’s immense curiosity. According to Overland Monthly magazine, the “Congress of American Indians” was organized with a very specific goal in mind:

to present the different Indian tribes and their primitive modes of living; to reproduce their old games and dances; compare the varied and characteristic style of dress; illustrate their strange customs; recall their almost forgotten traditions; prove their skill in bead embroidery, basket-weaving, and pottery; and most important of all, to afford a comparison of the various tribes and a study of their characteristic and tribal traits.8

The American Indians are specimens whose function is to “illustrate” strange customs yet enable distinctions to be made between the different tribes. In other words, the Indian is static, reified, deserving not so much of respect as scholarship. These representatives of a “fast-dying race,” stereotypically associated with “primitive” crafts like embroidery and pottery, are made all the more striking when juxtaposed against the modern architectural and engineering feats displayed at the exposition. “The Indian,” declared Overland Monthly, “will always be a fascinating object.”9 Indeed, nearly every page of the report in Overland Monthly is accompanied by a photograph of a notable Native American, often deliberately posing for the camera. On the first page is a portrait of the aged Geronimo, shot by the official photographer of the Trans-Mississippi Exposition and Indian Congress, F. A. Rinehart. Described as having a “deeply wrinkled face, scarred and seamed with seventy years of treachery and cunning,” Geronimo stands as a nostalgic reminder of the Apache wars two decades earlier, a nostalgia that further reduces the Indian into an object, a memento.10

Paul Greenhalgh argues in Ephemeral Vistas, his study of late nineteenth and early twentieth century expositions and world’s fairs, that this process of objectification depended upon a blurring between entertainment and education:

Between 1889 & 1914, the exhibitions [the expositions and world’s fairs] became a human showcase, when people from all over the world were brought to sites in order to be seen by others for their gratification and education. […] Through this twenty-five year period it would be no exaggeration to say that as items of display, objects were seen to be less interesting than human beings, and through the medium of display, human beings were transformed into objects.11

Surely Greenhalgh had in mind, among other examples, the representation of Native Americans as they appeared at the Omaha Exposition of 1898 and the St. Louis Exposition in 1904. Evidence abounds that “human beings were transformed into objects” at both events. According to David R. Francis, the former governor of Missouri and chairman of the St. Louis Exposition’s executive committee, Geronimo “illustrated at once a native type and an aboriginal personage of interest alike to special students and passing throngs of visitors.”12 Geronimo, according to this formulation, is a “type,” which scholars and tourists alike can find interest in, providing the turn-of-the-century equivalent of edutainment.

Perhaps “edutainment” is too light a word, for it glosses over the complex power relations at work in Native American exhibitions. Linking the open displays of Native Americans in expositions like St. Louis with the more insidious Foucauldian panopticons that structured modern prisons, the historian Jo Ann Woodsum reasons,  “As in the panopticon, the person(s) on display are under constant surveillance and therefore participate in their own discipline before the omnipresent gaze of the colonial eye.” Woodsum concludes that “Americans could gaze on their vanquished enemies [the Indians] with a twofold purpose. First, to acknowledge their triumph over a terrible obstacle on the road to progress. Second, as a way of reconciling the bloody nature of that triumph of empire with the foundation of the country as a democratic republic.”13 The displays, Woodsum suggests, patch over an enormous ideological rift in American history. Indeed, there is a redemptive element to the fair, but in the case of Geronimo, I would argue, what is redeemed is not the nation, but the native. “Here,” Francis writes in The Universal Exposition of 1904, the official account of the St. Louis event, “the once bloody warrior Geronimo completed his own mental transformation from savage to citizen and for the first time sought to assume both the rights and the responsibilities of the high stage.”14 The exposition was nothing less than the means through which Geronimo, whose name was once invoked as a kind of bogeyman, became the paragon of citizenship.15

Samuel M. McCowan, the superintendent of the Chilocco Indian Training School in Oklahoma who became the director of the St. Louis Indian exhibits, had wished to present examples of Indian industry from tribes as diverse as Navajo, Pueblo, Apache, and Sioux. These Native Americans who sold their “native” crafts—pottery, beads, baskets, blankets, buckskins, silver jewelry—stood in sharp contrast to Geronimo, who sat in his booth signing photographs and hawking souvenirs (like the buttons taken from his coat, of which he had a curiously large supply).16 McCowan initially had felt that Geronimo was “no more than a blatant blackguard, living on a false reputation,” but he arranged for the Chiricahua Apache to visit the fair anyway, since his presence would guarantee a large crowd for the more educational aspects of the Indian exhibit.17 As Geronimo’s time at the Fair came to a close, however, even McCowan changed his mind about Geronimo. McCowan almost gushes as he reports back to the army captain responsible for guarding the Apache warrior in Oklahoma:

He really has endeared himself to whites and Indians alike. With one or two exceptions, when he was not feeling well, he was gentle, kind and courteous. I did not think I could ever speak so kindly of the old fellow whom I have always regarded as an incarnate fiend. I am very glad to return him to you in as sound and healthy condition as when you brought him here.18

Geronimo, redeemed through his budding civility (not to mention his newfound interest in capitalism), impressed McCowan just as he impressed so many other visitors. As one Arizona visitor to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition remarked, Geronimo “had been tamed and looked alright.”19 Two decades earlier that same visitor from the Southwest might have been clamoring for Geronimo’s hanging. These changes in attitude of those around him are the virtues of converting “from savage to citizen.”

Geronimo the Reader and Spectator

 

When people first came to the World’s Fair they did nothing but parade up and down the streets. When they got tired of this they would visit the shows. There were many strange things in these shows.

- Geronimo, describing his experience at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair 20

But what did Geronimo think about all this? We can begin to hazard some guesses because Geronimo told us in the most subtle of ways. In 1905, back in custody at Fort Sills, Geronimo agreed to tell S. M. Barrett, a school superintendent from a nearby town, his life story. “Each day,” Barrett recalls, “he had in mind what he would tell and told it in a very clear, brief manner. […] Whenever his fancy led him, there he told whatever he wished to tell and no more.” Geronimo controlled what was said, how it was said, and when it was said. When asked a question after the first interview session, Geronimo simply responded, “Write what I have spoken.”21 Refusing to speak if a stenographer was present, Geronimo crafted an autobiography which is the legacy of an oral tradition. Doubly so—since he told his story to an interpreter, Asa Daklugie, who then told it to Barrett, at which point the story was put down in writing. Geronimo speaks, but someone else writes.22 The manuscript was then submitted for approval to the War Department, whose Secretary had found that “there are a number of passages which, from the departmental point of view, are decidedly objectionable.”23 It was only after President Roosevelt approved the manuscript in 1906 that this “autobiography” was published as Geronimo’s Story of His Life (it has since been reissued as Geronimo: His Own Story).

Rarely has Geronimo’s Own Story been treated as a literary text. More often it has been read as a historical document, or as Barrett phrases it in his preface, “an authentic record of the private life of the Apache Indians.”24 One notable exception is John Robert Leo’s “Riding Geronimo’s Cadillac: His Own Story and the Circumstancing of Text.” Written in the late seventies in the heady days of American deconstructionism, the article is quite concerned with the construction of meaning through the aporia in the text. In one rather—and now, predicable—Derridean move, for example, Leo announces that “Geronimo is he whose meaning always is emerging.”25 While what Leo means by this statement of différance is too complicated to trace out here, I do want to emphasize Leo’s point that despite the translations, transcribing, and censorship that His Own Story underwent, “a residue of Geronimo’s way of seeing comes through the repressive imprint of white textual authority.”26 In other words, Geronimo circumvents a repressive ideological textual apparatus in order to convey a reading of the dominant white culture that goes against the grain—what Stuart Hall calls an “oppositional reading,” a reading that “detotalizes the message in the preferred code in order to retotalize the message within some alternative framework of reference.”27 Geronimo begins the chapter of His Own Story called “At the World’s Fair,” with just such an encoding:

When I was at first asked to attend the St. Louis World’s Fair I did not wish to go. Later, when I was told that I would receive good attention and protection, and that the President of the United States said that it would be all right, I consented.28

What Geronimo does not say is that he did not wish to go because the government was only willing to pay $1 per day for appearing at the exposition, while a commercial promoter had offered Geronimo $100 per month. Once the government made it clear that Geronimo could only leave his compound at Fort Sill under the War Department’s terms, he acquiesced.29 Or, as he phrased it, in way that puts the power back in his hands, “I consented.” Of course, Geronimo would receive “good attention and protection” during his trip—in other words, close supervision by government guards.

What allows Geronimo to decode the fair, revealing some of its absurdities and paradoxes and then re-encode his reading in an understated narrative that we ourselves must decode is his appreciation of the power of the printed word, a lesson learned during his warrior days of the 1880s. Geronimo demonstrates this awareness in a transcript of his March 25, 1886 parley with General Crook:

I do not want you [General Crook] to believe any bad papers about me. I want the papers sent you to tell the truth about me, because I want to do what is right. Very often there are stories put in the newspapers that I am to be hanged. I don’t want that any more. When a man tries to do right, such stories out not to be put in the newspapers. […] Don’t believe any bad talk you hear about me. The agents and the interpreter hear that somebody has done wrong, and they blame it all on me. Don’t believe what they say. […] I think I am a good man, but in the papers all over the world they say I am a bad man.”30

Geronimo brought this understanding that “bad papers” tell “bad talk” to bear as he told Barrett his thoughts about his six months at the St. Louis World’s Fair, where, when he was not selling photographs and buttons or, as he did every Sunday, roping buffalo for delighted audiences in a Wild West show, he would himself venture to the shows. “There were,” Geronimo decided, “many strange things in these shows.”31 What follows in the rest of the chapter is the exhibition object par excellence, whom audiences come to gawk at, speaking about what he finds strange, what he finds alien about the fair. And Geronimo does so in such an understated way, focusing on seemingly unrelated shows, that we might wonder what underlying sentiments the old Apache hoped to convey in this narrative.

Of all the “many strange things” at the World’s Fair, of all the marvels and exhibits—the Exposition power plant, the Swiss chalet, the arc lighting, the hot air balloon races, the automobile showcase—what does Geronimo remember, or at least tell Barrett about? Most telling is that Geronimo recounts a number of acts which involve dissimulation. Watching two Turks brandishing scimitars in a sham battle, he “expected both to be wounded or perhaps killed, but neither one was harmed.” In another show a “strange-looking negro” sat bound in a chair, his hands tied behind his back. In a moment, the escape artist was free. Geronimo tells Barrett that “I do not understand how this was done. It was certainly a miraculous power, because no man could have released himself by his own efforts.” In the same vein, Geronimo witnesses a magic show, in which a variation of the classic trick of sawing a woman in half is performed. “I heard the sword cut through the woman’s body,” Geronimo recalls, “and the manager himself said she was dead; but when the cloth was lifted from the basket she stepped out, smiled, and walked off the stage.” The magic for Geronimo, as he tells it, lies not in the illusion that a woman’s body was sliced in half, but in how she healed. “I would like to know how she was so quickly healed,” Geronimo asks, “and why the wounds did not kill her.”32

Men who fiercely fight and are not injured. A man who escapes the inescapable. A woman whose mortal wound disappears. I would venture that Geronimo is not simply dictating a chronological account of his wanderings through the midway, but is consciously, strategically constructing a discourse on power and the evasion of its effects. Perhaps Geronimo sees in the black escape artist who wrests himself free with “a miraculous power” a version of his own struggle against the repressive white world

A visit to a glassmaker likewise turns into a meditation on deception, authority, and control:

I had always thought that these things [glassware] were made by hand, but they are not. The man had a curious little instrument, and whenever he would blow through this into a little blaze the glass would take any shape he wanted it to. I am not sure, but I think that if I had this kind of an instrument I could make whatever I wished. There seems to be a charm about it. But I suppose it is very difficult to get these little instruments, or other people would have them.33

Here Geronimo imagines what it would be like to “make whatever I wished,” a tantalizing power for one whose land and family were torn away from him a quarter of a century earlier. Geronimo recognizes the impossibility of such wishing, though, hinting that if such powers were readily available no one would want for anything. What it is that makes possessing “these little instruments” of power so very difficult is left unsaid—a striking silence in the text.

The conclusion of the chapter in His Own Story devoted to the World’s Fair is particularly stirring—and particularly coded. Geronimo, at the fair as a representative of one group of anthropological specimens, mentions an encounter with another group of anthropological specimens, “some little brown people” that United States troops had “captured recently on some islands far away from here.” These were Iggorrotes from the Philippines, about whom Geronimo had “heard that the President sent them to the Fair so they could learn some manners, and when they went home teach their people how to dress and how to behave.”34 On the surface Geronimo appears to distance himself from these “brown people,” disavowing any similarities between his situation and theirs. But this is to ignore Geronimo’s next remark, in which he implicitly places himself in the same subject position as the Filipinos:

I am glad I went to the Fair. I saw many interesting things and learned much of the white people. They are a very kind and peaceful people.35

Just as the Iggorrotes were to learn how to dress and behave by observing whites, so too did Geronimo learn from the whites. I would argue that this closing passage is laced with irony. What exactly did Geronimo learn of the white people? Not of their technology, their engineering, their art—all on display at the Exposition—nor how to dress and how to behave. Rather, he learned of the mechanisms of power, of deception, of a feigned aggression which is merely a mask for real violence. Geronimo concludes that “had this [Exposition] been among the Mexicans I am sure I should have been compelled to defend myself often.”36 Surely this is an allusion to Geronimo’s earlier days, when he did have to defend himself against Mexicans, but also, unspoken here, against whites, who deceived Geronimo and his Apache band time and time again with their false promises and broken treaties.37 A “very kind and peaceful people”? Hardly, if one adopts an oppositional reading, as Geronimo dryly does.

Bibliography

Barnum, P. T. Struggles and triumphs; or, Forty Years’ Recollections of P. T. Barnum. Buffalo: Courier Company, 1882.

Buel, James W. Louisiana and the Fair: An Exposition of the World, Its People and Their Achievements. Vol. 1. 10 vols. Saint Louis: World’s Progress Publishing Company, 1904.

Clum, Woodworth. Apache Agent: The Story of John P. Clum. 1936. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978.

Davis, Britton. The Truth About Geronimo. Ed. M. M. Quaife. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929.

Debo, Angie. Geronimo: The Man, His Time, His Place. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976.

Francis, David R. The Universal Exposition of 1904. St. Louis: Louisiana Purchase Exposition Company, 1913.

Geronimo, and S. M. Barrett. Geronimo: His Own Story. Ed. Frederick Turner. 1906. New York: Meridian-Penguin, 1996.

Greenhalgh, Paul. Ephemeral Vistas: A History of the Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851-1939. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988.

Hall, Stuart. “Encoding, Decoding.” The Cultural Studies Reader. Ed. Simon During. New York: Routledge, 1993. 90-103.

Harriman, Mary Alice. “The Congress of American Aborigines at the Omaha Exposition.” Overland Monthly 33 (1898): 505-512.

Leo, John Robert. “Riding Geronimo’s Cadillac: His Own Story and the Circumstancing of Text.” Journal of American Culture 1 (1978): 818-837.

Reddin, Paul. Wild West Shows. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.

Sonnichsen, C. L. “From Savage to Saint: A New Image for Geronimo.” Journal of Arizona History 27 (1986): 5-34.

Trennert, Robert A. “Fairs, Expositions, and the Changing Image of Southwestern Indians, 1876-1904.” New Mexico Historical Review 62 (1987): 127-150.

—. “A Resurrection of Native Arts and Crafts: The St. Louis World’s Fair, 1904.” Missouri Historical Review 87 (1993): 274-292.

Woodsum, Jo Ann. “‘Living Signs of Themselves’: A Research Note on the Politics and Practice of Exhibiting Native Americans in the United States at the Turn of the Century.” UCLA Historical Journal 13 (1993): 110-129.

  1. Woodworth Clum, Apache Agent: The Story of John P. Clum (1936; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), p. 291. ↩
  2. This ironic claim, considering the genocide that followed the United States’ takeover of the territory, was made by James W. Buel, Louisiana and the Fair: An Exposition of the World, Its People and Their Achievements, vol. 1, 10 vols. (Saint Louis: World’s Progress Publishing Company, 1904), p. 7. ↩
  3. Angie Debo, Geronimo: The Man, His Time, His Place (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976), pp. 410-412. ↩
  4. P. T. Barnum, Struggles and triumphs; or, Forty Years’ Recollections of P. T. Barnum (Buffalo: Courier Company, 1882), p. 214. ↩
  5. Ibid., pp. 215-216. ↩
  6. Paul Reddin, Wild West Shows (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), pp. 153, 161. ↩
  7. Ibid., p. 161. ↩
  8. Mary Alice Harriman, “The Congress of American Aborigines at the Omaha Exposition,” Overland Monthly 33 (1898), p. 506. ↩
  9. Ibid., p. 507. ↩
  10. Ibid., p. 510. ↩
  11. Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: A History of the Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851-1939 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), p. 82. ↩
  12. David R. Francis, The Universal Exposition of 1904 (St. Louis: Louisiana Purchase Exposition Company, 1913), p. 529. ↩
  13. Jo Ann Woodsum, “‘Living Signs of Themselves’: A Research Note on the Politics and Practice of Exhibiting Native Americans in the United States at the Turn of the Century,” UCLA Historical Journal 13 (1993), pp. 114-118. ↩
  14. Francis, p. 529. ↩
  15. Consider what one pioneer’s granddaughter recalls: “When my mother was growing up, people said to their children, ‘If you don’t behave, Geronimo will get you.’” Quoted in C. L. Sonnichsen, “From Savage to Saint: A New Image for Geronimo,” Journal of Arizona History 27 (1986), p. 8. ↩
  16. Debo, pp. 400-405. ↩
  17. Robert A. Trennert, “A Resurrection of Native Arts and Crafts: The St. Louis World’s Fair, 1904,” Missouri Historical Review 87 (1993), pp. 286-288. ↩
  18. Debo, p. 415. ↩
  19. Robert A. Trennert, “Fairs, Expositions, and the Changing Image of Southwestern Indians, 1876-1904,” New Mexico Historical Review 62 (1987), p. 146. ↩
  20. Geronimo and S. M. Barrett, Geronimo: His Own Story, ed. Frederick Turner (1906; New York: Meridian-Penguin, 1996), p. 156. ↩
  21. Ibid., p. 41. ↩
  22. The relationship between Geronimo’s orality and literacy would make for a very interesting case study. Geronimo was illiterate, yet there was one word which Geronimo could write: his signature, a line of clumsy block letters G-E-R-O-N-I-M-O, which he autographed his photographs with. ↩
  23. Geronimo and Barrett, p. 45. ↩
  24. Ibid., p. 1. ↩
  25. John Robert Leo, “Riding Geronimo’s Cadillac: His Own Story and the Circumstancing of Text,” Journal of American Culture 1 (1978), p. 820. ↩
  26. Ibid., p. 824. ↩
  27. Stuart Hall, “Encoding, Decoding,” The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 103. ↩
  28. Geronimo and Barrett, p. 155. ↩
  29. Trennert, “Native Arts and Crafts,” pp. 287-288; Debo, p. 410. ↩
  30. Britton Davis, The Truth About Geronimo, ed. M. M. Quaife (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929), pp. 202-203. ↩
  31. Geronimo and Barrett, p. 156. ↩
  32. Geronimo and Barrett, p. 156. ↩
  33. Ibid., p. 160. ↩
  34. Ibid. ↩
  35. Ibid., pp. 161-162. ↩
  36. Ibid., p. 162. ↩
  37. I have not the space to present a detailed history of the Apache Wars and the various treaties and negotiations which pushed Geronimo and his tribe into a reservation system, but suffice it to say, that Geronimo himself covers this history earlier in His Own Story, especially pages 119-131, which makes Geronimo’s conclusion all that much more ironic. ↩

Fall 2011 Course Description for ENGL 451: Science Fiction

April 10th, 2011 § 12 comments § permalink

Stelarc Third HandOften dismissed by its critics as low-brow pulp, science fiction is nonetheless a rich, dynamic literary genre which deserves our attention. In this class we will move beyond the stereotypes of science fiction in order to examine novels, stories, comics, films, and videogames that question the global commodification of culture, the fetishization of technology, and the dominant ideologies that structure race, gender, and class relations. Drawing upon works from North America, Europe, and Asia, we will ultimately challenge what counts as “human” in our increasingly inhuman world.

(Amplified Body Diagram courtesy of Stelarc, 1995)

Queen of the Bucking Unicorn

April 7th, 2011 § Comments Off § permalink



Queen of the Bucking Unicorn

Intergalactic Breakdance Deathmatch Boogaloo

April 7th, 2011 § Comments Off § permalink

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