From Text to Txting

Description

From mindless consumption to critical interpretation

Connect with author Paul Budra: website Twitter Connect with author Clint Burnham: Twitter

Literary scholars face a new and often baffling reality in the classroom: students spend more time looking at glowing screens than reading printed text. The social lives of these students take place in cyberspace instead of the student pub. Their favorite narratives exist in video games, not books. How do teachers who grew up in a different world engage these students without watering down pedagogy? Clint Burnham and Paul Budra have assembled a group of specialists in visual poetry, graphic novels, digital humanities, role-playing games, television studies, and, yes, even the middle-brow novel, to address this question. Contributors give a brief description of their subject, investigate how it confronts traditional notions of the literary, and ask what contemporary literary theory can illuminate about their text before explaining how their subject can be taught in the 21st-century classroom.

Introduction Paul Budra and Clint Burnham
1. Roll a D20 and the Author Dies Paul Budra
2. Consider the Source: Critical Considerations of the Medium of Social Media Kirsten C. Uszkalo and Darren James Harkness
3. Voice of the Gutter: Comics in the Academy Tanis MacDonald
4. Television: The Extra Literary Device Daniel Keyes
5. Hypertext in the Attic: The Past, Present and Future of Digital Writing Andreas Kitzmann
6. The ABCs of Viewing: Material Poetics and the Literary Screen Philip A. Klobucar
7. "Let the Rhythm Hit 'Em": Hip-Hop, Prosody, and Meaning Alessandro Porco
8. Thinking Inside the Box: A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of Television Studies C.W. Marshall and Tiffany Potter
9. Middle Brow Lit and the End of Postmodernism, Clint Burnham
Contributors

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Popular Culture
• Literature
• Pedagogy
• Criticism
• General officer
• Cultural studies
• Technology
• Cinema
• General
• Technologie
• Culture
• Media

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 25 juillet 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253007209
• Langue: English

Extrait

FROM TEXT TO TXTING
FROM TEXT TO
TXTING
New Media in the Classroom
Edited by Paul Budra Clint Burnham
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA
www.iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931
2012 by Indiana University Press All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences - Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
From text to txting : new media in the classroom / edited by Paul Budra and Clint Burnham.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-253-00310-2 (cl : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-00578-6 (pb : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-00720-9 (eb) 1. Educational technology - Social aspects. 2. Education - Effect of technological innovations on. 3. Popular culture - Effect of technological innovations on. 4. Digital media. 5. Social media. I. Budra, Paul Vincent, 1957- II. Burnham, Clint, 1962-
LB1028.3.F77 2012
371.33 - dc23 2012004593
1 2 3 4 5 17 16 15 14 13 12
For my mother, Gay Budra P. B.
For my father, Lee Burnham C. B.
Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction / Paul Budra and Clint Burnham

1 Roll a D20 and the Author Dies / Paul Budra
2 Consider the Source: Critical Considerations of the Medium of Social Media / Kirsten C. Uszkalo and Darren James Harkness
3 Voice of the Gutter: Comics in the Academy / Tanis MacDonald
4 Television: The Extraliterary Device / Daniel Keyes
5 Hypertext in the Attic: The Past, Present, and Future of Digital Writing / Andreas Kitzmann
6 The ABCs of Viewing: Material Poetics and the Literary Screen / Philip A. Klobucar
7 Let the Rhythm Hit Em : Hip-Hop, Prosody, and Meaning / Alessandro Porco
8 Thinking Inside the Box: A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of Television Studies / C. W. Marshall and Tiffany Potter
9 Middlebrow Lit and the End of Postmodernism / Clint Burnham

Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Simon Fraser University and the Office of Research Services for providing financial support for this project in the form of a University Publications Fund Grant and a President s Research Start-Up Grant. The intellectual generosity of our colleagues in SFU s English Department was an inspiration, while the commitment of the dean of arts and social sciences to excellence in university teaching was a potent reminder that any theoretical practice faces its most important test in the classroom. Thanks to all of them. Finally, we would like to thank our contributors for their insight, creativity, and patience.
Introduction
PAUL BUDRA AND CLINT BURNHAM
This book is a response to two changes in humanities education since the 1980s: on the one hand, there has been an explosion of popular, paraliterary, and digital cultural forms, which have an increasing grip on our students; on the other hand (but not entirely unrelated), there is a need for humanities departments to change their tools for remediation in the face of demographic and textual sea changes 1 In an age when the word text is increasingly used as a metaphor (the text of the ----), when read can mean any interpretive act (a reading of a photograph), when screens have replaced books, emoticons have reintroduced the pictograph, and students are infinitely more familiar with the storylines of video games than the plots of Shakespeare s plays, humanities departments risk becoming (even further) marginalized in the academy unless they retool. Academic literary critics who do not engage with the profound shifts in the delivery of narrative, verse, and argument stand on the cusp of becoming curators of an outdated print culture, antiquarians of the book. The contributors to this book believe that literary critics should be doing just the opposite: with our knowledge of literary history and form, our skills of close reading and cultural contextualization, literary critics should be interpreting, assessing, and explaining the effects that the remediation of print is having now to a populace that, for the most part, simply accepts these innovations as technological fashion. The chapters in this book, then, seek to address the question of the value of the skills that literary studies promote in an age when more people read tweets than essays and text messages than newspapers. In this introduction we would like to accomplish two tasks, the first of which is to argue that literary studies has to recognize the historic mutability of its object(s). These texts have swung in and out of historical fashion (and fascination) and they have come to be seen, increasingly, as signifying practices. Second, we argue that such studies today should take their cue from the abundance of critical methods to be found both in literary history and in parallel or emergent disciplines. We can, and should, engage with the literary-critical practices to be found in theory, in popular discourse, and in dialogue with the historical situation of our classrooms and students. This is not to say that there are not difficulties, and we address these challenges too.
The reluctance of some literary critics to make this engagement is partly driven by a misunderstanding of what constitutes the subject of their study. Both Roland Barthes and Raymond Williams have argued for the comparative recentness of literature as a category of imaginative writing. 2 The etymology of the term seems to support their claim: the English word literature did not appear until late in the fourteenth century and then it meant an acquaintance with letters or books ( OED ), in short, knowledge of written culture, a sort of secondary literacy. The word does not take on the meaning [l]iterary work or production; the activity or profession of a man of letters; the realm of letters until the late eighteenth century. As for the most common definition now, [l]iterary productions as a whole; the body of writings produced in a particular country or period, or in the world in general, that did not appear until a decade or so into the nineteenth century. This understanding of the literary and the academic field of study it generated seems to have given literature scholars a blinkered notion of the scope of their subject: literary studies started sometime in the late eighteenth century in response to the proliferation of texts and the bourgeois phenomenon of recreational reading and so it is defined by text and print. Period.
But Barthes and, especially, Williams were making polemical points with their radical historicization of the term. And while they are certainly right about the proliferation of the text due to print technology, they are demonstrably wrong in the assertion of the newness of the literary as a conceptual category because they ignore the classical roots of the term: Littera means letter, and litteratura in Latin was a translation of the Greek word grammatik , the knowledge of reading and writing, as Quintilian tells us in his Institutiones (Wellek 16). Classical writers made fine distinctions within this broad meaning: In Cicero . . . we find the terms Graecase literae, historia litteris nobis, and stadium litterarum. The term litteratura is used by him in the sense of erudition, literary culture, when he speaks of Caesar having litteratura in a list of qualities (Wellek 17). And by the second century CE the term was being used to designate a specific body of writing - holy writ - to distinguish it from other and pagan writing. 3
We do not need the evidence of patristic distinctions, however, to recognize the tenuousness of Barthes s and Williams s claim, for the recency of literature . . . does not prove the absence of a unitary term for the central genres earlier (Fowler 9). Too, value rankings are not historically stable: yesterday s literary trash has a way of slipping into today s canon. Ben Jonson was ridiculed in 1616 for presuming to publish his plays in a folio as though they were real literature (that is, poetry) rather than popular entertainment. Novels were considered misleading fictions in the seventeenth century and were dismissed as an effeminate entertainment. Comic books were considered not only childish trash, but so morally dangerous that they were the subject of a U.S. Senate subcommittee in 1954 at which psychiatrist and anticomics crusader Fredric Wertham declared, Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry. 4 But early modern English drama is now recognized as one of the great literary accomplishments of world history; the novel is perhaps the most ubiquitous literary experience in the world; and in 1992 a comic book won a special Pulitzer Prize. What happened?
One of three scenarios. The first, and most common, is that a marginalized category of writing produced something so good that critics and the public made it an exception. Art Spiegelman s Maus was a comic book, but a deeply complex comic book about the most serious subject in modern history: the Holocaust. It won a literary award. It became, de facto, literature. Similarly, science fiction, long relegated to pulp magazines and teenage boys closets, was used by serious writers such as George Orwell and Aldous Huxley to produce novels that could not be dismissed on the basis of their category. The second is that a critic or school of critics mounted a defense of a marginalized