Fair Matter

Wrapping Up the Semester With a Little Game Play

By Katherine D. Harris

After debating good and evil, ripping apart the pages of The Hours, tweeting as a character, unfolding the sad pages of Nox, and poking fingers through the holes in Tree of Codes, my students arrived at the moment that I had been promising all semester: play. Using Callois' “typology of play,” we crafted our heroes and began playing Diablo III, an MMORPG created by Blizzard Entertainment and released in May 2012. “By Friday, you should have killed the Skeleton King.” That was their final assignment – along with analyzing their game play in various blog posts. By the conclusion of the semester, students had created engaging projects around this game play. Some chose to compare a Diablo III hero's free will to our other anti-heroes, A Clockwork Orange or Frankenstein, while others took a more creative perspective with a scrapbook and a collaborative video:

Alyssa Hernandez, “Terror & Horror in Frankenstein & Diablo III” 

Krista Reutter, “Targeting an Audience: Diablo III” 

Nahida Nisa, “A Question of Continuity: Examining the Suggestions of Nox and The Hours”

Nathan Hall, “The Visual Possibilities of Modern Literature” 

Angela Martin and Savauna Reyna, “Can Textual Heroines Achieve a Modern Epic Win?”

These English majors ranged from discussing what is considered canonical literary figures (Byron, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Dickens) and up into the latest forms of entertainment and media. All in all, a successful semester of “screwing around.”

I Take It All Back: Chaucer's Retraction and the End of the Semester

By Erick Kelemen

Today my Chaucer students and I ended the semester by looking at Chaucer’s Retraction, the last bit of The Canterbury Tales, where he takes it all back—or, at least, takes back the sinful works, his “translacions and enditynges of worldly vanitees.” It’s an odd piece to end with, both for CT and for a class on Chaucer, as it’s quite destabilizing, rejecting everything our culture loves about Chaucer. My students certainly seemed to be puzzled by it. I’m not sure I helped. And maybe that’s a good thing. 

Screwing Around with Readers: Victor LaValle's The Devil in Silver

By Beth McCoy

Recommended by writer Kristen Gentry, Victor Lavalle's novel Big Machine has become more precious to me with each re-reading. It's difficult to teach a book that I adore. All I want to do is identify beautiful lines, lines like these:                 

Adele Henry, quick study.

Adele Henry, pedaling fast.                 

Elegant enough on their own, such lines become more so amid in the context of Big Machine's mysterious Washburn Library. Even the mundane word "electricity" (one of the novel's keys and the title of one of its sections) becomes delicious and special: savoring each syllable, I contemplate how the word would sound on a recording made in a "South Bronx parking garage."

Intense in dislikes and likes, I'm a picky reader, for sure. But I'm also a greedy one who wants more of Big Machine's characters, its meditations on faith, its humor, its depth.

Sacrilege to The Book

By Katherine D. Harris

This semester, I have asked my English majors to read from Frankenstein to Diablo III in an earnest attempt to assess the evolution of print culture and narrative over the last 200-plus years. They began their foray into print culture with a research project that involved screwing around with original nineteenth-century serials, magazines, literary annuals, newspapers, and poetry volumes. As we near the conclusion of the semester – and as an act of desperation to gain their attention – I ripped apart a book and threw it on the floor. Actually, I asked them to rip apart their copies of The Hours, Michael Cunningham's postmodern pastiche of Mrs. Dalloway. The two-dollar paperback suddenly became invaluable to the students. They gasped in disbelief. One student even tweeted “I'm not okay with this.”

 

Housman's Festival Day

By Erick Kelemen

“Today we celebrate the joyful task of dealing firmly with all . . . who would make the world simpler than it actually is.”

Today we ought to remember poet and textual critic A. E. Housman. I’m not sure why the second tuesday of November is Housman’s festival day. In all likelihood, the date is a random assignment. Honoring Housman today is a bit of fun imagined by historian E. Bruce Brooks, who has assembled a calendar of festivals for Philologists, with Housman as one of several philologist saints. It’s the kind of fun of which I approve. 

In the essay for which he is famous as a textual critic, “The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism,” Housman asserts that it is a subject that “Most people, and many scholars among them, find... rather dry and rather dull,” something that “cannot be taught at all: criticus nascitur, non fit.” A critic is born, not made. I used to like to point out to students that Housman spends the rest of the essay doing exactly what he says cannot be done: teach us to be textual critics.  

If most people found it dull, perhaps it wasn’t sold properly. If presented as a task preliminary to the study of literature, textual criticism becomes something somebody else does so that more interesting people may do their interpretive work. But any textual critic will tell you—it’s Housman’s very point—that interpretation and textual criticism are impossible to untangle. To determine what the text is (or ought to be) requires that we interpret; to interpret, we must simultaneously determine what the text is (or ought to be).  

"One Art": Order and Disorder in the Shelves

By Beth McCoy

In "People of the Book Shelf," writer Geraldine Brooks explains the "dewy-eyed," "idiosyncratic" system she uses to organize her books on shelves. "I start out conventionally enough," Brooks writes, "alpha by author."

But while I take account of the first letter of the writer’s surname, I have other ambitions for my shelves that transcend the conveniences of mere alphabetical accuracy. It’s impossible for me to place one book alongside another without thinking about the authors, and how they would feel about their spine-side companion.

More specifically, Brooks arranges her books as she would "seat guests at a dinner party." I had several reactions to the essay, only one of which I'll explore here: my immediate sense of how alien Brooks's shelving method at first seemed to mine.

Indeed, appearing to be no method at all, my way of shelving books is similar to that employed by Brooks's "book-loving" spouse, a man who prefers to pile volumes in "tottering redoubts" hampering his ability to move freely about their living space.

TechnoZombies Decipher Humanity?

By Katherine D. Harris

After our interesting infographic session on A Clockwork Orange, students in TechnoLiterature began to grapple with issues of biotechnology in Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve. On our first day of discussion, six students provided the class with information about Carter, the dissemination of this novel, its characters, and the biotechnology that demands suspension of disbelief, as with most of Carter's novels. Though no digital reader version of the novel exists, students accessed the Amazon and Barnes & Noble reviews to investigate the public reception of this novel, and they noted that quite a few of the write-ups suggested baffled and baffling responses. The novel is just weird: Mother, the somewhat fascist matriarch, castrates a misogynistic womanizer only to re-create him (Evelyn) as a woman (Eve), complete with functioning reproductive system. This new woman still retains masculine qualities demonstrated by falling in love with the epitome of woman, Tristessa, who turns out to be a transvestite. This means that Eve desires the performance of femininity – essentially, a man who performs womanhood and femininity to highlight over-determined beauty. Only then does Eve realize that she holds power in this new body and new existence as woman. She holds the power of love.

The part that these TechnoLiterature students have a problem with is the insemination of Eve with her own sperm. Realistically, could Eve ever understand “woman?” Did she need to be subjugated as a woman to completely comprehend the realities of the powerless woman's body in a patriarchal construct? Students argued vehemently about performance of gender, but ultimately agreed that the young men in the room could not really understand or read Evelyn as a woman.

All of this discussion sparked conversations about the essence of humanity. Is it Descartes cognitive function, “I think, therefore I am?” Or, is it hope and despair, construction of a belief system, the creative function? I asked students to write a blog post about The Passion of New Eve that focused on issues of gender – a post like most of the other posts that they have been writing all semester. As first and second year students, for the most part, they struggle to articulate their ideas in complex, sophisticated writing. But, I think this is my fault. When we moved into discussions about Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the novel that is the basis for Blade Runner, students jumped into action to have an incredibly heated discussion about humanity and artificial intelligence. Much of the debate centered around feelings/emotions vs. the performance of feelings/emotions. This, of course, brought us to the popularization of serial killers, zombies, vampires, and other-worldly beasts. We returned to the question “What makes us human?”

Scholarship and Mortality

By Erick Kelemen

One of the most important lessons of graduate school was that I’ll never be able to read everything I think I ought to read. I’ll never be able to look everything up, never be able to follow out all the footnotes I think I ought to follow. Part of me still doesn’t want to believe it. To admit it is not just to admit to my insufficiency as a scholar, after all; it is to admit to my mortality.

But where did the thought that I could read it all even come from? It’s one of the enduring fantasies of academia: the definitive, the complete, the exhaustive scholarship. I had certainly bought into the fantasy by the time I first encountered the name Étienne Gilson, whose mention in a context unfamiliar to me sent my inner library geek into a tizzy: Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. Eco’s fictional translator narrates his efforts to locate a book by following out a note about it, and claims that he “consulted illustrious medievalists such as the dear and unforgettable Étienne Gilson” to no avail. Eco’s murder-mystery derives much conflict from this very idea: that the investigator is always insufficient because he is human and mortal; that knowledge is always partial at best. In doing so, though, Eco positions the reader on the side of the questing detective, William, who delights in what our advisors taught us to call shelf-reading, not what librarians do (for which there is now an augmented reality app!), but looking not only at the book that we came for, but also at the books shelved near it, on the theory that exploring neighbors on a carefully ordered shelf of books will lead us to things we didn’t know we were looking for. 

Notes and Daggers: On Descartes, Translation, and Conflict

By Beth McCoy

I have a favorite footnote. It's found in the 1980 Hackett edition of René Descartes' Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and for Seeking Truth in the Sciences.

By the time the note rolls around, Descartes has expressed his dissatisfaction with components of his education, including fables and poetry. (Apparently, his dissatisfaction does not extend to the extended metaphors characteristic of literature; the philosopher applies those liberally). He has traveled and thus discovered that people in other places do things in ways different than those he was taught, and, contrary to his upbringing, these differently doing folks do just fine.

Such a realization does not turn the certainty-seeking Descartes into a relativist. It does, however, send him during a German winter into a warm room where he begins slowly to peel away the layers of knowledge that have accrued to him. Eventually, this peeling yields the famous cogito: I think, therefore I am.

Donald Cress's Hackett translation sets the scene for Descartes' de-layering in this way: "the onset of winter held me up in quarters where, finding no conversation with which to be diverted and, fortunately, having no other no worries or passions which troubled me, I remained for a whole day by myself in a small stove-heated room,³ where I had complete leisure for communing with my thoughts."

Old Fashioned Visualizations of A Clockwork Orange

By Katherine D. Harris

Being a Digital Humanist has indelibly altered my thought process. I work in book history and print culture – with all of those textual apparatuses and paratextual elements that allow readerly consumption in a comforting and familiar linear form. But, I no longer think about reading from left to right, or even crafting arguments in a linear progression. Neither do my students. They often visualize their readings as maps of information, or “infographics.” In the spirit of Dr. Paul Fyfe's article, “Digital Pedagogy Unplugged,”  I asked non-English majors (mostly freshmen and sophomores) to map the three phases of Alex in Anthony Burgess' dystopic novel, A Clockwork Orange. Instead of using a highlighter to visualize variant ideas on the printed page, we spent the class session mapping and visualizing the three representations of Alex, as Alex 1.0, Alex 2.0, and Alex 3.0, based on the three volumes that comprise this twentieth-century bildungsroman.