Fair Matter

"The Moon's an Arrant Thief:" Notes, Games, and Nabokov

By Erick Kelemen

If you like games and notes and close reading, then Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, Pale Fire, is the book for you. Pretending to be an edition of a poem called “Pale Fire,” the Foreword, the Notes, and the Index do not provide so much a frame, commentary or background for that poem as constitute an unrelated narrative, one with the most unreliable of narrators, to the point that it is impossible to tell what can be accepted as true within the fictional world of the novel. 

Is the murderer a convict escaped from a mental asylum? Or is he an incompetent assassin on a mission to kill a deposed king in hiding? The novel inhabits this world of craziness so thoroughly and so artfully that it invites a kind of crazed scholarship, tinged with conspiracy-theory paranoia. I won't even go into the theory that the dead poet's long-dead-daughter's ghost inspired the narrator. For that you can go to Wikipedia.

Which is all the funnier because Pale Fire is a brilliant parody of scholars and of the editions and commentaries they produce, as is most obvious in the note about the source of the title, when the speaker of the poem invokes a muse and gets an immediate answer, “Help me, Will! Pale Fire” (962). Will, of course, is William Shakespeare, and the phrase comes from William Shakespeare’s awkward play, Timon of Athens, which would have been easy to discover long before the play became something of a hit on the London stage this year, long before the invention of the internet, since scholars had begun printing concordances to Shakespeare’s works in the 1790s. I’d be willing to bet that almost every public library in mid-century America had one.

Giving Students the Keys: Digital Projects

by Katherine D. Harris

For Spring 2013, my Department has officially given the stamp of approval to Digital Humanities in our curriculum. They offered (and I accepted) the chance to teach a Digital Humanities course in our undergraduate program: Digital Dickens. During this Fall, I've had the opportunity to enhance most of my courses with a more material and print culture perspective – being very promiscuous in the literary historical boundaries, especially for the nineteenth-century. After all, where else will students gain an understanding about the constructions of masculinity in The Boy's Own Annual? Or understand the satirical fun had by Louisa Sheridan, editor of The Comic Offering, about the constructions of nineteenth-century femininity and etiquette? These same students will consider these issues of materiality in the digital world when we play Diablo III.

In a further nod to the prevalence of Digital Humanities, and the skillset it offers our English undergraduates, my Department has decided to allow our graduate students access to this same skillset – in another problem-based learning environment: Project Beard-stair.

Sitting at the Crossroads of Interpretation

By Beth McCoy

I've been thinking about FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Specifically, I've  been thinking about those X-shaped markings that appeared after Hurricane Katrina on buildings all over New Orleans, Biloxi, and other Gulf Coast areas. They are FEMA's search and rescue signs, and their method of construction is prescribed in the National Urban Search & Rescue (US&R) Response System Rescue Field Operations Guide.

It may seem odd to write in a literature blog about banal, often-derided symbols of government methodology. After all, literature is polysemous, possessed of multiple meanings and inviting multiple interpretations while FEMA signs seem to mean only what the field ops guide says they mean.

A quick read of the guide's instructions suggests that concepts informing literary interpretation (e.g., author, representation, performance) are as relevant for FEMA signs as for a poem. That the signs seem to yield less easily to interpretation than, say, a Keats poem means only that readers have to work a bit harder: not just at reading the writing on the walls, but also at interrogating why a Keats poem yields to interpretation so quickly in the first place (hint: it doesn't, really).

Poetry Hooks

By Adrian Matejka

I first started reading poetry when I was an undergraduate at Indiana University and the only reason it clicked with me was its proximity to rap music in the artistic spectrum. Poetry’s short verses and rhyme schemes reminded me of Nas and Rakim. Nas had it right when he said, “Poetry, that’s a part of me,” but there is something timeless about poetry while rap is often grounded by contemporary moments and allusions. Poetry’s endurance is part of what make it indelible: the art preceded written language and will still be around when we’re communicating via thought holograms like Star Trek characters.

Poetry has persevered because of its capaciousness of form. It has adapted, enlarged, adjusted, or diminished itself according to the politics, technology, and general zeitgeist of the moment. Poetry might disappear in villanelle form but then will reappear as tag lines for commercials, hooks in rap songs, and monologues in movies. Poetry has found more ways to survive than rappers have found ways to use “like” to set up similes, but it is the possibility for communication that makes poetry so vital. As Yusef Komunyakaa said in his essay, “The Autobiographical ‘I,’” “The poet wishes to share.”