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.”

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.”

 

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?”

Playing Literature: Gaming in the Classroom

By Katherine D. Harris

I walked into my course, English 10, to 35 fresh faces, most of whom were new to college and San Jose State University. Many of them attended their first classes this morning and looked woefully unimpressed with their entry into adult education. Most of them had their backpacks on the tables and were busy texting, Facebook-ing, or tweeting. (I know because I asked!) The course, Great Works of Literature in its most generic sense, fulfills a lower division general education requirement in “letters.” Students chose the class because it fit with their schedules, and most bemoaned having to take any literature course at all. Little did they know that they were about to embark on a course that considers their generation's greatest tool: technology.

Digital Dickens

By Katherine D. Harris

The digital revolution has altered the dissemination and understanding of literary texts in such a way that the profession has been forced to reconsider the Internet's wilderness – harness it to change learning in the college classroom. Some instructors resent the interruption of the digital and claim that it entices students to screw around rather than attend to serious learning. In effect, the Internet and digital devices encourage everyone towards a short attention span. What do we do about that deeper reading practice that's necessary to sustain attention and increase knowledge? Well, I quibble with this idea. Books have been forcing readers outside of linear reading practices for quite some time.

Daunted by Dante

By Beth McCoy

This fall SUNY Geneseo colleague Ron Herzman and I will teach "Dante and African American Literature," inspired by Dennis Looney's Freedom Readers: The African American Reception of Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy (2011). The class will offer the opportunity to explore my favorite intellectual question: What happens? For instance, what happens when such texts as Victor Lavalle's incredible novel Big Machine (2009) are read via Dante's The Divine Comedy? What happens when the The Divine Comedy is read through Big Machine?

As the course is an utterly new endeavor, it's likely I'll be blogging about it quite a bit over the next several months.  Already, however, I am daunted: I have to return to Dante for the first time since a wonderful medieval literature survey course in my last year of college.

Tweet to the Text: Teaching with Zeitoun

By Beth McCoy

Back in 2009, I ridiculed Twitter and its "fail whale." But Andy Selsberg's "Teaching to the Text Message" op-ed encouraged me to think more seriously about the medium.  Novelist Teju Cole's famous tweet-gems made me think even further about Twitter's potential. Now I am Twitter user (@bamccoy14454) who uses Twitter to teach literature. I got there via my Hurricane Stories course and Dave Eggers' Zeitoun.

Zeitoun is the story of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, the New Orleans painting contractor who rode out Hurricane Katrina, protected his (and his customers') property, and committed acts of heroism and humanity.  For his troubles,  the U.S. military interpreted the Syrian and Muslim Zeitoun as a threat and disappeared him to a military prison. The book recounts both Zeitoun's detention and his family's frantic efforts to find him.

The text  does many things in the course. It reminds us (as Erick does in a previous post) that recovering that which is lost may entail looking at that which is in plain sight, and it illuminates the illogic of U.S. racial categories, including the "racialization of Islam."  The book lends itself to Twitter particularly well. Placing students in small groups, I ask them to craft two tweets: one telling Zeitoun's story from his own perspective and another telling the same story story from the U.S. government's perspective.

Screwing Around with Poetry

By Katherine D. Harris

In my last post, I had some fun with music, lyrics, and poetry – something I hope that I bring to my students. But I suspect in my hurry to teach variations of poetic form to undergraduates, reading poetry is more like surgery for them than it is “screwing around.” In Digital Humanities, we've been discussing this idea of undergraduate education and bringing the fun to them in the same way that we, as scholars and researchers, experience our material. Stephen Ramsay, a grand poobah in Digital Humanities, encourages scholars to “screw around” with a million books (“The Hermeneutics of Screwing Around”) to explore and discover randomly. After all, you never know what you might find in the research before you get your hands on it. But, Ramsay encourages a set of scholars who are practiced already in their craft, who know the force of enjambment and can identify a Shakespearean sonnet without counting meter. How do we convey a sense of Ramsay's “screwing around” to undergraduates while still teaching them these basics?

I've been teaching poetry in lock-step for years: learn poetic forms, then meter, then rhyme schemes, then poetic devices. Teaching these elements provides students with a formula to engage with and “figure out” a poem. But that's not quite what Ramsay advocates, or Jentery Sayers with tinkering, or the playfulness of, say, a video game. Students learn poetic elements to decipher what they think is the true, single meaning of a poem – as if there's one answer, one interpretation to reveal the deeper meaning for that inevitable explication essay due somewhere during the semester. But, I wonder if we have to teach these things in order? Can we ask them to “screw around” first?