Fair Matter

Why Zombies?

By Beth McCoy

I just finished re-reading Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011). I read it the first time last summer while on a family trip. Actually “read” is the wrong verb. I devoured it. Getting through the book became a compulsion. I plowed through it with dread and excitement, its images trailing behind me in a haunting wake. I wasn’t good company.

The second time through was no different. In reading the novel again, I can attend more carefully to its magnificent structure, the way the novel’s tributary language of liquid--of blood, water, and capitalism--crests as the protagonist bearing the nickname “Mark Spitz” walks through this second Door of No Return. It is no accident that the novel’s three days unfold in the zone below Canal Street, the heart of the African slave trade in New York City.

Zone One is my first zombie text. It’s likely my last. The novel is stupendous, but I’m not a fan of the genre. Understanding the zombie as vodoun's "answer to being dead in law,” to borrow Joan Dayan’s words, I fail to understood the pop culture attraction. I have yet to attempt The Walking Dead, stayed away from Shaun of the Dead, watched not one George Romero movie.

Young Adult Lit: Trendy or Timeless?

By Cheryl Wilson

In a 2009 article for Publishers Weekly, “What They Don’t Know Won’t Hurt Them: Persuading
Adults to Read YA Literature,” librarian Carlisle Webber writes, “It’s time to get adults fully on the YA bandwagon and help them overcome their embarrassment.”  Webber contends that adult readers are either turned off by the idea of Young Adult Literature or embarrassed by their attraction to the genre. 

This situation is not unique to YA Lit.  Romance novels, chick lit, and gothic fantasy, among many others, are all genres that have remained “guilty pleasures”—stashed under beds or, more recently, disguised by the anonymous blank cover of an e-reader.  As publishers’ numbers and the success of books such as Fifty Shades of Grey demonstrate, however, the shadowy multitudes who read these genres outnumber the readers of much more “mainstream” fiction.

Does YA Lit deserve to be in this category of guilty pleasures, why is it there, and is the recent production of crossover books just a passing fad?  In the 1980s, young adult series such as The Babysitters Club or Homecoming were targeted to teen readers and had little crossover appeal for adults.  Enter Harry Potter.  The success of J. K. Rowling’s seven-book series (1997-2007) not only spawned a franchise but also encouraged adult readers to turn to the young adult section of their local bookstore or public library to see what they may have been missing. 

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?”

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.

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.”

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.

Scrapbooks, Material Texts, and Tree of Codes

By Katherine D. Harris

As I ready myself for Fall 2012 and 120 students, I'm mulling over my choices for the British Literature survey course 1800 to present. After moving through Frankenstein, Great Expectations in facsimile serial form, some Boy's Own Annual magazines (originals), we will amble through Mrs. Dalloway, some Pinter, a bit of Eliot – then the survey becomes murky because geopolitical boundaries in the late 20^th Century no longer dictate national identity. By the conclusion of the semester, I want students to have a sense of the shifts in print culture and the insouciance of nationalism. Anne Carson's moving tribute, Nox, will explode our ideas about the codex form since the book itself is an accordian of connected pages instead of the typical bound codex. The contents read like a scrapbook, and somewhat like Dickens' Household Words magazine from the 19^th Century. Dickens serialized novels heralded a feminized space that interrogated an industrialized nation no longer interested in its poorest inhabitants. Carson's Nox takes on this feminized space of the scrapbook, for that is the very definition of domestic space from 19th-century England.

A scrapbook, much like an album, is intended as an informal receptacle of unassociated and impromptu clumps of words and images. Each scrapbook, pocket-book or album represents an importance that is conflated with public and private, and a scrapbook may entertain different moments or memories or may be a snapshot of a life. In his article for the inaugural volume of the Keepsake (1828), Leigh Hunt interchanges almanac and pocket-book but defines their use synonymously with scrapbook:

Jane Eyre Texts

By Katherine D. Harris

While meandering around social networking sites and screwing around more than I ought to be, I ran across Mallory Ortberg's surprisingly hilarious parody, “Texts from Jane Eyre,” in which the major arcs of Charlotte Bronte's gothic-infused 19th-century novel becomes typographically mediated by the brevity of text messaging. Two of the most painful scenes in this bildungsroman are rendered as dripping sarcasm, in a way that Bronte would have never written, and are more reminiscent of sassy American teenage angst. Nonetheless, the pithiness captures Jane's reluctance to commit herself to the insincerity of either suitor, Rochester or St. John.

Since my British Literature Survey 1800-Present course typically begins with novels such as Jane Eyre and then moves to their 20th-century revisions and mash-ups, “Texts from Jane Eyre” albeit brief, may serve as a good example of 21st-century parody that reinterprets “classics” in contemporary media. After all, in the 19th-century, authors often found their works revised into more salacious, scandalous reading: see Matthew Lewis' 500-page 1796 Gothic novel, The Monk, condensed to an 80-page novella in 1798, The New Monk. Why not open the reading audience even further in the 21st-century by employing the somewhat entertaining format that requires a shorthand to experience and emotion? These voices from long dead writers and classic works already exist: Tweets of Grass, or a character from a novel, Carwin the Biloquist, or a mash-up account.