Fair Matter

Reading Experiences in a Modern World

By Katherine D. Harris

In reading practices, we locate ourselves based on page numbers, running header titles, even an index and table of contents. The codex form makes it convenient to read left to right, in English, down the page and across several pages turned sequentially. (For some amusement, see the Monty Python-esque video, “Medieval Help Desk.”). We moved from the scroll to a more stable form for storing print text and images – the spine, binding, paper weight, ink, type, and organization are all tools for training readers to become consumers of the book. All of these elements of the page, called paratextual elements, were also created to control the reading experience, to offer reference points – as if reading forms a visual map to guide intellectual meanderings. This, a form of "screwing around," allows the mind to create associations among knowledge points – and we do this en masse. In Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson argues that very large communities are formed simply by the act of reading similar materials: “[The community] is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. . . . it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship” (6-7).

But, if the knowledge is being mapped, especially with the codex form, how can we throw off the mantle of a center point and appreciate the multiplicity of perspectives and nationalism? After all, isn't this what gets the world into trouble? Trying to prove that one society has a broader and more advanced culture than another?

Experience/Experiment; or, Reading the Variorum

By Erick Kelemen

Parts 5A and B of the Chaucer Variorum, Volume II (The Canterbury Tales), The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale, have now appeared, and I want you to find them as endlessly fascinating as I do. This means becoming acquainted with your inner footnote geek.

The Wife of Bath is a footnote-y speaker: most of us cannot read, much less enjoy, the Wife of Bath without them. Yes, her first word is “Experience,” knowledge requiring no citation, but she soon launches into dozens of lines which might as well be quotations from the Glossa Ordinaria.

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?

Sword and Dragon: Teaching Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Beautiful Struggle

By Beth McCoy

In this post, I return both to The Beautiful Struggle, Ta-Nehisi Coates' memoir of 1980s Baltimore, and to the paratext, Gerard Genette’s term for the typography, notes, prefaces etc. that make texts into books. After the dedication to Ta-Nehisi's mother, Cheryl Waters, but before The Beautiful Struggle's first formal words, readers encounter paratextual elements rooting the memoir in the fantasy worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien and role-playing games (RPG).

    First, there is a map of "Old Baltimore." Blazoned with sword and dragon, the map claims Coates' childhood as the stuff of epic: battles lost and won, civilizations birthed and declined, havens offered and sought. The map's legend, for instance, denotes the intersection of "Garrison and Liberty" as the site "[w]here the orcs cold-played me for my scullie" and marks "Mondawmin Mall" as "The Fertile Crescent of my fallen town." And to the West--ever the place to which the mortals of Middle Earth are drawn but cannot go--lies the "Mecca": Howard University, the "way out" and great escape" where Coates would attend but not finish.

    Next comes a genealogy, a family tree of "the Coates clan." The Lord of the Rings relegates its genealogies of elves, men, hobbits, and dwarves to appendices at trilogy's end, a backloading consistent with the books' accumulating revelations of secrets: lineages, identities, histories. Frontloaded as preface to The Beautiful Struggle,  the Coates genealogy heralds a dynasty built openly upon frank (if sometimes badly timed) contracts between adults. These contracts produced eight children webbed among four houses. Such a mapping, Coates writes, looks "all a mess on paper, but it was all love to me, and formed my earliest and still enduring definition of family."

    As the memoir proceeds, Coates makes clear the link between The Beautiful Struggle's epic map and its dynastic genealogy: when pursued by neighborhood "orcs" as all kids are at one time or another, it's helpful to have four Rivendells along the way of your quest rather than merely one. For these homely houses provided the challenging, nurturing space within which young Ta-Nehisi wrought the magic spells--numbers, words, and rhymes--that allowed him not just to survive, but also to thrive.

    The last time I taught The Beautiful Struggle, I acknowledged the fantasy genre fevers engulfing my students (in one class, for instance, I counted four Game of Thrones computer desktop images) and made the memoir's paratextual engagement with fantasy genre the way into the book. 

Poetic Dissonance

By Katherine D. Harris

After Erick's post about Cusack, Poe, conversations in poetry and my recent discovery of Bob Dylan (I know!), I'm inspired to take a closer look at poetry in the literature classroom. After all, April is National Poetry Month with all kinds of celebrations happening to commemorate the beauty of poets and their voices.

At the L.A. Times Festival of Books' Poetry Stage, the United States Post Office acknowledged the literary legacy of some of the greatest American poets, as only the US Post Office could, with stamps: “The 20-stamp pane marks the largest group of authors honored together in the history of the Postal Service. So who made the cut? Ten American poets: Elizabeth Bishop, Joseph Brodsky, Gwendolyn Brooks, ee cummings, Robert Hayden, Denise Levertov, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams” (Brown “Festival”).

With poetry, and literature in general, readers often laud the writer instead of the work itself – perhaps assigning a celebrity to authorship that was installed when the patronage system was effectively abolished in 1709 with the Statute of Queen Anne and the subsequent 1814 and 1842 Copyright Acts in England. By linking copyright to an author's lifespan, we turned poets into intellectual property holders. After authors and poets learned to control their works, they had to also learn how to market them. We return to the USPS' new commemorative plate of stamps: “Each stamp bears the face of a poet. And here's the best part (also another first): The back of the pane features lines of poetry from each of the honored writers” (Brown). At the LA Times Festival, USC Provost Elizabeth Garrett noted that “[p]oetry isn’t just something you read in books”; it is a medium best read aloud or heard.

 

The Purloined Raven

By Erick Kelemen

After this young gentleman, an exception no one could possibly fault me for, John Cusack is my favorite actor. So I’m pretty excited about his upcoming movie, The Raven. Part of me worries about the concept that drives the film: Edgar Allan Poe (played by Cusack) joins forces with a young Baltimore detective to stop a serial killer who uses Poe’s macabre tales as his guide. The fan in me doesn’t care. Knowing what I know about Poe, I think old Edgar would be thrilled...so long as he shared in the profits. Cusack’s movie also provides an interesting connection to Katherine’s post about literary annuals, which I read with interest, since I sometimes use them when I teach Poe.

I can’t claim to be an expert on Poe. I took a graduate seminar on Poe twenty years ago but haven’t kept up on the scholarship. The fact that I must speak as a fan and not as an expert is a good reason why I include some of Poe’s works in the non-majors introductory literature courses I occasionally teach. My fandom is part of the point, since almost no one in the class will go on to become an expert in literature, either. My aim is to give thinking people (who are about to embark on careers in business or law, say) practice in thinking about and appreciating literature in more sophisticated ways. So, I tell my students, my first justification for including these tales is, quite simply, that I like them. There are other reasons, too, and I cover those in class. The Raven promises to make one reason much more obvious: literature arises in specific contexts, such as where a work was first published; if we are to begin to recover meanings, we ought to know something about those contexts. 

Father and Sons: The Paratext and Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Beautiful Struggle

By Beth McCoy

Ta-Nehisi Coates is known to many both for his essays in The Atlantic and for the blog he keeps on the publication's website. But he is also author of The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, a gorgeous memoir recounting Coates’s coming of age as a dreamy Baltimore kid during “the crack age.”
     I'm particularly interested in the way the book engages the paratext, Gerard Genette’s term for the covers, typography, notes, prefaces, and the like that makes a text into a book. According to Genette, paratextual elements operate as "thresholds" inviting and shaping interpretation before a book's first formal word. The Beautiful Struggle draws attention to how elements of the paratext--and footnotes in particular--opened for Coates' father mythologies of a black past that could provide liveable present and future space for his children.

Madwomen in the Archive

By Katherine D. Harris

When they first surfaced during the early nineteenth-century, literary annuals were intended to replace conduct manuals and mimic the commonplace album and almanac. But the genre grew into its own niche and became incredibly popular even if slightly over-priced at twelve shillings to three pounds. The literary contents and engravings were designated as literature for women because of the “poetess aesthetic,” which was at first praised but then condemned as “low brow” or the “cakes of literature.” Without having access to a large corpus of these materials twentieth and twenty-first century scholars have had a difficult time moving beyond these nineteenth-and early twentieth-century denigrations.

I've been writing about a this obscure 19^th century literary genre published in England 1823-1860. These books, literary annuals, enticed readers with titles such as Forget Me Not, Literary Souvenir, The Keepsake, Friendship's Offering. Though these books are rich with literary and cultural value, the literary texts are difficult to find in a continuous run despite heroic efforts by libraries and for-profit publishers to digitize them. The reading materials resonated with a reading public who desired to become part of the widespread print culture of the period. Though I write about these fascinating objects of literary culture, I don't usually teach them.