Literature
What is the point of teaching students how to read books in the epoch of the Internet?
I am currently trying to make a case for a ?new? collection of theoretical readings?a book that will teach well and provide undergraduate students with a sense of confident mastery (albeit preliminary) over the slippery subject of Critical Theory. But what is the use of such a sheaf when most readings?or in some cases, summaries of such readings?are available on the screen, at the click of a mouse button, handily archived, and hyper-linked throughout? What can a book do, differently?
One can resort to the materiality of the paper-feel, or to the smell of a book. But textually speaking, what subtleties exist when reading a page? Does a page of Marx or Freud read differently in a book and on the screen of an Amazon Kindle? Will the Webpage soon displace the earlier notion of ?page? as piece of paper? Was Alexander Pope?s formulation of the critic an early premonition of the movement from literature to criticism to?the Internet?
How does one discuss this (hyper)textual matrix without sounding apocalyptic, nostalgic, or utopian? What is the work of literary theory in an age of technological reproducibility? Take the contemporary Japanese phenomenon of the ?cell phone novel??now is literature dying, or thriving? It is hard to say, but interesting to think about.
- A Bit More On Twitter: Public / Tracking
The other day Tim Welsh and I were chatting about Twitter, and he raised two points that I want to take up further in this post. First we talked about the public aspect of Twitter, and how this can make it more than just an e-note-taking service. I like...
- On Videogames & Memories
I recently wrote an Amazon review of Ian Bogost's sprightly new book How to Do Things with Videogames. I want to extend that review here in order to think through some related things. This book's form makes it incredibly accessible and inviting:...
- Fields Without Origins
Two colleagues of mine and I are working to develop a syllabus for a new English course that will utilize e-readers instead of paper books: every student in the class will be given an e-reader, and our goal will be to immerse ourselves in 'new'...
- Rey Chow On New Media
Recently I attended a talk by Rey Chow, who gave a provocative talk called "Postcolonial Visibilities: Foucault, Deleuze, and the New Media Technologies." Among other things, Chow discussed the seemingly paradoxical phenomenon by which images of the lowest...
- Web Elements, Imagery, Reservations
Last week I guest-taught an introductory literature class at Loyola University in New Orleans. The students were extremely adept at seizing on and describing imagery in Louise Erdrich's story "The Red Convertible," and I found myself thinking about...
Literature
Questions Concerning Technology
What is the point of teaching students how to read books in the epoch of the Internet?
I am currently trying to make a case for a ?new? collection of theoretical readings?a book that will teach well and provide undergraduate students with a sense of confident mastery (albeit preliminary) over the slippery subject of Critical Theory. But what is the use of such a sheaf when most readings?or in some cases, summaries of such readings?are available on the screen, at the click of a mouse button, handily archived, and hyper-linked throughout? What can a book do, differently?
One can resort to the materiality of the paper-feel, or to the smell of a book. But textually speaking, what subtleties exist when reading a page? Does a page of Marx or Freud read differently in a book and on the screen of an Amazon Kindle? Will the Webpage soon displace the earlier notion of ?page? as piece of paper? Was Alexander Pope?s formulation of the critic an early premonition of the movement from literature to criticism to?the Internet?
How does one discuss this (hyper)textual matrix without sounding apocalyptic, nostalgic, or utopian? What is the work of literary theory in an age of technological reproducibility? Take the contemporary Japanese phenomenon of the ?cell phone novel??now is literature dying, or thriving? It is hard to say, but interesting to think about.
- A Bit More On Twitter: Public / Tracking
The other day Tim Welsh and I were chatting about Twitter, and he raised two points that I want to take up further in this post. First we talked about the public aspect of Twitter, and how this can make it more than just an e-note-taking service. I like...
- On Videogames & Memories
I recently wrote an Amazon review of Ian Bogost's sprightly new book How to Do Things with Videogames. I want to extend that review here in order to think through some related things. This book's form makes it incredibly accessible and inviting:...
- Fields Without Origins
Two colleagues of mine and I are working to develop a syllabus for a new English course that will utilize e-readers instead of paper books: every student in the class will be given an e-reader, and our goal will be to immerse ourselves in 'new'...
- Rey Chow On New Media
Recently I attended a talk by Rey Chow, who gave a provocative talk called "Postcolonial Visibilities: Foucault, Deleuze, and the New Media Technologies." Among other things, Chow discussed the seemingly paradoxical phenomenon by which images of the lowest...
- Web Elements, Imagery, Reservations
Last week I guest-taught an introductory literature class at Loyola University in New Orleans. The students were extremely adept at seizing on and describing imagery in Louise Erdrich's story "The Red Convertible," and I found myself thinking about...