Class discussion notes 8/27

8/27: first Gutenberg discussion: his premise

[assortment of ideas from class]

noticed the issue of time: seems concerned about readers not being able to sit still, slow down–required for reading.

the Henry James teaching example–effective, engaging example from his experience, resonated with lots of readers

noticed he judges, almost disdains, those who use technology: the word “horde.” For some of us, felt like we were fighting him at times when reading; other times, though, he comes across as quiet and sedate.

Is this view of reading elist? is in not just about books vs. technology but only certain kinds of books?

began to notice and wonder about his style: in other words, not what he says but how he says it–and the ways in which how he writes is or isn’t effective for what he is trying to argue. I indicated that this attention to style (pulling back the curtain on the writers within the machines, so to speak) will be a continuing focus. An initial issue of SB’s style: places where he seems to contradict his argument with statements that indicate he too uses the technology he is also complaining about (for example, the television/Virginia Woolf example).

What would SB think about the book-reading phenomenon of Harry Potter in the last few years? Does it count as reading for him?

I mentioned as an example of a kind of public/networked/digital reading experience that is based on books but also informed by digital technology the fanfiction phenomenon. Here is a Harry Potter fanfiction site, if interested.

I also talked briefly about the tags, how they work and what they mean for this emerging medium of writing. One word that has emerged to describe this concept is “folksonomy“–you can learn more from the wikipedia entry.

Birkerts chapter 2: hidden reading life

Note on process: This posting represents an alternative approach for using the Glog in response to reading. In my first Glog on Gutenberg Elegies (focusing mainly on the introduction and first chapter), I used the glog while reading, taking notes, then spending more time with an issue I noticed and wanted to delve into. In effect, I finished the Glog when I finished reading. Those of you who like to read and take notes might try this. Remember that you needn’t write the entry live; you can if you prefer write in a notebook (I assume it would be digital in some form, ie a word document) and copy at a later point into your wordpress Glog. Another option would be to read an entire assignment, take some notes along the way in the book or a notebook, then sit down to reflect on the reading by writing your Glog. Experiment with the best way for you to glog. The purpose is for you to find the mediation of your reading (in effect, that is what we are doing; Birkerts would likely cringe hearing that word in connection to reading) that will best prepare you for class discussion and for your future writing. Overall, whether you write while reading or soon after, I do suggest that you never leave too much distance between your reading and your writing.

Why would Birkerts cringe? Because reading should be, as he sees it, a solitary act. The picture of reading I get thus far, particularly from the autobiographical perspective he provides in chapter 2, emphaszies what he calls his “hidden reading life” (38). Due to family dynamics that he explores, he learns to associate reading with “feminine” principles shaped by his mother and in some tension with his father. His father emphasizes the activity of doing and associates reading with passivity. I don’t want to psychoanalyze too much–though the way SB presents this, he does seem to invite this kind of analysis of psychodynamics. Is SB’s strong love of books (bibliomania) tied to feelings for his mother? I am not thinking Oedipus here so much as the way he associates reading so strongly with privacy, with the hidden, almost with an illicit activity (daydreaming in the middle of the day, inside, presumably was illicit from his father’s perspective). 

Mediation–in the form of digital reading, the screen–of this private and secluded activity thus violates not the object (the text, the book) but the subject of reading: the reading experience that Birkerts has with books. It makes the experience public; it pulls the books out of the boxes: recall his assertion that books are most alluriing when being packed up in a box (53). Digital mediation of reading and writing is lots of things; one of which is greater connection with a reading/writing audience. That is of interest to me. I wonder if others agree, are equally interested in the social aspects of digital writing (even something like Facebook). Birkerts is concerned about reading becoming too social. My concern is that his definition of reading and its significance is too narrowly viewed as private, as requiring privacy.

A wild assertion/speculation at this point: the struggles he details in this same chapter with becoming a writer, the difficulty in writing as he had planned–these stem from his overly anti-social view of reading. What do you think?

Gutenberg Elegies: duration and distraction

[hear]

Right away as I begin the reading (my second time–I read the 1994 edition earlier this summer) I hear and see in the new introduction lots of oppositions and antinomies, phrases that indicate and figure what reading is (for SB) vs. what technology has done to reading. I am going to list a few here as I keep reading, then go back to one or two and dig in, see what I notice about these oppositions.

digital bit vs. material atom

life hurried and fragmented by technology vs. life slow and frustrating, vivid in material totality (xii)

deep transformation in the nature of reading: shift from focused, text-centered engagement to far more lateral kind of encounter (restless, grazing, clicking, scrolling): xiv

duration vs. distraction; counter-technology (anti-technology) vs. technology

page vs. screen

[notice]

I am noticing a fairly narrow defintion (and from this, narrow view) of ‘technology.’ The phrase “counter-technology of the book” raises a problem. He is so sharply defining things in terms of the binary opposition book vs. technology, he neglects historical perspective on book technology. The book is a technology–as is the writing it contains. Indeed, he glides over the fact that book publication was a major technological invention and innovation; and that the digital revolution is often thought of as the most transformational invention since the printing press. I first went to this book (and thought it would be helpful in the course) wanting more historical perspective on what “Gutenberg” means for literature and reading–in other words, what the technology of reading/writing books is about and how that compares/contrasts with more recent technologies of reading and writing in digital environments. Thus far, I don’t see much historical perspective on what “book” means; rather, see him taking the object of a book for granted–and assuming that its main difference from the ‘electronic’ text (screen, etc) is that the book is an actual object whereas the other is not. But books are made from printing technologies–and still made from printing technologies that have migrated to digital formats and still involve electronic components [a point that Katherine Hayles will make]. And aren’t digital technologies such as computer screens objects?

[wonder]

On page xiv he defines “Literature” very narrowly as fiction–then asserts that fiction is under assault by nonfiction. What’s up with his view of nonfiction? Is he adding fiction vs. nonfiction to the reading vs. technology list of binaries? Is nonfictional somehow more technological and fiction more artful? This is where these binaries get interesting because they start to slip and slide. One of the things I particularly wonder: he includes ‘memoir’ in his definition of nonfiction–yet his own book (also nonfiction) relies on autobiographical perspective and experince, as he tells us in the introduction. His focus is on something he calls “private self.” A contradiction?

Does the ‘digital bit’ have material atoms in it?

What does he mean by reverie?

My Work in Progress

You might be interested to know what I am thinking about, reading into, researching around, and generally speaking, currently working on as a writer. I, too, have to compost. But I also have to write and seek to publish in order to figure it out. A good deal of what this project delves into will enter into, and continue to come out of, my teaching. Most specifically, the course you are taking.  

Work in Progress:

The Scholar’s Information: Emerson’s Education in an Electronic Age

 

What becomes of Emerson’s Scholar in the Age of Google? The Scholar’s Information offers two firsts in Emerson studies: the first book to study Emerson’s sustained (and largely forgotten) interest in the theory and practice of education and the first to consider Emerson’s writing in relation to digital communication. Emerson’s understanding of the cultural and pedagogical implications of mediation in his own age of electronic communication can shed light on where we now find ourselves in education generally, literary education specifically.  In elucidating a web of relations between new and old media, between Emerson’s education and Google’s scholar, I focus on Emerson’s crucial conception of metonymy as the basis for learning—indeed, for all thinking. This notion of metonymy links Emersonian analogy with an associational thinking that is prominent in conceptions of hypertext and emphasized in definitions of digital literacy.  I am interested in what this technological correspondence between the information of Emersonian intellect and electronic pedagogy can teach us about the emergence of digital communication in the humanities—and more specifically, how the study of literature and writing can be reconfigured in light of that emergence. While focusing on Emerson’s conception of literary education, this project will also range among other versions of a metonymic pedagogy I locate in Emerson: in Benjamin Franklin’s plans for an English school; in Whitman’s “Democratic Vistas”; in the theories of John Dewey; in the emergence of cybernetics and information technologies; and most recently in calls for a rethinking of English and composition studies in arguments put forth by Robert Scholes and Richard Lanham.

 

Thus far I have completed research on Emerson manuscripts while I was Emerson Memorial Association Fellow at Houghton Library, Harvard University and published an initial article in Emerson Society Papers 2006. Presented on Whitman and digital archives (“Parts of the Actual Distraction”) at two conferences and am revising for article publication.  I am applying for a fellowship from The Library Company of Philadelphia to research 18^th century grammar and rhetoric texts and to complete an article/chapter “Learning at Hand: Benjamin Franklin’s Writing Pedagogy.” Up next is the chapter, “Googling Emerson: The American Scholar and Vannevar Bush’s Memex.”

Dear you, whoever you are

I look forward to meeting you in class. By the time you are looking at this, this right now, it is already days after I am writing this, this right now, and most likely I have met you, in the first class. So let me say, rather, I look forward to getting to know you.

[Whitman was really on to something, the way we do travel through our writing medium, like a voice from beyond, like a ferry that crosses over and back: check out his great poem "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" to see what I mean. It has been on my mind recently as I have worked on the course and began setting up this digital ferry. More on that later]

This site, Comp\Post, is part blog and part course web. I will use Blackboard, as you know, though mainly to collect and maintain, in virtual presence, your finished writing projects. For day to day updates and thoughts, including more from my own glogging (what’s that?), and hopefully lots of input from your own, this will be the place to go. I also have plans for you to help me build a writing resource wiki for this course and for everyone in English 101.

The point of all this? Well, as you begin to fathom from the syllabus, and perhaps from some of what I said thus far in class, this is a course that uses these various technologies as tools and media of writing, which they are (and you already know them, even if you haven’t considered them writing media). That may be unavoidable. But since we are focusing more deliberately in this course on writing (and learning to write more deliberately), and since the topic of the literature we are reading has something to do with writing and technology, with (borrowing from Katherine Hayles) writing machines, we want to do more than just not avoid the implications of writing and mediation. We want to think more specifically and robustly and imaginatively about the medium (and media) of our writing.

So, there it is. This site and other experiments with writing and remediation (a term to be explained), including your own experiments, will serve a purpose. I hope that purpose leads you, someday, you whoever you are, back here or perhaps back to your blog or to your final publication from this course and see that you have realized in your writing more than you supposed.