Fair Matter

A Struggle to Read

By Misun Dokko

In my introductory American Literature II survey course, I emphasize hunkering down and isolating oneself within the walls of literary or critical narrative for an hour or more. Many of my English majors struggle with this task because reading requires long stretches of relative isolation and fixed attention on a singular text. Such isolation and fixation run counter to the ways we Facebook, tweet, text, Youtube, blog, and work, not apart from each other but as overlapping tasks. While studies have shown that such multitasking has benefits and limitations, engaging in those debates is not my concern here because the fact is my students are already technological savvy multitaskers.

In light of this, it is no wonder that my English majors in American Literature II read reluctantly. My immediate response consisted of instituting frequent reading quizzes that asked questions that online summaries neglect. Over the course of the semester, some students accepted the disciplinary nature of quizzes and relented, reading more diligently and beginning to read when they didn’t before. However, quizzes worked only to an extent. Some students began to read but inconsistently. Other students who appeared to have read, which they demonstrated through discussion, had difficulty receiving above a C on the quizzes. Most students also seemed to view quizzes as punitive, and this may have detracted from their engagement with the course.

The New Alphabet That Never Was

By Beth McCoy

On Christmas eve 1976, I found J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit on a cinder-block bookshelf in my Aunt Francie’s apartment. Feigning repeated bathroom trips as an excuse to leave the dinner table, I sped through the book. By the time I was caught by dismayed parents who knew that a golden box containing both The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy awaited me in the morning, I had already finished the book, despite an over-long stop in Rivendell.

The surprise wasn’t ruined, though. Indeed, I found the trilogy to be hypnotic. Too young to understand the racism driving the books’ vision, I was half in love with Strider by the time Frodo left Bree. And the end of The Return of the King yielded even greater love: appendices explaining Elvish languages and alphabets that Tolkien conjured seemingly from the air. 

I was eleven and audacious. If Tolkien could make up new alphabets, I could, too. So I grabbed crayons and paper and threw myself upon an avocado-green rug amid walls teeming with yellow and orange flowers. I set upon my quest.

When I tell this story in the classroom, it’s at this point that students begin to smile. They realize suddenly what’s coming.

At the Crossroads of Politics, History, & Literature: Turks & Jews Since 1492

By Beyazit Akman

One of the most underrated terms of our times is “Abrahamic” religions (as opposed to “Judeo-Christianity”). In the post-9/11 era, it may be difficult for many to see the roots linking the Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, Islam. It may be even more difficult to see the rich history of Judeo-Islamic alliance.

This history perhaps is most visible in 1492, when Ferdinand and Isabella expelled Jewish people from central Europe and the Ottoman Empire’s Sultan Bayezid II rescued more than 100,000 of those expelled. Known as one of the most devout Muslim rulers in history (his title “Sofu” means “the Pious” in Turkish), Sultan Bayezid invited Sephardic Jews to the center of his empire at a time when Jewish discrimination and expulsion were instituted in such European metropolises as Amsterdam, Paris, and Venice. While the ships of Columbus were initiating the transatlantic slavery route to be used for centuries by major European colonial powers, the Ottoman navy was carrying victims of Christian oppression to Muslim lands.

Why did an Ottoman sultan help the Sephardim? For those of us who have a myopic understanding of historical events and who evaluate Judeo-Islamic relations in the restricted context of Israel-Palestinian conflict, the fact of the help may seem surprising, even unbelievable.

Feminism in Fashion Again?

By Katherine D. Harris

I'm teaching an Introduction to Literary Criticism this semester – well, I teach it every semester – and always at this point in our readings, the students breathe a sigh of relief to have finished their meanderings through Formalism, Structuralism, New Criticism, Post-Structuralism, Deconstruction, some Foucault, Barthes, Saussure, and even a little bit of the Russians. Now, we get into the identity politics and some fun with Freud before we launch into Anglo-American Feminist Studies where the conversations can't help but veer towards the political spectrum of critical theory, even in a literature course. Identifying phallic symbols always seems to crash that glass barrier, and they begin to see structures of power even in their daily lives. This year, though, the conversation has been particularly engaging, I think because of these recent satirical videos:

“Bic Pens for Women”

“Body Form Responds: The Truth”  

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.”

I Take It All Back: Chaucer's Retraction and the End of the Semester

By Erick Kelemen

Today my Chaucer students and I ended the semester by looking at Chaucer’s Retraction, the last bit of The Canterbury Tales, where he takes it all back—or, at least, takes back the sinful works, his “translacions and enditynges of worldly vanitees.” It’s an odd piece to end with, both for CT and for a class on Chaucer, as it’s quite destabilizing, rejecting everything our culture loves about Chaucer. My students certainly seemed to be puzzled by it. I’m not sure I helped. And maybe that’s a good thing. 

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?”

Scholarship and Mortality

By Erick Kelemen

One of the most important lessons of graduate school was that I’ll never be able to read everything I think I ought to read. I’ll never be able to look everything up, never be able to follow out all the footnotes I think I ought to follow. Part of me still doesn’t want to believe it. To admit it is not just to admit to my insufficiency as a scholar, after all; it is to admit to my mortality.

But where did the thought that I could read it all even come from? It’s one of the enduring fantasies of academia: the definitive, the complete, the exhaustive scholarship. I had certainly bought into the fantasy by the time I first encountered the name Étienne Gilson, whose mention in a context unfamiliar to me sent my inner library geek into a tizzy: Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. Eco’s fictional translator narrates his efforts to locate a book by following out a note about it, and claims that he “consulted illustrious medievalists such as the dear and unforgettable Étienne Gilson” to no avail. Eco’s murder-mystery derives much conflict from this very idea: that the investigator is always insufficient because he is human and mortal; that knowledge is always partial at best. In doing so, though, Eco positions the reader on the side of the questing detective, William, who delights in what our advisors taught us to call shelf-reading, not what librarians do (for which there is now an augmented reality app!), but looking not only at the book that we came for, but also at the books shelved near it, on the theory that exploring neighbors on a carefully ordered shelf of books will lead us to things we didn’t know we were looking for. 

Old Fashioned Visualizations of A Clockwork Orange

By Katherine D. Harris

Being a Digital Humanist has indelibly altered my thought process. I work in book history and print culture – with all of those textual apparatuses and paratextual elements that allow readerly consumption in a comforting and familiar linear form. But, I no longer think about reading from left to right, or even crafting arguments in a linear progression. Neither do my students. They often visualize their readings as maps of information, or “infographics.” In the spirit of Dr. Paul Fyfe's article, “Digital Pedagogy Unplugged,”  I asked non-English majors (mostly freshmen and sophomores) to map the three phases of Alex in Anthony Burgess' dystopic novel, A Clockwork Orange. Instead of using a highlighter to visualize variant ideas on the printed page, we spent the class session mapping and visualizing the three representations of Alex, as Alex 1.0, Alex 2.0, and Alex 3.0, based on the three volumes that comprise this twentieth-century bildungsroman.