It shouldn't be a binary though; as Greg mentioned before, the computational practices are designed by humans.

I wonder what studying the pervasive modulated repetition of "Melanctha" would reveal.

Another mini-tangent, sorry. I recently read this interview with Alexander Galloway in which he says the following about the two main approaches to DH (investigating the nature of letters and numbers versus focusing on the use of letters and numbers for other means):

Ultimately it comes down to this: if you count words in Moby-Dick, are you going to learn more about the white whale? I think you probably can — and we have to acknowledge that. But you won’t learn anything new about counting. That’s the difference between the two approaches, and I think a lot of the misunderstanding between the two methods (or cultures) of working with digitality is due to this difference.

Shakespeare infographics/data have been ALL over the Internet recently, probably because of the 400th anniversary of his death. Here's a great one about character interaction in the tragedies:

Tangential, but fun: Sir Ian McKellen and Heuristic Media recently released the first "Heuristic Shakespeare" app.

From the website:

The Tempest from Heuristic Shakespeare is the first in a collection of thirty-seven separate apps. Each app is a tool for demystifying a play and making it more enjoyable for a modern audience. Sir Ian McKellen and Professor Sir Jonathan Bate take us on journey of discovery using the world-famous Arden Shakespeare texts and their extensive essays and notes. The apps are not meant to be a replacement for seeing the plays in the theatre or on the screen but instead bring the text to life and help readers understand the language.

Agreed! Why view a text through only one lens?

Highlighting this section because it might be useful for my final project (lit crit wiki).

I can't help but think Stein would have appreciated certain digital tools given her work with William James and interest in classifying personality types.

The medium is the message?

Is Clement talking about formalist approaches?

Contrast this to modern film and television adaptations of fiction. The death of the imaginary voice is joined by that of imaginary physicality. Granted, the extent of the latter depends on the text--certain works provide more physical descriptors than others. Film/television adaptation, however, also opens the question of how true the adaptation is to the text's original medium (the text itself!).

Seems that the number of choices had at least doubled by 2009, if the title of Kirschner's essay ("Reading Dickens Four Ways") holds weight.

Also: nice Benjamin shout-out.

Is "aesthetic format" code for "book as object"?

I assume Rubery is using "book" as a kind of metonymy for the content of a book.

In away, this greeting places the phonograph as an almost archaic prototype of Siri.

Good point: serious readers should be defined not by their form of choice but by their content of choice.

For me, audiobook time was when I used to straighten my hair, which is a boring task that takes forever when your hair is a curly/frizzy as mine. Audiobooks made it slightly more bearable. Clearly, not bearable enough, as I no longer straighten my hair.

For me, storage capacity was overshadowed my immediate gratification, which is what I liked about e-readers when they were first popularized. I remember finishing the first book in a series at two in the morning; I was literally able to press a button to purchase and start reading the next installment within two minutes.

The most meta meta that ever did meta.

But it's not just the context that's changing; it's also the medium. Unless context and medium are the same? Or, does context dictate the preferred medium?

What are "cyberpunk fiction" and "tech-noir aesthetic"???

Studies pertaining to gaming go beyond observations of only body language now--companies employ psychologists to measure pupil dilation, body temperature, sweat to gauge adrenaline levels and emotional arousal, etc.

Was everybody kung-fu fighting?

Psh. Roald Dahl thought of this in 1964 when he wrote about transmitting candy bars through televisions via radio waves in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

I can't help but think of how we could apply Freud's ideas of manifest and latent content to digital texts.

Learning objective for our Billy Budd game?

Yes, if you're Jauss or Iser.

How does something like Google Glass fit here? The machine and the body are essentially joining physically...is that still coevolution?

Does bitcoin play a role here?

I have nothing specific to say about this excerpt; I just think it's really great prose.

Rainn Wilson's character on The Office (Dwight Schrute) is seen playing Second Life in the fourth season. Here's the extended, deleted clip, which does an interesting job of commenting on how "real life" affects the game play--it's more obvious if you're familiar with the show, but still.

But what's great about the Web is that it isn't static--how can we say that there's an end it's evolving toward?

Point for MLA works cited on the web: you can link to electronic sources.

Reminiscent of Iser's virtual text and implied reader?

WHAT. There are one too many words in this terrible phrase, which is both pretentious and ridiculous.

So, essentially...the medium is the message? I think I've heard that somewhere before...

Not sure I see the similarity with Liz and Richard Burton, but ok, if you say so.

This too (i.e., the original move's title) is confusing, just in terms of formatting.

Would be great if this were a link to the move or in quotations marks or something to set it apart.

I don't know. My experience at Sleep No More was game-like. After 30 minutes of exploring, my goal became very clear: find your way back to the bar.

This sounds simultaneously amazing and horrifying. In fact, I'm pretty sure this may be the digital version of Edmund Burke's theory on the sublime and the beautiful.

Exactly. The goals aren't removed, but they become user/player/gamer-directed.

This relates to our discussion on 4/23, particularly Josie's comment about how her goal in playing The Sims was to build the biggest family tree, but that was a goal she chose/gravitated toward, not one outlined by the game-makers (#sorrynotsorry for the Hunger Games nod).

Also, hypothes.is should add a function for mentions. I tried @JosieWatson, but as you can see, nothing happened.

How does Bogost's discussion of "serious games" fit in here?

What about l'art pour l'art and all that jazz? McDaid is promoting a purely telic view of literature (i.e., that it has some goal beyond itself).

Because I need to consider some things that are “not games.”

How Saussurean. From Course in General Linguistics:

In the same way a word can be exchanged for something dissimilar, an idea; besides, it can be compared with something of the same nature, another word. Its value is therefore not fixed so long as one simply states that it can be “exchanged” for a given concept, i.e. that it has this or that signification: one must also compare it with similar values, with other words that stand in opposition to it. Its content is really fixed only by the concurrence of everything that exists outside it.

Is the "magic circle" of a game like the assumed "fourth wall" in theater? If so, then a game radially disrupts, or separates one from, reality (i.e., from all angles), while the theater (and perhaps, by extension, literature, etc.) does so linearly.

WAIT. There's not only highbrow and lowbrow (and apparently, "middlebrow," according to an article I read last week) but there are also electronic textual versions of these categories? This remnant from phrenology has gone too far.

Ceci n'est pas une pipe?

About five years ago, Kaplan tried to do this for online SAT and ACT homework. It didn't work. Also, it was way too complicated. Teachers/tutors had to go through a four hour seminar about the badge, etc. system so that we could then explain it to our students. I did the seminar twice and still didn't get it.

Why can't gamification be an additional part of the process rather than replacing the existing whole?

Cute.

Is there a autotelic/telic distinction here? Making games for the sake of games versus making games for a higher sociocultural or political purpose? Are games the "new art"? Or just an extension of art?

In terms of written rhetoric, interesting that here, the phrase is uncapitalized and bracketed by quotation marks, while before it is Serious Games. Reads as much more serious.

The idea of annotating movies is exciting. How great would it be to annotate the Marshall McLuhan scene in Annie Hall?

In the 21st century, immediacy is a commodity unto itself.

I've used the same copy of A Room of One's Own for multiple classes, the first of which was my AP English Literature class during my senior year of high school. Every time I use it, I get to reread my annotations from two, five, or ten years ago; it's amazing what changes in terms of what I found unfamiliar or what resonated.

I never had to take English 120, but isn't this the book the department recommends for it?

The idea of offering literary intimacy, often perceived as "missing" from digital texts, harks back to the ideas presented in "Community Reading and Social Imagination" (Bérubé et al.).

Will the DIY annotation movement replace the prevalence of Norton Critical Editions et al. in the classroom? I can't help but think of the additional benefit of saving money on expensive anthologies and scholarly editions that can be quite costly.

This is important from a pedagogical standpoint; so many high school and undergraduate students are never told why they should annotate.

There's a great parody of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? here: Do English Majors Dream of Annotations?

Why is this in quotation marks? Seems a bit derisive.

A game for the Alice books would be super trippy and fun.

I recall this Stein essay as a discussion of composition over generations, but I could be mistaken. Her writing can be headache-inducing at times.

Comma Haruki? Is he well known enough to be alluded to by just his surname, or is there another Murakami I don't know about? Also, Haruki Murakami's work doesn't really seem to jive with the preceding texts...like a literary version of the Sesame Street segment "One of these things is not like the other."

So, like our annotation project, gameplay in literature encourages a move away from the Formalist approach.

This has nothing to do with anything, really, but I just need to share that I have such complicated feelings about Harold Bloom. Thanks.

What about criticism as art? Think Oscar Wilde's "The Critic as Artist," and later, Joel Spingarn's "The New Criticism." From the former:

That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography, as it deals not with events, but with the thoughts of one's life; not with life's physical accidents of deed or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind...

Compare this to the Harry Potter series, which J.K. Rowling ended with Hermione marrying Ron, a pairing she later admitted was almost entirely fan-driven.

If metafiction is a staple of postmodern lit, what is metagaming a staple of??? Cue existential crisis...

I've been waiting for this unit to link to this Flavorwire article called "A Sad Person's Guide to Interactive Fiction."

So much cooler than the look-a-raw-potato-can-be-a-battery project we did when I was in second grade...

This is so crucial!

For those unfamiliar with learning objectives...here's an cheat sheet of Bloom's taxonomy, which is old-school at this point, but still valuable vis-à-vis pedagogy and its history.

I like this; that way the concept (e.g., how to solve the problem, how to answer the question how to analyze the poem...whatever learning objective you choose) remains, even if the details don't, and can be applied to similar (or different) scenarios.

During my career as a test prep teacher, I taught a few classes with students who were hard to engage. They were silent, which is so very difficult for a classroom setting that uses the Socratic method combined with group work as its foundation. The kids would sit in their groups and work independently. I finally created a quiz/board game amalgam (they dubbed it "Kateardy") that got them to interact not only with me but also with each other.

Never underestimate the power of competition and candy when trying to bring teenagers out of their shells.

Interesting juxtaposition of product versus productive. Wonder what the etymology is.

What about mimetic play?

"Performances" Is such a broad category--I would argue that there are some performances (e.g., theatrical productions of plays) that are extremely serious.

Again, reminiscent of Iser's theories. Although, I wonder about the insight the juxtaposition of the public text and the private response, particularly the helpfulness of the latter. Will any random private response (i.e., annotation) do? Certainly, Melville's Marginalia provides insight, but what about a text with otherwise anonymous annotations?

Also, this:

Benjamin, Benjamin, Benjamin!

Like the letters practiced in copybooks?

Yes, but the New England Primer, for example, was far form secular...check out "H" (My Book and Heart / Shall never part).

But were they allowed to do much with this perfectly feminine penmanship? Virginia Woolf's hypothetical Judith Shakespeare from A Room of One's Own comes to mind.

The metaphor of writing as personal growth seems a bit far-fetched to me.

May be an old wives' tale, but I'm pretty sure there's a popular theory that adults whose handwriting doesn't change are more likely to be sociopaths or serial killers or something of that...ilk.

Echoes of Plato's Republic...

So, Lerer is talking about the aesthetic discipline of writing. Did this practice really end in the early twentieth century? Because I remember several units on proper penmanship during my elementary school years in the early to mid-90s.

Iser? Iser.

We haven't talked much about our imminent Billy Budd game yet, but I wonder if "the annotator" (child or novice adult or scholar) is a feasible "part" or "role."

I wonder if the paperback of Ulysses I spilled a Venti iced coffee on in 2009 will make it into one of these displays some day. Probably not, but a girl can dream, right?

If this is something children do whatever time or social world they live in, do the margins begging to be written in become Twitter feeds and Facebook walls in a twenty-first century world?

This aim seems to combine not only reception history and reader-response theory but also Iser's ideas of the virtual text and the implied reader.

How does reception theory as a mode of literary criticism fit here? Should there be a reception theory devoted merely to book as objects? What about Benjamin's ideas in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"?

"Filling in the blanks" is not only having a moment but also aiming to reach a new audience. See Mo Willems's Don't Let the Pigeon Finish this Activity Book (2012) for ages 3-8 and the current trend of adult coloring books (Johanna Brasford's are so popular that she was moved from the Tarcher Perigee imprint at Penguin Random House to Penguin proper) and activity books like Keri Smith's Wreck This Journal.

Melville scholar Allan Emery posits that the nineteenth-century American doctrine of Manifest Destiny, in conjunction with popularized ideas about non-Anglo nations in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), informed the fictionalized Delano’s characterization of Benito.

“Benito Cereno” was serialized over the last three 1855 issues of Putnam’s Monthly Magazine of American Literature, which published installments of Melville’s “Israel Potter” in between July 1854 and March 1855. In February 1854, Putnam’s Monthly published an anonymous article titled “Annexation” (pp. 183-194) that explicitly defends America’s right to the titular act.

You can find the entire article here, but I've included what I thought to be one of the most relevant excerpts, as it demonstrates the common self-characterization of America as superior to other nations. Based on these ideas, which Melville would have been privy to (he likely read this very article), one could argue that Delano and Benito are a metonymic representation of the United States and the "others" it wished to annex.

…we own no subject nations, no colonial victims, no trembling provinces—and we never desire to own them;—we waste no fields, we ruin no cities, we exhaust no distant settlements;—the weak Indian tribes among us we have striven to redeem and civilize; the weak Mexican and Spanish races among us, a prey to anarchy and misrule, we offer the advantages of stable government, of equal laws, of a flourishing and refined social life; and we aim at no alliances which are not founded on the broadest principles of reciprocal justice and goodwill (p. 191)

Note that the author describes the “Mexican and Spanish races” as “prey to anarchy and misrule,” and that Melville uses “misrule” (for the second time) to describe the result of Benito’s shortcomings.

On a linguistic note, the etymology of “annexation” (the noun form of the verb “annex”) outlined on OED Online reveals a few different but related Latin roots; chiefly, annect-ĕre, which means “to tie to,” but also nect-ĕre, which has a slightly different meaning of “to tie, to bind.” The second word much more explicitly connotes the act of violent enslavement. Given the political climate at the time, the use of “annexation” in describing American expansionism seems like a code to shroud the scant differences between westward expansion and the practice of slavery.

Why did Melville change the name of the slave ship from Tryal to San Dominick? A few separate searches for “San Dominick” resulted in “Benito Cereno” excerpts only. But then I remembered some excerpts from Toussaint L’Ouverture I read last semester in English 395…

L’Ouverture was one of the leaders the Haitian Revolution that took place in the then-French colony of Saint Domingue from 1791 to 1804. While this rebellion, which can be reductively classified as a nation-wide slave-revolt against imperialist forces, ended fifteen years before Melville was born, it received renewed attention under the name “Santo Domingo” or “St. Domingo” starting in the 1830s and continuing through the Civil War, as issues regarding slavery came to the forefront of the collective American conscious. In addition to being alluded to in myriad newspaper articles, St. Domingo featured in academic circles. Here are some sources:

The History and Present Condition of St. Domingo by J. Brown, M.D. (1837)

St. Domingo, its revolution and its hero, Toussaint Louverture by Charles Wyllys Elliott (1855)

Historical sketches of the revolutions, and the foreign and civil wars in the Island of St. Domingo, with a narrative, of the entire massacre of the white population of the island by Peter Stephen Chazotte (1840)

The Life of Toussaint L'Ouverture: the negro patriot of Hayti; comprising an account of the struggle for liberty in the island, and a sketch of its history to the present period by Rev. John R. Beard (1853)

Here's an image from the last title that seems particularly applicable to "Benito Cereno."

In 2006, Catherine Toal published an essay in Nineteenth-Century Literature titled "Some Things Which Could Never Have Happened: Fiction, Identification, and 'Benito Cereno'." Toal argues that the form Melville uses in "Benito Cereno" (i.e., the fictionalization of real events) can be traced to a letter he wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne three years before "Benito Cereno" was published.

In the letter, which scholars have labeled "The Agatha Story," Melville writes, "...you can construct a story of remarkable interest out of this material...You have a skeleton of actual reality to build about with fulness & veins & beauty." Toal contends that this metaphor is reversed in "Benito Cereno" vis-à-vis Melville’s attempts to construct a skeleton around the source material.

While this connection is not wholly intertextual, it does demonstrate that the trope of using “actual reality” as fictional fodder is something Melville thought about quite a bit.

Whenever good counsel was at a premium, the fairy tale had it, and where the need was greatest, its aid was nearest.

Once upon a time (haha), fairy tales were quite violent--the ones we know today have been diluted through centuries of storytelling. There's a theory that the gore of these stories served a purpose: to provide a fantasy world to help children cope with a harsh or dangerous reality.

He is ready to make it completely his own, to devour it, as it were. Indeed, he destroys, he swallows up the material as the fire devours logs in the fireplace.

This seems like a rather violent portrait of the novelist. One that evoked (at least in my mind) this 1823 painting by Goya:

In point of fact, he has succeeded in abbreviating even storytelling.

Benjamin would not like Twitter. Although, perhaps retweeting is a 21st century incarnation of what he writes at the end of this paragraph: "...the perfect narrative is revealed through the layers of a variety of retellings."

Is retweeting the new retelling?

"Writing," he says in one of his letters, "is to me no liberal art, but a craft."

I can't read this without rolling my eyes. The idea of writing as craft was likely novel (get it?) for Leskov--and Benjamin too, apparently--but I'm immediatley reminded of myriad conversations with would-be, actual, or former MFA-ers who go on and on and on about "honing their craft."

Experience which is passed on from mouth to mouth is the source from which all storytellers have drawn.

Benjamin's focus is understandably European, but a great North American example of the oral tradition is Native American cultures. Stephanie Fitzgerald and Hilary E. Wyss wrote a great article on the oral tradition and other alternative texts in "Land and Literacy: The Textualities of Native Studies" (2010).

What ten years later was poured out in the flood of war books was anything but experience that goes from mouth to mouth.

Benjamin's point that the content of post-World War I literature meagerly conveyed experience, if at all, is valid; however, many of these texts that were/are seemingly devoid of such experience (or perhaps stories) have since been labeled masterpieces of literary modernism due to the emphasis on form rather than content. But to be fair to Benjamin, who wrote this piece in 1936, we have a complete picture of the literary trends of the twentieth century that he could not have.

The most innovative aspect of Benjamin’s argument is its framing of the novel, not as a distinctive narrative mode in an evolutionary sequence of literary forms, but as a function of changing relationships between storytellers and their auditors with the advent of printed books.

Benjamin published "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" the same year as "The Storyteller" (1936). I wonder how Benjamin's idea of mechanical reproduction, which I recall as primarily visual, pertains to literary forms. Also, I think this intersection dovetails with Rubery's discussion of Victorian culture and aural literature.

If there is a sense in which no one ever reads a Dickens plot for the first time, it is because that story has been heard to some extent before it has been read. A Christmas Carol is only the most obvious example of such a twice-heard tale.

Housing Works hosts an annual "marathon" reading of A Christmas Carol called "What the Dickens?" Here's the lineup/info from this past December.

The recitation of a scene that takes a mere ten minutes to read silently to one’s self can take upwards of forty minutes when read aloud before an audience.

Audiobooks take away readerly agency, transforming readers into listeners. It seems that through audiobooks, literary audiences become more like theatrical audiences, and therefore engage less directly with the written text, or "text itself."

Re: audiobooks...

I took a course with a reading list of recently published "high-brow" literary works. When we read Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs (2009), a blind classmate commented that the audiobook narrator sounded like a ditzy, college-aged Carrie Bradshaw, which affected his perspective of Moore's narrator, who most students characterized as a somewhat intense and reserved young woman. To me, this distinction reinforces McLuhan's idea that the medium is the message--the words were the same, but the audiobook offered a different interpretation from the one Moore seemingly hinted at in the text itself.

Rather, screen-based media constitute a matrix from which new forms spring—blogs, tweets,and feeds, for example—and older ones are “remediated,” a process in which old content is transformed in and through a new medium (Bolter and Grusin 5).

Does this mean that the tablet/smartphone/computer/etc. is the container while the various forms that appear on that container are the media?

In what Walter Ong calls “primary oral culture,” after all, the literary act is perhaps best conceived not as transmission at all instead but as community—the original village behind Marshall McLuhan’s mediated global village.

"The medium is the message." What is the message of the medium of Web 2.0?

Similarly, blog and social-network platforms can be used to engage with literary works. For instance, one team of students in the 2008 version of my Literature+ course used the LiveJournal blogging platform to create profile pages for the characters in the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales. They themed each profile page with images and language they thought appropriate to the character and then wrote comments “in character” on other characters’ pages or on a shared community page (e.g., the Miller commenting rudely on the Knight’s or Wife of Bath’s pages, much as Chaucer’s original Miller was wont to do).

This reminds me of Mallory Ortberg's Texts from Jane Eyre (2014) and various Twitter accounts of long-deceased authors.

Reader-response and reception theory, for instance, elevated reading activity in the circuit.

Hans Robert Jauss, Wolfgang Iser

I refer in particular to literary theory from the 1960s onward—precisely Landow’s reason for analogizing hypertext to Barthes and other poststructuralists.

How do the ideas Barthes presents in his 1967 essay "The Death of an Author" coincide with social reading in the context of Web 2.0? It seems that the previously deceased author has been resurrected, or perhaps undergone a simultaneous reincarnation and multiplication through the dynamic web page. However, given the anonymity that the Internet facilitates, the author(s) can stay dead, rendering the reader's evaluation of the "text 'itself'" much more feasible. In the context of the digital age, perhaps the author is indeed dead but inhabits a ghost-like space.