Recently in the Literature Category

One of my students posted this on her blog... she'll be presenting it tonight in class.  I'm looking forward to it!  Here's a parody, by Meagan Gemperlein

At the beginning of the semester, I had blogged about hating blogging, but really in the end it wasn't that terrible. I came to see how it can be useful in a classroom setting and help promote classroom discussion. So the song parody is a realization that blogging can only help you understand something and not hurt you.

BLOGGING IN THE USA

A Song Parody of "Party in the USA" sung by Miley Cyrus

I started reading Huck Finn mid October with a hope to understand the text

But then who's this dude who's talking weird

Woah, gotta be a dialect

Figured out it's Huck an he's the main character

The book's his adventure down the Mississippi River

But this is all so crazy

Cause I can't understand a word he's saying

My head is hurting and I'm feeling really confused

Too much reading and I'm uptight

That's when I mark the page and just move on

I'll just blog it later on, I'll just blog it later on, I'll just blog it late on

CHORUS:

So I sign on to my blog and I write my thoughts away

My classmate comment like yeah

And I get new ideas like yeah

So I sign on to my blog

Now I'll write a thesis that will be OK

Yeah, I'm just blogging in the USA (more)

http://www.60secondrecap.com/resource/

How to Write a Paper

• 1: Get Psyched
• 2: The Thesis Statement
• 3: Organization
• 4: Proving you know what you're talking about
• 5: Your teacher is not a mind-reader
• 6: In Conclusion
• 7: Rah-rah-rah, etc.

What can be learned from Fitzgerald's tax returns? To start with, his popular reputation as a careless spendthrift is untrue. Fitzgerald was always trying to follow conservative financial principles. Until 1937 he kept a ledger--as if he were a grocer--a meticulous record of his earnings from each short story, play, and novel he sold. The 1929 ledger recorded items as small as royalties of $5.10 from the American edition of The Great Gatsby and $0.34 from the English edition. No one could call Fitzgerald frugal, but he was always trying to save money--at least until his wife Zelda's illness, starting in 1929, put any idea of saving out of the question. The ordinary person saves to protect against some distant rainy day. Fitzgerald had no interest in that. To him saving meant freedom to work on his novels without interruptions caused by the economic necessity of writing short stories. The short stories were his main source of revenue. --William J. Quirk, The American Scholar

I assigned book one of Maus: A Survivor's Tale to a "Writing About Literature" class, the designated writing-intensive course for our English majors.

The students discussed the abrupt ending, the use of ethnic stereotypes, and of course the comic book medium itself. One student's "Hearing through Yiddish... Seeing in Ink..." is particularly thoughtful.

About a third of the class went on to read book two, even though it wasn't on the syllabus; one student read the book aloud to her nine-year-old sister.

This weekend, Seton Hill is home to a conference sponsored by the National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education.  I'm canceling all my classes during one day of the conference.

Clearly, the computer re-energized Bukowski and gave him new life as a writer. Yet much of Bukowski's late writing was about old age and death. The computer fit into this. In poems, letters, and in The Captain, Bukowski chronicled his struggles with the computer. The shutdowns, the lost poems, the time at the shop for repairs. This mirrored Bukowski's own health problems and trips to the hospital. The computer represented the writer in old age. The computer and the digital revolution also suggest the end of the book and of print. As a result, the computer spelled the death of the traditional author, a fact that must have struck Bukowski as he faced death himself. Yet all was not doom and gloom as the computer (old age and death) also provides the material and means for new poems. So the computer also represents the old writer's creative impulse. Jed Birmingham, Reality Studio

All kinds of awesome metatronics going on here.

A good collection, on a well-designed page.

www.readprint.com

Thanks for the suggestion, Josh.

[L]ast fall, for the first time in 15 years, Ms. McNeill, 42, did not assign "Mockingbird" -- or any novel. Instead she turned over all the decisions about which books to read to the students in her seventh- and eighth-grade English classes at Jonesboro Middle School in this south Atlanta suburb.

Among their choices: James Patterson's adrenaline-fueled "Maximum Ride" books, plenty of young-adult chick-lit novels and even the "Captain Underpants" series of comic-book-style novels.

But then there were students like Jennae Arnold, a soft-spoken eighth grader who picked challenging titles like "A Lesson Before Dying" by Ernest J. Gaines and "The Bluest Eye" by Toni Morrison, of which she wrote, partly in text-message speak: "I would have N3V3R thought of or about something like that on my own."

The approach Ms. McNeill uses, in which students choose their own books, discuss them individually with their teacher and one another, and keep detailed journals about their reading, is part of a movement to revolutionize the way literature is taught in America's schools. While there is no clear consensus among English teachers, variations on the approach, known as reading workshop, are catching on. --Motoko Rich

This sounds like a much better approach than having students at this age watch the movie so they have something to contribute to the discussion of a book they haven't read. 

In the "Literature and I" assignment that I ask my English majors to write in "Writing about Literature," several students reported that they loved reading when they were younger, but that school turned them off.  Of course the canon is an important part of our shared literature culture, and if students are all reading their own separate lists, there would be little to discuss.

Of course the classics are important, but I'd be satisfied with giving students in middle school a little more choice, and certainly letting high school students pick from among current best-sellers in an advanced English class.

My son (age 11) loves reading, and usually dashes off joyfully when I tell him to go to his room and read whatever he wants. He chooses nonfiction for his own reading pleasure, often a Popular Science, PC Gamer, or a military history book.  My daughter (7) prefers to work with her hands and body rather than to sit still, but the last few days I've been reading her The Hobbit, and she always asks for more (even though the chapters aren't a kid-friendly length).

Within five years:

(1) Many online journals and magazines now only publishing traditional text-based fiction and poetry will, as part of their online offerings, publish digital literature on a regular basis;

(2) Most major universities and many colleges (if they don't already) will offer courses in New Media, and those courses will cover/include digital literature;

(3) Accomplished scholars who assess the whole of digital literature by examining exemplary models from early hypertexts will be saying "oops!" and seeking a vocabulary that accepts the continual flux and explosive change of current practices in digital literature;

[...]

--Alan Bigelow, Netpoetic

This is a little late, but it's still the right way to handle the criticism. From Amazon:

This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our "solution" to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we've received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.

With deep apology to our customers,

Jeff Bezos
Founder & CEO
Amazon.com

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for--thought they owned.--David Pogue, NYT

The citizens whose Kindles needed rectification had purchased unauthorized George Orwell books.  So 1984 disappeared down the memory hole, and Animal Farm got shipped to the glue factory.

A bit predictable, but still enjoyable.

My favorite "winner" in this year's Lyttle Lytton Contest, which awards writers who can, in one sentence, imitate the infamous "It was a dark and stormy night" novel opening.

Alex turned to Gertrude, in much the same way Martin Landau turned to Barbara Bain in the opening of Space: 1999. -- Alex Dering

I just supervised a teaching demonstration in the Writing Popular Fiction program here at Seton HIll, and the experience inspired me to touch up an old handout on developing ideas for short stories.

A short story is tight -- there is no room for long exposition, there are no subplots to explore, and by the end of the story there should be no loose ends to tie up.  End right at the climax, so that the reader has to imagine how a life-changing event will affect the protagonist.

[...]

While readers of genre fiction (such as horror, fantasy, or mystery) have certain specific expectations, in general the reader's enjoyment comes from identifying the crucial revelation -- what James Joyce described as an epiphany -- that defines the moral significance of the protagonist's actions.

• Your goody-two-shoes protagonist happens upon an envelope from a cancer testing lab.  It's addressed to her arch enemy.  The story ends with the protagonist tearing the envelope open. [What's inside the envelope is not as important as your character's decision to snoop.]
  
• A husband comes home from work early, carrying flowers and a diamond bracelet.  He he hears her singing a romantic duet with someone else. He might first check to see that he's got the receipt, or he might set his jaw and open up the display box, or he might first stick the bracelet in his wife's gas tank.  [We don't actually need to see his wife's reaction -- his decision to knock on the door means he's chosen a confrontation rather than walking away.]
  
• The protagonist is in the upstairs hallway of someone else's house.  She hears snoring in the next room, pulls out a rope, and reaches for the switch in order to turn off the light. [Obviously the story would need to give us a little more detail about who this person is and what she wants, but once she makes her decision, the story is over.]
  

Drawing on real-life experiences, such as winning the big game, bouncing back after an illness or injury, or dealing with the death of a loved one, are attractive choices for students who are looking for a "personal essay" topic. But simply describing powerful emotional experiences ("She would never forget the wonderful feeling..."  "He was more furious than he had ever been...") is not the same thing as generating emotional responses in the reader.

For one day, Haaretz editor-in-chief Dov Alfon sent most of his staff reporters home and sent 31 of Israel's finest authors and poets to cover the day's news.

The idea behind the paper's June 10 special edition was to honor Israel's annual Hebrew Book Week, which opened the same day, by inviting Israeli authors to get away from their forthcoming novels and letting them bear witness to the events of the day.

This wasn't a Sabbath supplement, a chance to balance the news with extra color. This was a near complete replacement of the newspaper itself. Save for the sports section and a few other articles, all the reporters' notebooks were handed over to poets and novelists, both bestselling and up-and-coming. Their articles filled the pages, from the leading headline to the weather report. -- Daniel Estrin, Forward

So, did the reporters go home and write poems? If so, this would resemble that episode of The Brady Bunch where Mrs. Brady went to the office, and Mr. Brady stayed home with the kids.

Thanks for the tip, Mike.

I've become a fan of audiobooks, mostly because I can listen to them while folding laundry or weeding the yard or while auto-piloting my way through the grocery store. I've thought about writing an article like the one that just appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education. One book, sampled four ways -- paperback, audiobook, Kindle, and iPhone.  Ann Kirschner beat me to it -- and did a fine job.  She seems surprised at how much she enjoyed the audiobook:

Soon I was looking for any excuse to stay plugged in just a little bit longer. In fact, if I made a graph of total reading time on Little Dorrit, I bet that the audiobook would win (though not for the most pages).

You can listen while you are walking around.

You can listen while driving.

You can listen while applying makeup.

You can listen while you are cooking.

You can listen while you are in the dentist's chair.

Audiobooks also impose a certain discipline. I think of this as real-time reading: The author and narrator control your pace, and it is impractical to skim ahead or thumb back to another section. For Dickens, so naturally cinematic and plot-driven, that can have a breathtaking effect. It was my good fortune to be listening when Little Dorrit and Maggie spent their long night wandering the London streets. I shivered with them, I shared their exhaustion, and I sighed with the dull relief of returning to the Marshalsea prison.

Kirschner notes that young people who grew up playing hand-held games will have no problem reading from small screens.  She's right, though of course when those young people start losing their eyesight, they might appreciate larger displays. 

Right now, I'm struggling through a text-to-speech version of the Illiad, and I'm not enjoying it as much as I have enjoyed some more modern stuff.  I don't think it has much to do with the content, but rather the fact that the past few weeks have been a bit hectic, with my wife having an operation and me needing to take care of her and supervise the home-schooling, while at the same time trying to wrap up the loose ends of the semester.  So I've been hitting the sack pretty late and pretty tired, without the benefit of any commute time or solitary-walk-around-the-quad-with-headphones time.  When I fall asleep during a chapter, I'm more inclined to jump ahead then back up and re-listen, since I know it will take me forever to find out what happens if I try to study each chapter.

Many of the canonical works of hypertext fiction were written before the World Wide Web, so the author/designers were creating an experience for users who were not already familiar with the conventions of HTML documents. (When we surf the web, we expect links to change color after we visit them, we expect a home button in the upper left corner, etc.).

Although advocates of hypertext narrative (Bolter 2001, Jackson 1997, Landow 1997, for example) have enthusiastically argued that interactivity offers the reader more creative input, the difficult balance between the positive rewards of creative control and the negative effects of unwanted effort, is an aspect barely discussed in the literature, though Murray (1997b) and Ryan (2006) acknowledge the issue.The data strongly supports Murray's (1997) contention that authorial control and reader agency must be carefully balanced. What appeared to be happening for the readers in my study is that the presence of interactivity promised something that hypertext in its current form could not deliver -- ie, a game-like level of user control combined with a novel-like level of audience subordination to authorial leadership. The two experiences seemed to clash destructively in many readers' minds.The readers who commented on this issue all talked about the need for control to be given such that it progressed the narrative at all times. Whether that control is the offer of hyper-linked words, or animated images, whatever the reader does to the screen should develop the story. -- James Pope, interjunction.org (See also Part 1, "Twists in the Digital Tale")

Still, the creative-writing program, unsystematic or even anti-system as it might believe itself to be, is a system. People go in at one end and they come out the other, bearing (like the Scarecrow) a piece of paper with a Latin inscription, but also bearing (unlike the Scarecrow) the impress of an institutional experience. The nature of that experience mutates as the folk wisdom of the workshop mutates--from "Show, don't tell," which was the mantra in the nineteen-forties and fifties, to the effectively opposite mantra "Find your voice," which took over in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. McGurl suggests that these mantras encode shifting patterns of cultural assumptions--about identity, about work, about gender and class, and, of course, about what counts as good writing--and that they have had a big effect on the stories and novels that American writers have produced. "The rise of the creative-writing program," he says, "stands as the most important event in postwar American literary history." -- Louis Menand, The New Yorker

Read to the end -- Menand is being professionally skeptical throughout the essay, but he admits in the end that learning to write poems is a process that brings its own benefits, whether or not they include publishing poetry.

The current summer 100 Days project gathers a group of story writers, poets, visual artists, musicians, and programmers for one hundred days of creative effort.  Each artist's work will be unique yet build on the work of others in the collective.  Here we make, remake, shape and reshape.

• Steve Ersinghaus :: Story
• Carianne Garside :: Painting
• James Revillini :: jQuery
• John Timmons :: Sounds
• Jessica Somers :: Photos
• Neha Bawa :: Poetry
• Mindy Bray :: Photos
• Maggie Ducharme :: Meals
• Susan Ersinghaus :: Suburbs
• Denna Hintze-Yates :: Verbal Image
• Dave Pender :: Drawings

My former student Neha Bawa is among the participants. I have enjoyed learning from the new media pedagogy of Steve Ersinghaus and John Timmons. I'm also particularly interested in James Revillini's scripting experiments.

A masterful spoof of one of my favorite literary works, skewering a reference book I spent a lot of time with in my formative years..

'Tis hard to say, which promises more Loot:
Writing, or Telling others how to do't. -- Geoff Nunberg

Heard Any Good Books.mp3 (5min, 1MB)
When pneumonia wiped me out for about two months in the fall of 2007, for several weeks I could do little more than lie on the futon and worry about the work I was missing.  During the first week or so, when I still imagined it was just the flu and figured I'd be back on my feet soon, I worried about falling behind in my reading. 

I was slated to teach Jane Eyre, which I hadn't read since I was an undergraduate, and I could barely hold a book. Fortunately, I could just lie there and listen to a patient (if bland) computer voice reading whatever I asked it to read. 

During one of my lucid phases, I downloaded the Project Gutenberg edition of Jane Eyre, and converted it into an MP3 with the text-to-speech program TextAloud.   (The default voices that come with the program are tolerable, but I sprang for some professional voices that are worth the extra money -- much better than blustering bots who blurt "Stop the humanoids! Stop the intruders! The humanoids must not escape!") The whole thing cost about $55.

I pushed the whole Jane Eyre text through the program, resulting in a single file that probably took 11 hours to play.  It was rather tedious having to rewind to the last thing I remembered before I fell asleep and/or the batteries died. 

Since then, I've learned a few things about listening to computer-generated audiobooks.

This article from NCTE comes at a good time for me, since I'm scheduled to teach a "Writing about Literature" class in the fall. It's a PDF (booo!).

Of all types of writing, writing about literature may seem the least practical. Who apart from scholars and English majors analyzes poetry after the age of 18? Even book reviewers don't write the kinds of essays commonly assigned in school. Why do teachers devote so much effort to developing an arcane skill? Because writing about literature disciplines the mind. It challenges students to look closely into what they read and express clearly and powerfully what they find there. Meeting this challenge entails more than identifying correct answers to teachers' questions. It requires deep reading and analytical thinking--skills that will serve students well whatever their futures may hold. -- Carol Jago (136k PDF)

In the past few hours, I've gotten Friend requests from Jay Gatsby and Nick Carroway, as well as a a shady "Narrator Man" who calls himself invisible, and is a member of The Brotherhood.

My students in an American Lit class have been working on a creative interpretation of a work of literature, and several have chosen to use Facebook. 

Another thought-provoking link from BoingBoing. Maybe the language is a bit alarmist, but that's what gets the linkers linking.

The Authors Guild -- which represents a measly 8000 writers -- brought a class action against Google on behalf of all literary copyright holders, even the authors of the millions of "orphan works" whose rightsholders can't be located. Once that class was certified, whatever deal Google struck with the class became binding on every work of literature ever produced. The odds are that this feat won't ever be repeated, which means that Google is the only company in the world that will have a clean, legal way of offering all these books in search results. --Cory Doctorow

An interesting introduction to literary Darwinism, from LiveScience.com:

Carroll hypothesized that modern readers would gravitate toward protagonists who displayed pro-social tendencies or promoted group cooperation -- similar to how ancestral human hunter-gatherers valued such behavior.

He joined forces with another Literary Darwinist, Jonathan Gottschall, as well as two evolutionary psychologists on the study. Their online survey asked respondents to identify characters from classic 19th century British novels as protagonists, antagonists, or minor characters, and to rate character traits and emotional responses based on a psychological model of personality.

As predicted, people rated protagonists as displaying cooperative behavior that produced feel-good, positive responses from readers. They rated antagonists as being motivated by desire for social dominance, which drew negative emotional responses.

The study also found strong agreement among respondents rating character traits, even if just two people responded regarding a certain character. "Pride and Prejudice" had no lack of responses -- 81 people showed a familiarity with heroine Elizabeth Bennett that might have made the Austen protagonist blush.

And to think Charkes Kinbote had to make do with John Shade's index cards...

The influence of authors' environments on their writing has always interested scholars. Marcel Proust, for example, is known to have been heavily influenced by the paintings he surrounded himself with when he penned the novel Remembrance of Things Past, between 1909 and 1922. Imagine if Proust had been writing 100 years later, on a laptop: What else we might be able to learn about his creative process.

The implications for scholarship are tremendous, Mr. Kirschenbaum says. Take a great digital-era author: "You could potentially look at a browser history, see that he visited a particular Web site on a particular day and time," he says. "And then if you were to go into the draft of one of his manuscripts, you could see that draft was edited at a particular day and hour, and you could establish a connection between something he was looking at on the Web with something that he then wrote." -- Steve Kolowich, Chronicle of Higher Education

Remediation of a classic? A satire on visual cruft? http://www.tomas-nilsson.se/


Slagsmålsklubben - Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.

What would it have been like to be brought up by George Orwell? Pretty grim, you might think. But you would be wrong. In June 1944, Orwell and his wife Eileen adopted a three-week-old boy whom they named Richard Horatio Blair (Eric Blair being Orwell's real name). Now a retired engineer living happily in an immaculate house in a picture-book Warwickshire village, Blair has never publicised the fact that he was related to Orwell, always preferring to remain in the background. But ahead of a talk at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival with Orwell's biographer DJ Taylor (details, below right), Richard agreed to speak to me about his memories of his childhood. -- John Carey,The Times Online

Since this is published in the review section, it looks like the website automatically appends "review | Non-fiction book reviews" to the article title (in the <title></title> tags, visible in the colored stripe at the very top of your browser window), but this isn't a book review, it's a personality profile.

The son of the poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath has taken his own life, 46 years after his mother gassed herself while he slept.-- Times Online

I'm teaching Plath in my American Lit class tomorrow.