Showing papers in "Cea Critic in 2014"

Asynchronous Online Instruction: Creative Collaboration for Virtual Student Support

Abstract: With online instructors incorporating more synchronous technologies in distant composition courses, there is perhaps a mounting tendency to perceive asynchronous methods as obsolete. Synchronous courses more easily replicate the experiences of face-to-face courses, which appeals to many composition instructors. However, by utilizing a dynamic approach that includes contributions from the college library and tutoring center, asynchronous methodologies still have a place in online composition, particularly if instructors utilizing these methodologies seek to reconceptualize modes of instruction for the online realm instead of merely recreating them. Ultimately, the collaborative dynamic of our support approach has instilled new possibilities in asynchronous online instruction, possibilities that help students grow as writers even if they are separated by stretches of transactional distance. Copyright © Sharon Burns, Joseph Cunningham, Katie Foran-Mulcahy. This article first appeared in CEA Critic 76:1 (2014), 114-131. Reprinted with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press.

From Physical to Digital Textuality: Loss and Gain in Literary Projects

Abstract: Not all texts were written, edited, and produced for the same purpose, nor are they all used in the same way; therefore, there is no set of rules that will apply to all digitizations of all texts. This essay focuses on so­called literary texts (poetry, drama, fiction, and familiar essays) treated as works of art rather than as cultural documents. The main reason to be so specific is that standards of accuracy and precision in uses of literary texts as art are different from the standards often in play for cultural documents or corpora of texts for linguistic analysis. Accuracy is good for all uses, but some users dispense with it more readily than others. As has now often been said, " Any text might do, but no two texts of a work will do the same thing. " Hence, if what is to be done with a text depends on which text it is, on when and where it was created, and on who its authors, revisers, censors, or producers were, then there is no substitute for knowing precisely which text one is using and how it differs from other texts bearing the same title and purporting to be the same work. The standards for digitizing such texts are high; good enough isn't. Furthermore, not all literary works studied today were written and published digitally­­most in fact were written with the anticipation of print production, or, if long enough ago, for preservation and use as manuscripts. What happens to textuality when such texts are digitized? Was their original physical form a significant indicator of meaning, purpose, or status of the text? Will digitization destroy clues to the work's significance? What standard of accuracy and comprehensiveness matters? How should those who digitize texts address what is lost during the process? Whether a digital textual project is a professional scholarly edition or a student project, makes no difference with regard to the facts with which one works nor to the ideals for which one strives. Whether on stone, clay, papyrus, vellum, parchment, or paper, the surviving material texts are what we have. They are the primary materials; they constitute the evidence upon which all subsequent uses depend. One cannot go behind these basic physical objects in search of the answer to the question: "Where did this come from?" The physical stuff is where, for us, it comes from; it forms the …

"A Woman of Genius is but a Heavenly Lunatic": Stoddard's Subversive Use of Music in The Morgesons

Abstract: duality in the novel and points to musical skill as one basis of comparison. Stoddard offers here two distinct delineations of female musicianship: that of Cassy (or Cassandra), the novel's protagonist and narrator, in the form of the publicly sanctioned performer and singer in the parlor; and that of Verry (or Veronica), her younger sister, in the form of privately realized musical genius. Although music plays an integral role in the work, with almost forty references in the text, little critical analysis has been offered concerning its importance. Scholars have not considered this difficult novel in light of nineteenth-century attitudes toward female musical per- formance, composition, or genius. This paper discusses these conceptual- izations and considers how Stoddard uses them in depicting her female characters' search for agency and self-expression. Additionally, it examines how the text's musical references contribute to its strikingly proto-modern- ist style. Often subversive in her use of music, Stoddard, like the mosquito referenced in the opening epigraph, both sings and stings throughout her self-styled recitative. Best known in her lifetime for nearly fifty short stories and poetry printed in various periodicals as well as a newspaper column in the Daily Alta California, Stoddard also published three novels in the 1860s. All but disappearing from the American literary scene for nearly a century, she was brought into public view once more by Lawrence Buell and Sandra A. Zagarell's 1984 critical edition of The Morgesons, followed by the inclusion of her story "Lemorne versus Huell" in several anthologies, including the Norton Anthology of American Literature, in which she is described by the editors as being "(s)omewhat ahead of her time" (Levine and Krupat 2524). Indeed, of mid-nineteenth-century American writers, few produced works as enigmatic and baffling as those conceived by Stoddard. Marked by

Doing a Lot with a Little: Making Digital Humanities Work at a Small College

Abstract: I'm interested in how one goes about integrating digital tools into the liberal arts, and my perspective is that of a long-time faculty member in a small department at a small school. The common wisdom is that today's students know and can do more than most faculty in all things digital, and we need merely provide opportunities for them to use those skills. But that's not true for many students. Our department's newest faculty member has a specialty in digital media, specifically gamification. And although many students are flocking to her classes, she's also encountering resistance from some English majors: as one said to her in the first week of her "Digital Literacies" class, "I don't know anything about games, and I didn't become an English major to analyze stuff like this." I see two issues revealed through her statement: first, not all students are as digitally savvy as we think they are. Yes, they are experts at Facebook and Instagram and they can upload a movie from their iPhone to YouTube in seconds. However, they tend not to apply the digital skills they do have to their academic studies, and they usually don't have the confidence or intellectual curiosity to explore the application of new digital tools on their own. And second, this student and others like her hadn't received exposure in earlier classes to digital humanities techniques, so what my colleague was doing seemed outlandish to her. I want to address both issues today.

Teaching Attentive Reading and Motivated Writing through Digital Editing

Abstract: Though English departments, including my own at the University of Nebraska, have been teaching digital humanities (DH) courses for over a decade, hyperbolic claims about the perils and promises of using computers in the study of literature continue to appear in the press. A piece in the Los Angeles Review of Books likens the algorithms used by some digital humanities methods to fascism (Marche). Another, in The Huffington Post, compares the rise of digital humanities to \" our uncritical acceptance of drone attacks \" (Mohamed). On the other hand, digital humanists such as Franco Moretti, who famously promote \" distant reading \" as opposed to close reading, project a future for the humanities that radically departs from long-cherished methods. The controversial Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0, put out by a group of scholars at UCLA, includes a lot of talk about DH's \" utopian core \" and optimistic \" democratization of culture and scholarship \" (Presner). In my experience teaching dozens of courses and workshops on digital textual representation, the pedagogical value of digital tools—specifically TEI (Text Encoding Initiative)—is more complex and ultimately more rewarding than these caricatures imply. Text encoding, at least the in-depth, student-conceived markup that I teach in my classes, is not free of complications. It is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and sometimes extremely frustrating to beginners. It requires reliable computers, preferably ones the students can take home, and a classroom license for software (I use Oxygen XML Editor) that costs several hundred dollars. In order to create projects that can be publicly displayed, students require access to a server with certain technological specifications. Also, TEI is far from an uncontroversial way of approaching texts even in the digital editing community—it is predicated on a theory of textuality that is open to an array of criticisms, and anyone who has worked with it for a long time will have a lengthy list of quibbles regarding various features. (Frankly, I'd like to see TEI become one of several widely accepted and well-documented ways we can approach digital editing.) Notwithstanding its practical and theoretical hurdles, TEI is an invaluable tool for teaching literature. It makes a few pedagogical goals central to the work of the class: students must pay careful, consistent attention to the text; they learn to understand the cultural record as malleable; they feel a clear sense of purpose, audience, and expertise when writing; they leave with transferable technical skills. …

From Text to Tags: The Digital Humanities in an Introductory Literature Course

Abstract: What role can the digital humanities play in the undergraduate classroom? Answering this question can be tricky because the topic, Digital Humanities, is so broad. Matthew Kirschenbaum describes digital humanities as “more akin to a common methodological outlook than an investment in any one specific set of texts or even technologies” (par. 3). Rafael C. Alvarado associates the field with those scholars “who have embraced digital media” (par. 9). However, as he goes on to say,

This Is Your Brain on College: Educating Students with the Brain in Mind

Abstract: So, in one class I can only cover a fraction of what I have planned because everyone is so pumped for discussion—but then I immediately go to a class where silence dominates. Teaching friends, what strategies have you found work well with small & silent classes? I’ve tried freewritings [sic], having them create (and share) their own discussion questions, etc. One guy just gives me a zombie stare all class period. (Bovaird-Abbo)

Mormonism in A Study in Scarlet: Colonization on the Frontiers (of Sherlockian Logic)

Abstract: A Study in Scarlet recounts Jefferson Hope’s murder of Enoch Drebber and Joseph Stangerson. Although it occurs in London, the homicide is precipitated by events in Utah Territory, which introduced a British audience to a vast frontier both untamed and beautiful. The land, which functions in the text as the quintessence of American alterity, is inextricably related to John Ferrier, Jefferson Hope, and Lucy Ferrier, Arthur Conan Doyle’s independent and beautiful young woman whose capture by Brigham Young’s band mirrors the settlement and colonization of the landscape. In this essay, I argue that Conan Doyle’s exotic depiction of the land and its inhabitants complicates the precarious relationship between the Mormon adherents and Conan Doyle’s idealized American West. Like seventeenthand eighteenth-century settlers, Brigham Young and his devotees strike off on their own with the stated goal of religious freedom, but in doing so they impose a colonial order on what Conan Doyle describes as an uncultivated environment. Furthermore, this particular representation of colonization and the American West occupies an anomalous place in the Holmes canon. What has become known as the “Mormon segment” in Conan Doyle criticism is never actually reported to Holmes or Watson in A Study in Scarlet; they solve the case with none of the backstory that was provided to the reader. I argue that the seemingly disparate Mormon episode functions as a formal frontier of Sherlock Holmes’s system of logical deduction. The exoticized Utah desert and project of colonization circumvents Holmes’s usual methods of analysis, which attests to the complexities of colonialism and displacement in the nineteenth-century American West.