Blogging Pedagogy - literature

Making the Most of Digital Tools in a Class on Black Public Intellectuals

Regina Mills — Mon, 21 Apr 2014 13:01:10 +0000

Author:

Regina Mills

Image Credit:

The Atlantic

I am teaching a literature course next term (African American Literature and Culture). Thankfully, when I teach in the fall, I will be in the Digital Research and Writing Lab (DWRL). However, unlike a research-based writing class, literature classes do not seem as easily tailored towards the digital tools we have available. Thus, I’d like to take this blog post as an opportunity to throw out some of the ideas I have for class projects and activities.

First, the tiniest bit of background. My syllabus is a work in progress but currently revolves around the theme, “Black Public Intellectuals.” I was inspired by the current debates over the need for more public intellectuals (written mostly by older white men) and whether or not Melissa Harris-Perry (lovingly known as MHP) is a public intellectual (as claimed by Ta-Nehisi Coates in this Atlantic article). I plan on reading intellectuals from Frederick Douglass, WEB Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Langston Hughes, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, Cornel West, and of course MHP. Some of the questions I’ll be posing are: What is the role of the public intellectual? Is the role of the Black public intellectual different in any way? In what ways have Black public intellectuals broadcast their ideas in the past? In the present? Who are the Black public intellectuals of our times?

With this in mind, I want to discuss some of the activities/prompts I’m considering for this class. First, I’m thinking that I am so tired of having to answer questions about things on my syllabus and resources (that are underused!). I have tried syllabus quizzes, refusing to answer E-mails about questions I’ve already answered, etc. but I want to try something new. So, here’s my idea: A scavenger hunt of class policies from the syllabus and key resources/locations. I’m considering requiring students to visit the DWRL Open Lab, the Undergraduate Writing Center (UWC), and the Warfield Center for African and African American Studies, plus certain helpful websites. I would need to ask if the UWC, the Open Lab, and the Warfield Center could help me out. Maybe they could have business cards or some proof of being there as part of the Scavenger Hunt completion. This could be done on the first day of class as the major activity for the day, with a debrief at the end of class.

As for writing projects, I’m considering having students create a website on a Black public intellectual we did or did not study in class. Since I intend to give only one or two readings per intellectual, this makes it so students can go deeper into a public intellectual that intrigued them in class or they can research others that might speak more to their own social justice and/or intellectual pursuits. I would imagine this website having to include: close readings of a few texts, historical context and biography of the Black public intellectual, and a list of recommended readings (with short annotated bibs/previews of what the sites/resources offer). I could make this an end-of-the-semester project (though it really does ask a lot), but I could also see it being done in piecemeal with certain sections being done over the course of the semester. Or having students have bi-weekly blog posts where they work on drafts, track progress, etc. My one concern is that I don’t know the kind of blogging websites that would be less clunky than Blackboard or Canvas (our current management software).

So these are some of my thoughts – I would really appreciate your feedback and other suggestions for class activities revolving around the themes and questions I have set up. Please leave a comment or E-mail me at regina.mills@utexas.edu.

Timelines, Trauma, Temporality

Hala Herbly — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 03:58:44 +0000

Author:

Hala Herbly

Image Credit:

The Great Books List

I'm teaching Banned Books and Novel Ideas this year, and most of the books I've chosen focus on the experience of trauma, whether on the level of the individual or the mass. One of the ways that I explain the concept of trauma to my class is by referring to Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which he explains the concept of the repetition compulsion as a response to traumatic experiences. The repetition compulsion manifests as a constant reliving of the trauma, often taking the form of dreams or nightmares, daydreams, or even subconscious actions. These symptoms, Freud reasoned, were ways for the subconscious mind to rid itself of the psychic pain of trauma. By constantly reliving the intial trauma, perhaps the mind can figure a way to escape or resolve the traumatic incident.

Most of the texts we're reading focus on incidents of trauma and their aftereffects, and thus tend to present temporality as anything but linear. This is where timeline appications come in.

In my class we read The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, and Beloved by Toni Morrison. Both these novels are pretty creative when it comes to temporality. During our discussions, students would often admit that they were confused by what had happened in that day's reading--which was completely understandable. Instead of relating the events of the novel point by point ("then this happened...then this...") I have my students log into their computers and congregate on a timeline-creating web application. I chose to use Dipity, which allows everyone to log in and edit the same timeline. For The Handmaid's Tale, this excercise allowed them to visualize the monotony of everyday life in the Republic of Gilead, the distance between Offred's present and her much-treasured memories, and finally, the shocking gap between her writing and the discovery of her recorded diary far in the future. This visualization led to a discussion of the mundane experience of everyday time, and the less accessible monolith of 'history."

Like The Handmaid's Tale, Beloved is structured by the intimate thoughts of three characters, Sethe, Denver, and Beloved. Because these womens' experiences tend to strain against the coherence of formal narrative, it was essential for my class to have a forum where they could discuss what happened when. Once they understood who Beloved was, and how she came to be, they were able to recognize why Beloved would seek to relive her early, traumatic experiences. Once again, the timeline enabled them to visualize this. Additionally, they were able to augment the novel's timeline with historical events--the end of the Civil War, for example.

I think these timeline excercises really helped my students, not only to "figure out" these novels' complex plots, but also to understand the cyclical nature of trauma, and to really inhabit the subtleties of narrative.

N.B.: Dipity sometimes moves excruciatingly slowly--the website, for some reason, takes forever to load, and any addition to the timeline we create often doesn't show up until long after it's been published. The site seems to be working a bit better these days, but I would still test it out if you plan on using it in class. A quick google search reveals other timeline-making web applications as well.

Video Games, Queer Studies, and Gay and Lesbian Literature and Culture

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:34:15 +0000

Author:

Kevin Bourque

Image Credit:

Fallout: New Vegas

Since early 2006 – when Blizzard Entertainment met with criticism and controversy for threatening to oust a player advertising a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT)-friendly World of Warcraft guild – queer visibility in the world of gaming has exploded. Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony gave the world of gaming its first eponymous queer character, “Gay” Tony Prince, just last year; and, as though mirroring America’s slow shift in public opinion from “separate-but-equal” solutions to full-fledged marriage equality, mere same-sex cohabitation in the Sims 2 graduated nine years later to gay marriages in the Sims 3 (2009). Dragon Age: Origins, from that same year, includes a memorable elf-on-elf scene which, in the words of the conservative World Net Daily, “depicts two men in various sex positions in a secret scene of homosexual seduction.” And finally, ongoing controversy over the possibility of same-sex coupling in Mass Effect 2 has prompted Bioware to lock down any forum discussion on the subject – perhaps in a misguided attempt, similar to Blizzard’s five years ago, to protect sexual minorities from abuse by mandating their invisibility.

The newfound visibility of queers in games serves as a kind of compelling synecdoche for our increasing, if troubled, presence in popular culture. It offers, too, a unique case study in sexual identity, complementing ongoing debates in queer activism, theory and culture as to how LGBT identity is created to begin with, and offering a compelling resource to teaching and scholarship on theories of sexual identity – in courses such as my own Gay and Lesbian Literature and Culture, or other courses grappling with the rhetorics of gender, sexuality, and identity formation.

In her foundational Epistemology of the Closet (1990), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick traced a governing tension between minoritizing and universalizing approaches to sexual identity, the former seeing homosexuality as the purview of a minority of actual homosexuals and the latter as a possibility for all persons, across a wide range of sexualities. This tension – along with the complementary binary of essentialist (one is intrinsically gay or lesbian) versus constructionist (all sexualities are socially constructed, shaped and formed by context) models – governs our notions of sexual identity. The making of sexual identity in contemporary video games demonstrates these ongoing debates, making thorny if foundational concepts in queer studies far more apparent and intuitive to the student.

The Sims (2000), for example, takes a generously universalizing approach. In lieu of making a particular sexual identity part of the character-formation process, developers chose to populate the game entirely with equal-opportunity Kinsey-3’s, each character intrinsically bisexual. Left to his or her own devices, a Sim is equally able to form romantic attachment with either sex, and one’s sexual identity is predicated more on interpersonal connection than on any intrinsic or personal difference.

Contrariwise, the recent Fallout: New Vegas has taken a minoritizing perspective, even building sexual minority status into the process of character formation. Character “perks,” such as the aptly-named Confirmed Bachelor trait, define one’s character as gay (Cherchez la Femme, incidentally, is the lesbian version) as they offers bonuses in conversations with sexual minority non-player characters.

1. Confirmed Batchelor used in dialogue; a gay NPC's response

Finally, other video games are destabilizing sex, gender and sexuality outright. In MolleIndustria’s Queer Power, styled after fighting games such as Mortal Kombat and Soul Calibur, two players race to beat each other to sexual orgasm while seamlessly transforming in gender, sexual position and erotic activity. Queer Power is, in the words of creator Paolo Pedercini, “loosely inspired by queer theory and particularly the work of gender theorist Judith Butler,” and as in Butler’s groundbreaking work – which thinks through how the performance of gender in fact constructs the categories of sexuality, gender, and even biological sex – how you act defines what you are, not vice-versa. The concept, as well as the theorist’s notoriously convoluted writerly style, is likewise reflected in a recent release from the UCLA conceptual-design outfit Queer Technologies: TransCoder, a “Queer Programming Anti-Language” which offers “libraries rooted in theories of queerness as an attempt to sever ontological and epistemological ties to dominant technologies and interrupt the flow of circulation between heternormative culture, coding, and visual interface.”

2. MolleIndustria's Queer Power; Queer Technology's Transcoder

Poetry in Images

Mike Widner — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:30:12 +0000

Author:

Mike Widner

Image Credit:

Steve A. Johnson

Students often have difficulty reading and interpreting poetry. It's an alien skill, it seems, for most of them. The challenge is even greater when there's a significant language barrier, such as trying to read Chaucer in Middle English. In my Banned Books course this semester, therefore, I had students collaboratively annotate passages from The Canterbury Tales with relevant images. This exercise would work, however, for any poem.

We began with a wiki page that had the introductory passage from the "General Prologue" in place. Students then searched for images that would annotate an individual line or phrase. For example, the famous first line ("Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote") received an image of flowers in the rain to illustrate April showers. The image at the top of this page remarks upon the Miller's portrait, in which Chaucer regularly compares him to a hog.

Once students annotated most of the lines, a visual narrative arose that gave the students an easier entry into the meaning of the lines. The prevalence of nature imagery and ideas of generation and rebirth in the first 18 lines of the General Prologue came through clearly. By making these themes visible, we were then able to return to a discussion of the text while also increasing student confidence in their ability to navigate the difficulties of the poem. We also were able to discuss how the images did not always match the precise meaning of the words, thereby re-emphasizing the textual specifics.

Because this exercise was done with a class-restricted wiki, we did not need to worry about making sure the images used were licensed appropriately. Only students in the course could see it. For a different method of interpreting poetry via images, see Elizabeth Frye's lesson plan "Teaching Poetry with Image Databases."

Crowdsourcing Narrative Techniques: TV Tropes in the Literature Classroom

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:28:00 +0000

Author:

Ashley Squires

Image Credit:

Randall Munroe

I tend to be one of those lit instructors who rarely brings up the dreaded "literary devices" in the classroom. Too often, handing out a list of tropes and techniques and asking students to recognize them in a text becomes a labelling exercise that does nothing to further the student's engagement with the work.

The wiki TV Tropes has begun to change my mind. A little bit. For those who are unfamiliar with the project (beware, you can while away many an otherwise productive hour on this site), TV Tropes is a wiki that crowdsources definitions and examples of various techniques used in various narrative media: manga, graphic novels, television shows, video games, films, and yes, "classic" literature. The editors describe the tone of the site as "breezy" and "informal," which often makes the entries as entertaining as they are informative. TV Tropes gets referenced frequently in fan communities and on media criticism websites.

What I like about this site is that it encourages both readers and writers to use narrative techniques (many if not most of which have appeared in Intro to Literature textbooks for ages) as a way of engaging with the text and the medium. As the post "TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life" says,

Analyzing a medium in depth and pulling it apart by the seams teaches you to watch things critically--analyzing every aspect and codifying them inside your mind.
Most tropers, academics, directors or writers who so this start to find new ways to enjoy media. The subtle blends of plots, the new spins on old stories. The rare and welcome times where a plot you weren't expecting appears. But it is never the same.
Enjoyment comes from a balance of Recognition and Surprise--we enjoy things that we can relate to and have seen before, but we also like to be surprised. Total recognition is cliche; total surprise is aleinating. Through comparing different works of fiction, browing TV Tropes will merge surprise almost entirely with recognition and you will begin analyzing everything and taking a totally new (and possibly better) enjoyment from media--or reality.

It's difficult to think of a better mission statement for an E314 literature classroom. Rather than labelling devices, learning about narrative techniques and tropes can be a way of encouraging students to think about the expectations they bring to a narrative and how those expectations are shaped by narratives they have already encountered.

The assignment I suggested in this semester's Lesson Plan attempts to use TV Tropes as a way of getting students to connect tropes to their experience with a particular narrative. This could work as a simple journaling exercise or even as a formal essay. Really ambitious instructors might have their students create their own wiki pages describing the tropes used in a particular work and linking them to other works that use those tropes in similar ways.

My interest in discussing tropes and techniques across media began with a student's essay on Dante's Inferno the video game, which is, of course, adapted from the poem, which we read part of in class. This led to a discussion about the ways in which Inferno translates nicely into a video game. Namely, it has a series of defineable "levels" (the circles of Hell) that become progressively more intense until you get to the Big Bad himself, Lucifer. However, a journey through Hell that consists mostly of talking to people and learning stuff about God and the nature of the cosmos isn't actually riveting content for a gamer to conquer, so naturally the game creators translated these levels into boss encounters and reimagined the narrative frame as a hero's quest. Dante is a veteran warrior (maybe sort of true, considering his family's involvement in the Guelph and Ghibeline conflict) and his beloved, Beatrice, is spirited away to Hell by Lucifer, who is much more like a Balrog than like the frozen, crying guy we see trapped at the center of the world in the poem. So, we also talked about how these changes are meeting the narrative demands of video games and meeting the expectations of the gamers.

The lesson plan I contributed this semester takes that conversation and translates it into a formalized activity that could be used for something as simple as a journal exercise or as elaborate as a formal essay or class wiki project. Students should take some time in class to famliarize themselves with TV Tropes and then take a short narrative work home to read. Instructors might provide a list of central tropes they might want their students to focus on but encourage them to explore on their own. Students should then begin identifying tropes within the assignment, connect those tropes to other works (either other class assignments or other narratives that come to mind) and write about how the author's specific use of that trope shapes their experience as a reader.

Some instructors may still find this to be too much like a labelling exercise, but done correctly, I think it has enormous potential to get students to engage with texts on a different level and begin thinking about the works they encounter in literature classes not as self-contained "classics" that have little to do with them or their lives but as texts that are embedded in a set of narrative conventions and expectations that have developed over the course of several millenia.

tab_explosion.png

comic from XKCD

Why ARIS Works for Literature Classes

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:23:57 +0000

Author:

Cleve Wiese

Image Credit:

Cleve Wiese

So my Banned Books E314 class is wrapping up the ARIS project described in my recent lesson plan post, and as I reflect on the experience I find myself fending off the complaints of a reasonable (if imaginary) skeptic: Sure, games are rhetorical, so it makes sense to analyze them in a rhetoric class. And sure, procedural rhetoric is an important mode of argumentation, so game design makes sense – in a rhetoric class. And yes, given the proliferation of location based media, the creation of location based, augmented reality games is probably a valuable experience for students – again, in a rhetoric class. But why, this skeptic asks, would any of this be relevant to a literature class – a banned books class, no less – in which your texts are predetermined novels and poems? Aren’t you just driving a square peg into a round hole for the sake of a personal (read, selfish) interest?

I have a few responses for this critic. To begin with, I see the E314 course as a general introduction to a variety of ways of reading and analyzing literature. For me, that means spending part of the semester focusing on writers and their historical contexts, part of the semester focused on new-crit-inspired modes of close-reading and formal analysis, and part of the semester focused on reader response (things don’t break down quite that cleanly, of course, but that’s the guiding, tripartite framework). This assignment emphasizes the third approach: Beginning with the Aristotelian idea that people can only experience things (fiction included) through the lenses of concrete real-world experiences, memories, and images anyway, the purpose here is not to analyze what a text means, in itself or in some particular historical context, but what can be done with it, right now, at UT Austin in April 2011. The novel or poem is merely the raw material for a new creation that is literally embedded by students on the real-world space of the UT Campus via the ARIS platform.

But, my critic counters, if you so completely de-emphasize the text itself, how can this assignment possibly teach literary analysis? And what about your responsibility to focus on the bannedness of these banned books?

This assignment teaches analysis because every ARIS game the students design has to make an argument. And although that argument isn’t limited by the text, it is an interpretation of the text, inspired by the text, in response to the text. From this point of view, it’s really not all that far from the kind of literary analysis we already ask students to do all the time. The difference here is that the games students create self-consciously filter source material through their own real world concerns and lived experiences. For example, one game based on Catcher in the Rye includes an exchange with NPCs inspired by peripheral characters from Holden’s West Village drinking binge – but in the game, these characters are virtually embedded on the South Mall, and the focus of their exchange with the PC (in the role of Holden) is refocused on a particular concern of a particular group of UT readers/English students/game designers: underage drinking. These connections – between personal experiences and Holden’s fictional night out – occurred to these students in their roles as readers. And in their roles as students in my course earlier in the semester, they were expected to filter this seemingly irrelevant association out of writing assignments. But in this assignment, in the new roles of game designers, they are encouraged to put that subjective “noise” at the center of a new product focused not on the text alone, but on the intersection of the text and their everyday lives.

This may seem a counter-intuitive, or even self-indulgent, approach to teaching literature. But I find it strikingly appropriate for a Banned Books class: Most of the controversies we discuss have less to do with what disputed literary works mean in any objective sense than with what they are used for by different stakeholders in different cultural contexts. In some cases (such as The Satanic Verses, which we’re studying right now), the books themselves seem deliberately designed for this kind of fragmentation and re-mediation by a wide range of people in many places with a wide range of political, religious, or cultural agendas. In fact, this is the way books often work and have a measurable effect in the world. So I think it makes much more sense to give students the chance to engage in the same kind of openly rhetorical, subjective, irreverent appropriation of literature than to flatly condemn it as ignorant or wrong.

Finally, I think that playing with ARIS is an amazingly interesting way to get students thinking about persona and audience. In What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Literacy and Learning, James Gee discusses three levels of identity operative in a role playing video games: Real-world identity (student, teacher, etc.), virtual identity, and the intersection of real and virtual identities in a “projective identity” (what the real world ‘me’ aspires to for the virtual ‘me’). Similarly, in this assignment students first have to think of themselves in the real-world identity of game designers with the confidence and authority to play with (that is, freely appropriate) previously sacrosanct literary texts. Second, they have to design a persona for players to adopt and they have to figure out to effectively convey this role through dialogue and gameplay (as you can see below, in dialogue situations the ARIS player is visually represented by only a silhouette and the word “YOU,” a limitation that forces designers to find other compelling ways to convey 1^st person characterization). Finally, the students have to think about projective identity not so much in the aspirational sense that Gee talks about as in a closely related rhetorical sense: ‘What,’ they have to ask, ‘will players be encouraged to believe in their real world identities as a result of experiencing this game through the particular virtual identity I design.’ In other words, the projective identity becomes the interpretive thesis or argument.

Ok, my critic says, even if I buy all of what you’ve argued for here, I still think you’re trying to turn a literature assignment into a rhetoric assignment. To this I plead guilty, at least in part. But since every paper I ask my students to write requires them to make an argument for a particular audience, I’m not sure this is such a bad – or unusual – thing.