Teaching Electronic Literature as a Foreign Land
Hi, I’m Mark Sample, and I’m not a digital poet, but I play one in the classroom. Unlike many of netpoetic’s contributors, I am less a writer and practitioner of digital literature than a student of it. And by student, I mean teacher. I’m thrilled to be a contributor to netpoetic.com in this capacity, as an English professor who teaches all sorts of experimental literature to bewildered undergraduate and graduate students at George Mason University, Virginia’s largest public university.
One of the more challenging works of electronic literature I savor teaching is Brian Kim Stefan’s Star Wars, One Letter at a Time, which is exactly what it sounds like. Aside what’s going on in the piece itself (which deserves its own separate blog post), what I enjoy is the almost violent reaction it provokes in students. Undergraduate and graduate students alike are incredibly resistant to SWOLAAT, in most cases flat-out denying any claims Stefan’s reworking of Star Wars might make toward literariness.
The dismissive response of my students to SWOLAAT is only the most extreme example of what happens with many pieces of electronic literature, both in my classroom and in the wider world. For example, Johanna Drucker caused a stir this past summer in her review of Matthew Kirschenbaum’s groundbreaking Mechanisms, when she wrote that no works have “appeared in digital media whose interest goes beyond novelty value.” A bit aghast, Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Scott Rettberg both responded to Drucker’s remark, and I was struck by Rettberg’s observation that
ELO [The Electronic Literature Organization] has submitted a number of very good digital humanities grant proposals to the NEH, and we have had the same response nearly every time — on a panel of three reviewers, two will find the proposal worth funding, and one of whom will state flatly that it has no merit, not on the basis of the proposal itself or its relevance to the call, but because they find electronic literature itself to be without merit.
It occurred to me recently that the denial of electronic literature’s literary merit — whether it’s coming from my students or a distinguished NEH panel — is not due to a misplaced desire to preserve the sanctity of what counts as literature as it is sheer xenophobia.
Electronic literature is a foreign land.
Electronic literature might as well be the national literature of Cimmeria. To the uninitiated student or scholar, e-lit is at worst strange, incomprehensible, and inscrutable, and at best, simply silly.
So, I’m wondering, would the same process by which a stranger in a strange land grows accustomed to foreignness and even appreciates and incorporates cultural difference into his or her own life — could that process apply to e-lit?
Below (larger image) is a six stage model of intercultural sensitivity, designed by Milton J. Bennett in the late eighties and early nineties to describe the progress of individuals as they experience greater and more frequent cultural difference. And I think this model could help us introduce students to the foreign world of electronic literature.
In the early ethnocentric stages of Bennett’s model, individuals begin by first denying that cultural difference exists in the first place, either because of their own isolation or because of willful ignorance. Greater exposure to cultural difference next prompts a defensive posture, an us-versus-them mentality in which existing cognitive categories are reinforced and any comment directed toward one’s own culture is perceived as an attack. The last ethnocentric stage is characterized by a minimization of difference. Individuals tell themselves that “people are the same everywhere,” a superficially benign attitude that in fact masks uniqueness and still evaluates other cultures from a reference point within one’s own culture. The final three stages are marked by an understanding that behaviors, norms, beliefs and so on are all relative. The first ethnorelative stage is acceptance, genuinely acknowledging cultural difference and seeing that difference within its own cultural context. Next comes adaptation, when individuals change their own attitudes, behaviors, and even language to match their surroundings in an attempt to communicate and empathize. Finally, integration occurs when individuals move freely between cultures, practicing what Bennett calls “constructive marginality,” that is, seeing identity construction as an ongoing process that is always marginal to any specific social group.
If we think of electronic literature as a foreign land, then I propose we use this developmental model to accurately chart a stranger’s encounter with the genre. As my experience with Star Wars, One Letter at a Time illustrates, students first begin reading electronic literature in either the denial or defense stages (meaning they’ve either never experienced e-lit before or they have and they hate it). I can imagine an entire syllabus structured around the goal of moving students from denial to integration. Just as educators and sociologists have come up with practical strategies to facilitate the progress of study abroad students along Bennett’s continuum, so too can we design specific assignments that develop students’ competencies in each of these stages: from a total inability to read the differences between traditional literature and born digital literature to an integration of those very differences into their non-e-lit lives. And with each point in between, we target stage-appropriate skills and practices, meeting the students where they are, rather than expecting them to automatically appreciate the virtues of something as alien as Reiner Strasser and M.D Coverley’s ii: in the white darkness or something as unsettling as Jason Nelson’s This Is How You Will Die. This type of approach to teaching electronic literature would be far more rewarding (to both the professor and the students) than the kind of sink-or-swim model in Katherine Hayle’s theoretically dense (and nearly unteachable, as I’ve discovered) introduction to Electronic Literature.
Imagine too that we begin writing grant and publishing proposals with these stages in mind, understanding that committees and panels and editors are likely stuck in the ethnocentric stages, judging literature from what we might call the “Great Works” perspective. E-lit challenges this perspective, but not on grounds of literariness; it challenges existing notions of literature simply because it’s different. We can teach sensitivity to difference to our students, and we should model sensitivity in our own writings as well. Teachers and researchers of electronic literature are its ambassadors, and it is up to us to introduce strangers to the medium in a firm, but welcoming, guiding way.
[Note: an earlier version of this essay appeared on my own blog, Sample Reality]
Tags: e-literature | pedagogy | teaching | Theory
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10 Responses to “Teaching Electronic Literature as a Foreign Land”.
What a great posting. This is how I approach my course with my students… Not as a foreign land, but circulating around the question: “What is this stuff?” Darko Suvin in his Metamorphoses of Science Fiction introduces the idea that Science Fiction is the literature of “cognitive estrangement,” that it allows us to remove ourselves from our knowledge of how the empirical world works, allowing us to see the things that are ordinary in a new way.
We might consider the parallels between electronic literature and science fiction, and ask, in what ways does electronic literature offer us opportunities for parallel practices of estrangement (maybe we could call it “mediatic estrangement”)? But in any case, media specific analysis is implied, I think, whenever we situate new media texts within traditional literary settings. They make everything weird, at least for now, and that is a wonderful thing.
By the end of the semester, my students and I walk around campus, exchanging sly nods, connected by the occult knowledge of works that are readily available but largely unknown.
Agreed…..a damn good post….one that comes much closer to unraveling the mystery of why our craft often entices fear, anger and disdain from those in literary circles.
From a personal perspective, I have both experienced this “lack of literary respect” and been widely embraced for my work. So then the question is…who appreciates our/my work and who questions it’s merits? Those within the academic literary scene are often confused by my works. But their problem has always been that they read the works as only words and then apply their own literary critique models to the work, like horse doctors operating on that creature from Aliens. They don’t consider that all aspects of the work become part of the text….images, sound, interactivity etc..are all poetic/fictional elements.
BUT THEN…I think of the real issue…..do we have readers?
And the answer is hell damn crap YES. But those are readers who want to read our work, not for a class, but for enjoyment. Students have been beaten to death with literary models and analysis since they were wee pups….and so they think they need to apply these same methods to our work…. But others who simply find or stumble on the work….they love it and will engage with it…and share it….
Not all of them mind you….out of the five million that played my last poetry game, I’d say around ten percent actually enjoyed the game as a digital poem. But then that is 500,000 viewers….
Maybe as Mark implies…..we just need to wait for the academic community to catch up…while sending our work out into the world….
Jason Nelson
Sounds promising, Mark. A few responses.
Sort of reminds me of Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) as in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCbler-Ross_model . Death of an old world-view perhaps?
My work requires computer literacy on the part of the wreader and being open to engaging with its interactivities. It demands a ‘contemporary wreading’. I wouldn’t expect Johanna Drucker to go there. But kids are half way there.
I really like your approach to this, Mark – what an interesting angle. How, though, do we use this to change the way we write grants and teach students? Simply acknowledging that students/funding bodies are at a stage of denial doesn’t seem enough? How do you talk to someone in denial?
This would be a very useful skill for all those annoying debates one has with people who totally don’t get why universal healthcare is a good thing, too.
On the question of getting grants for electronic literature. Maybe we are doing what we ought to be doing… Artists keep on making art. Critics keep on criticizing. Teachers keep on teaching. Grant writers keep on writing grants. But more than anything, we need to keep on fostering connections between the people who have been on board from day one, late arrivals like me, and future generations.
Once people figure out the implications of what we do and study…. then we’ll be mobbed by savvy professionals, who need to study your name tag before deciding whether or not to talk to you, who treat every interaction like a job interview.
I came through Bowling Green State University, we were always educated in the history of Popular Culture Studies… And I think that history is a helpful one, when we think about what our own might look like someday. Basically, Popular Culture Studies arrived to academia as a joke. But what Ray and Pat Brown did was to build small institutions where they could, and rather than pushing the idea that EVERY school should have a popular culture studies program… they settled on the idea that popular culture studies could be anywhere you had a faculty member who supported it. I think the two big things that helped the development of the field were the creation of a national organization and the creation of scholarly resources. But all the senior members of the Popular Culture Association talk about the days when their popular culture research was not regarded as legitimate…. AND they also talk about those days as the most exciting and robust days, where the conferences were much more edgy and the collegial relationships between Popular Culture scholars as much more intense.
Now it is to the point where everyone has caught up…. and now everyone says they do popular culture studies of some sort (usually, though, they just mean that they show a movie during class). Now it is just considered a normal part of English, History, Philosophy, etc.
Right now, I can walk into a classroom, show something to a student, feeling 99% certain that they have never seen it before, feeling 99% certain that it is going to blow their mind…. AND, I can say, “If you like that piece, you should post a comment on netpoetic… and the artist will respond to you personally, because they are really, really nice… and they would be thrilled to hear from an 18 year old who took the time to read their work.” These students will come back to read more… and someday, some of them will tell their slack-jawed students, “You know, I actually got to meet so-and-so, and we talked about such-and-such.” Not to get too highfalootin’, but for all the Joseph Conrad and Jane Austen I enjoyed as an undergrad… no teacher was ever able to arrange for a personal meeting. On the other hand, one time I met one of the guys who wrote “The Unknown” (I hear he’s got a really great family, too). It was just as exciting as the time I met Allen Ginsberg… except that Allen Ginsberg didn’t drink a beer with me.
I think we should just keep doing what we are doing… Of course, every institutional breakthrough should be celebrated and encouraged. But, more importantly, we should be enjoying the connections we have right now. For all the things it’s not, it’s a great place to be working… even if we have to do all kinds of other stuff to pay the bills. In one generation, these days will be the good old days.
I guess I’m amused, and not a little pleased, that the “Star Wars” piece gets a “violent reaction.” I’ve never tried to teach it myself (but I never teach my own works in my E-lit classes).
The piece seems to go over well with art students, who are more accustomed to conceptual art that can never be entirely consumed in a sitting — Warhol’s Empire State, for example, or Douglas Gordon’s “24-Hour Psycho.” I think the piece is ideally viewed in a gallery setting, where you can tune in and out at will, and let the thing run behind your back while you converse, look at something else, etc. You can then return to the piece, relocate yourself within the Star Wars film after picking up a few words, and then leave it alone again.
As for its literariness, I wouldn’t make a too-strong argument for that — but I’m not a big fan of the word “literary” anyway, and find it mostly useless in discussing E-lit. However, I am a big fan of reading screenplays, and have taught courses on it, and would argue that the text for Star Wars is a piece of literature, for reasons I won’t go into here. But folks like Charlie Kaufman and Quentin Tarantino, are writing texts that are worth reading for literary merit alone.
Other angles on Star Wars: it’s a bit of a play on the Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries series of text movies, in that you are asked to read “on the z-axis” — rather than up or down, or across, _into_ the screen, through time. I’ve experimented with other sorts of “alternate readers” for poetic texts (such as Dan Farrell’s “The Inkblot Record”) but this one has been the most satisfying since you really have to choice but to read on this z-axis, relying on memory to form words (and not being able eyeball words arranged flat on a plain and turning them into meaning based on your sense of their shape — which is how we read). The first readers of Hangul, the invented Korean alphabet, were annoyed because they actually had to sound out the words before knowing what they were — they were used to reading Chinese ideograms and getting the word in one shot — and so Hangul foundered for several centuries before the Japanese made it illegal and the Koreans realized that it was one of their crowning cultural achievements.
Anyway…
I think one problem with Hayle’s approach is that it sees electronic literature as a cultural inevitability, some biproduct of the merging of the humanities and science, when in fact it is much like most art experimental products, the kooky ideas of people out there willing synthesize different strands of practice into something new. To that end, my focus tends to be on what these different strands are, and this often leads to works in the visul arts, performance, sound art, etc. and only rarely into issues having to do with the history of science or even issues of poststructural poetics (which have been more deeply examined by experimental poets like the Language writers and the French Tel Quel anyway).
So, for a piece like Star Wars, you could point to work by Warhol and Gordon (as I just did), or to Allen Ruppersberg’s work “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” for which he wrote out the entirety of Wilde’s novel onto huge canvases and presented them in a gallery context. (He also did something called “Walden, by Allen Ruppersberg,” for which he wrote out Walden and republished it.) You could look at “conceptual writing” by people like Kenneth Goldsmith; in his project “Day,” for example, he retyped and scanned in one issue of the New York Times, including the ads, stock figures, etc., and published it as a (huge) book. I also think of experiments in film, such as those by Brakhage, for which every frame of the film is a distinct image — any illusion of continuity of movement that we are used to in film is lost because every frame is being replaced entirely by a new image.
So I’m more into a culturalist approach, and assume that every new piece of e-lit is going to have its several strands of art-making informing it. And other discourses as well, of course — my work doesn’t usually access tropes from science or whatnot, but surely others do.
I don’t think it’s so easy to discount Johanna Drucker’s comments in her review of Matthew Kirschenbaum’s book. Anyone familiar with her art works know that she is willing to entertain the most wild notions of the “literary,” and her works are filled with nothing if not a “novelty” value competing with what we can call a “literary” value — which I think she equates with that part of the content that can be subjected to “close reading.”
Drucker’s closing line is the following: “But for the future close readings will require richer texts or we will be trapped in a cycle where only the techne and not the poetics express our imagination.” Earlier this year, when I was researching Michael Joyce to teach “afternoon,” I couldn’t find a single essay that considered his dealings with race in the “story” (there are a few modestly controversial passages), the meaning of the presence of the Creeley poem, the various issues having to do with calling a characer “Werther,” etc. Kate Hayles did an admirable reading of “Deep Blue” which is indeed “close” in the conventional sense (as she did for Talan Memmott’s Lexia to Perplexia in Writing Machines), but I couldn’t find anything similar for afternoon. But, indeed, there were several long essays discussing the techne of the piece — what it means to read in a hypertext environment, etc. I think, if we were to ask this question, opposing the techne to the literary (as I am not always wont to do, but have in the past), Drucker’s point still stands.
Folks say — these are the legends that surround the birth of modernism — that the first true notes of Modernism arrived in English literature with the first lines of Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock: “Let us go then, you and I / When the evening is stretched out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table.” (Tables and other flat surfaces, and what lie on them, play a huge role in the birth of the modern, it seems.) Is there anything nearly so quotable in the world of E-lit? (I’m asking this rhetorically, not because I know the answer.) We can probably point to more things that bear some resemblence to Picasso’s innovations in “Les Damoiselles d’Avignon” — i.e. things that played some role in changing our way of interfacing visually with a piece of art. But textually? I think this is the challenge that Drucker is putting up. I think, now that I think of it (always thinking), it’s what I wrote about in an essay called “Privileging Language” that appears on the EBR website — a call for new “literary” forms for the texts that become enmeshed in our digital environments.
(I think of “Kluge” as my own way of addressing this issue, for which I turned to the Oulipo and the music of Alvin Lucier. The digital piece is kind of a failure, but the text itself has some interesting tensions. But that’s another story.)
I guess, because I’m a poet, I think highly of technical innovations in metrics. William Carlos Williams (permit me to be grand here) has done more to change the way we read poetry than anyone since; people say that Eliot killed Romanticism (at least for the moment), that Pound invented the Chinese for our time (an idea which tickles me), but it’s Williams who tranformed our notions of meter, of the use of the syllable above and beyond the standard poetic feet, in ways we can even see anymore — and he did it with the help of the typewriter! Add to it all that he did for syntax (as in “For Elsie,” an amazing poem) and content (Ginsberg, of course, was much inspired by this) and idiom (New Jersey rulz), and you have quite an artist.
Well, it shows the difficulites of making “literary” innovations in a field that doesn’t, in fact, rely on anything that could conventionally be called a “page.” Williams used a typewriter, which was a big break with the past, but his poems ended up where most “literary” poems have ended up — viewed in a single shot, resting on a page, employing our conventional notions of reading and concentration, “memory and desire.” I think the hunt for the “literary” in E-lit is a good one and worth talking about. But I’ll stop for now, this is going on too long!
In response to David’s post about science fiction and “cognitive estrangement” — I think that’s a really neat point. Part of the problem with E-lit is when none of the elements of the piece bear any relation at all to “what we are used to” — and so this tension between the conventions of reading and the innovative aspect of the piece can be lost, and lost also this fruitful sense of “estrangement.” I argue for some relationship to “convention” in Fashionable Noise, and it’s partly for this reason — the usefulness of artistic works can make us appreciate the “conventionality” of our approach to life, and in this way aestheticize living. This is what estrangement is all about (think of the opening sequences of The Man Who Fell to Earth or any film by Chris Marker and you’ll know what I mean — art that turns the viewer into a visitor from another galaxy).
That seems to be the difference between fantasy and science fiction writing (in the most general sense) which is that the latter presents some version of our own world through a strange lens, whereas the former (generally) just creates a new world that seems to go on forever, filled with colorful objects. Science fiction is a version of realism, but with an hallucinogenic quality that (for those of us who love science fiction) can be addictive. I think most of my work can usefully be classed as science fiction; indeed, I think many of my poet friends (especially those from Toronto, such as Christian Bok, Darren Wershler and Steven Venright) wouldn’t mind that at all. It’s an issue of possible worlds; who knows, perhaps someday everyone will be reading books “one letter at a time,” or on canvases hanging from the walls.
(I have a diatribe against the depictions of future art forms in the last Star Wars movie, and its relationship to the state of “visual music,” but I’ll skip that for now… gotta run!)
@Brian, thanks for your thoughtful and wide-ranging response…I’m still processing it all but hope to say more soon. For now, let me just agree that “literariness” is a devil of a concept, and I always like to spend at least one day early in the semester brainstorming its meaning with students. They inevitably tie it up to ideas of “narrative” and “plot” — and the whole rest of the semester is an extended deprogramming of these embedded notions of what counts as literary.
And also — concerning reading along the z-axis, I always try to get students to realize that they are already experts in this practice…every time they go to the movies they do it quite naturally. The way your “Star Wars” piece transposes the paradigmatic grammar of cinema onto the syntagmatic structure of written text is a great example of using two conventions that are second nature to us to achieve that cognitive estrangement Suvin wrote about.
Brian, You are correct to note that this estrangement only works insofar as it relies on some dialectical positioning between tradition and innovation. I think this is also why a lot of academic creative writing has pulled far away from popular writing/reading.
On the other hand, to use you retelling of Star Wars as a point of reference… I think part of the “problem” readers have with it is not its radical difference from what we know, but in its absurd fidelity to what we think we know. For instance, a lot of people who don’t “dig” new media art often reference things like its eclecticism, non-linearity, and weirdness. We want writing to be a straightforward linear process. Everyone knows what Star Wars is. Everyone knows what a poem should be. Etc.
Well, reading Star Wars in the arrangement you offer is an absurd exercise in linearity. Letters appear one after another with an absolute fidelity to text. And, then people discover that they don’t read that way at all…. that they can’t read that way. My students always try to read it, and then they fail. I wonder if it is less the weirdness of the piece that upsets people so much… than it is the weirdness of our own theories of interpretation. I think it only takes a little bit of reflection for readers to conclude that, well, they like enjoying their “straight” narratives in formats that really are quite queer to begin with.
In this way, I think it is a very easy work to “get.” I just think that readers occasionally confuse liking something with learning something.
What an excellent way to lead into a new conference! (Twitter tag ELO AI).
So many Lit students have read — or attempted to read — Ullysses. However, by the time they get there they’ve probably already read Portrait, and before that a few shorts from Dubliners. Or if they haven’t, they have read the equivalent. If they can master or pass Ullysses, then maybe the go on to the Wake.
One could argue that contemporary students have already risen many levels. They have read books, seen movies, used Twitter and Facebook, and played video games. But is this enough?
I find, in my teaching, that there are easier works to start with, ones closer to the students’ homeland and others of a wow or a wtf variety. Some are highly literary, others heavy on the concept.
Facade is an easy sell. Inanimate Alice not such a stretch for beginners (in age and experience). It’s hard to beat hyper- Joyce for it’s appeal to Modernist traditions if the students have achieved that level of reading.
In my own work, I struggle between the tensions of exploring interfaces and narrative structures. 12 Easy Lessons to Better Time Travel owes more to Douglass Addams than to high lit. A show of hands follows a tradition of Latino genres, popular and experimental. On the other hand, Bunk Magazine has typically been my spot for more easily accessed experiments, such as http://bunkmagazine.com/mediawiki/ The Los Wikiless Timespedia, which features writing by ELO cofounder Scott Rettberg.
So knowing whether the piece is a sandle, a tennis shoe, or a hiking boot, as one trail book rated its hikes, makes a difference. The extra challenge, as we’ve noted, is identifying the number of literacies required: joysticks, continental philosophy tomes, library cards, O’Reilly code manuals, or urinals in gallery all mark various ways we could signal the literacies required or difficulty level with regard to various realms.
To this end, Deena Larsen is working on resources to help identify beginner e-lit readings in order to ease acculturation. Her workshop on Thursday should speak to these concerns.
Even in one artist’s work, we need to respect the range. Jason Nelson’s game game game piece might fit on a game friendly syllabus but Sydney’s Siberia has a stronger interface wow factor.
Apologies for erratic spelling, sending this from a phone on my way to ELO AI.
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