Electronic Leaves: Textualities, Old and New

Dr. T brought up a question in the responses to my Qualifying Exam in "Literate Practices in Multiple Media" that stuck in my brain and that I’ve been answering, in various forms, ever since.  This has been several months of answering, which may or may not be enough, given the question.  The question - badly paraphrased from incomplete and flickering memory - was: why am I choosing to analyze such texts?  Do my selected texts for analysis represent a central current in contemporary literary genres? 

This was a damned good question, because my selection of texts are obscure and fringe.  They represent a sort of graphic spatial avant-garde in contemporary print literature, and though they gesture toward new hybridities of visual and linguistic signification, I know that when taken as a whole field, print literature uses the graphic space both meaningfully (in a small amount of cases) and with little thought to the significations of space, packaging, font, form, illustration, and so on.  I do see an increase in very mainstream (read: popular fiction and YA fiction) literature’s use of the graphic space, font choices/blended font styles for effect, innovative packaging of text emphasizing its status as material object, and addition of images as co-signifiers in the work.  Take something as seemingly insignificant as Stephen King’s font switching in the novel Cell. The list can go on and on.

But then last week I realized: is it relevant to my study or a matter of necessity that the works under analysis be representative of the mainstream in literary fiction?  I think that’s a good point to be able to defend on a panel, but it certainly has less relevance to a study I’ve constructed specifically to examine ways literary works signify visually and spatially.  I’m setting out to look for works that point toward a possible cluster of new forms, and furthermore, I’m re-examining (this can be cut, for it is fascinating and relevant but not central) how even the most innocuous print literary works signify using these methods, therefore calling for the need to apply a reading methodology which can  - when used with the grain of texts - illuminate (using discursive tools from a variety of disciplines) how the spatial and visual aspects of the print text co-signify along with the linguistic portion.  Note that this is a methodology which will be applied with varying degrees of success, and one of the most interesting things this will yield (apart from works which do indeed signify in both ways to create one meaning) will be the ability to explore the implications of disjunctive co-signification - moments when the production of the visual, spatial, and illus. aspect of a linguistic work clash with the significations of the linguistic work.  Think of Jane Eyre, one of my favorite novels, set in pink Comic Sans with a cover illustration by Jim Davis and a jacket blurb by Meg Cabot. 

A good example of the kinds of disjunctions, which come about through a major disconnect in the production of themes, genre, and central statement during the packaging, editing, and marketing of a work in the process of publication - George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead.  The intro sequence, or "title sequence", was farmed out to another company - creating a beginning section of the central narrative by Romero, a title sequence interlude by different authors and artists (and yes, presumably with Romero’s consent and approval, though to what extent would be difficult to discover) which in fact presents a different thesis about the zombie than Romero does in his text - and then the movie itself, which contains Romero’s ideas. 

A larger question, written and later salvaged from my dying desktop and replicated here as a means of storage, is this:

Whether medium-specificity as a reading/ evaluative technique adds to one’s understanding of and appreciation of the range of possible significations and slippages of the narrative/ the narrative’s functions/ the narrative’s possible meanings.

To what extent a medium-specific analysis adds to one’s understanding of and appreciation of the narrative’s functions/singification systems in full.

And finally, is the project (one of at least two, I recognize) that I’m outlining anything to do with promoting and advocating medium-specific analysis, or is what I’m describing, because of its extensive borrowing from several discursive practices, a more widely applicable idea, which could be used on a variety of media which incorporate systems of linguistic-spatial-imageistic signification practices?

A note: as you can see, this entire endeavor has of recently been powerfully influenced by Noel Carroll’s arguments about the usefulness of a medium-specific analysis.

G. Thomas Tanselle.  "The Nature of Texts" from A Rationale of Textual Criticism (1989)

Books are not what you think they are.  At least, not in G. Thomas Tanselle’s view, as carefully delineated in "The Nature of Texts."  According to Tanselle, the book is the material medium through which a literary work is performed.  The performance, for Tanselle, is a collaboration of many factors, beginning with the edition and presentation of the work through the editing and publishing choices made by groups of people, and not necessarily ending with the reader working to re-create a sense of "the work" through the "set of instructions" for recreating the work, which is essentially what he sees the text as being. 

I can understand why he thinks of print texts as a set of instructions for recreating the work: he actually supports his argument well in many places, but for me especially when he discusses how he sees works of art as being quite a different category from print on pages.  He describes art as something immediately and physically experiencable, regardless of its state of repair or "edits".  In contrast, he sees the work of literature as sequences that have been arranged and many times altered in the process of printing, or mass-reproduction.  These word sequences are the "instructions" with which a reader can attempt to re-create the original literary work that exists, according to Tanselle, outside or beyond the physical medium through which the work is transmitted (however imperfectly).

Tanselle elaborates upon the idea: "Because the media of the sequential arts, however, are not tangible, works in those media can never be damaged physically; but we can never know, from surviving physical artifacts, what constitutes the texts of those works.  The artifacts may remain inviolate (at least as far as human intervention is concerned), but the exact contours of the works they attempt to transmit will forever be indistinct" (30).

Tanselle’s view shocks me. I feel somehow "scientifically superior," harder in my approach to textualities, than he (that old contest of hardness among sciences, that old feeling of the "softness" and inadequacy of the humanities).  I take from his viewpoint that there is no magical secret trove of first editiions lurking out there, nor an argument for a highly organized though geographically dispersed collective memory of "great works."  He is actually talking about a ghost in the machine! 

He actually believes in a ghost that animates the machine that is the structures of literary works, whereas I believe in the machine, working in collaboration with the reader in ways that have been pre-programmed by that invention’s historical and cultural frame.  Beyond this, I also believe that the machine’s very housing communicates its own set of instructions to the reader, and that the reader reacts to these extra-textual instructions in ways they cannot quite control….because we have not taught them to perceive them yet. 

I know, however, the many ways in which I agree with Tanselle.  I know that my British Edition of Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride does not tell the same story, in the same voice, with the same tone, as my American Edition.  It is a different book, and though it looked very pretty and even pleasantly pretentious as an artifact to put on my shelf when I decided to buy it, I hate to read it, and had to finally buy another American edition, which I immediately loved and read easily.

What created a different literary work between the two books, in collaboration with me?  For one thing, the paper weight and the look of the ink on it.  For another, the font choice in the British Edition, which was fussy and cramped.  The size and shape of the book made it awkward to hold and gave the sensation of reticence, forever giving me twinges of irritation in which I wanted to neatly crack its spine to see the words it was clutching from my view stingily in the middle of each two-page spread.  It was only when I placed this edition alongside my newly purchased American that I could see perhaps the most damning detail: the British had cut the text funny.  Sentences in the British gasped along from page to turned page instead of resting in comfortable blocks in plenty of sunny space in the American.  Voices broke off on one side of the dimly-lit British page only to stutter to life again after the page-turn.  The inked words sat not on the paper but deep in it, pitted and pocked, giving the eye the strain of a pair of unseasoned legs hiking up and down shallow cratered terrain for miles.

Was there a ghostly "work" which was awkwardly "performed" by this edition?  There was certainly the spectre of my memory of reading the American and loving it so much, and because of that, the unbearable sensation of reading this very different edition.

A must-listen during the stresses of Finals Week.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9SyuPllvS8

Opening my latest e-mail edition of NCTE, I noted the second of what surely are many articles and blurbs citing a new study about correlations between data gathered at RateMyProfessors.com and data gathered in the IDEA Student Evaluation System, which is used by around 275 colleges (http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/04/25/rmp).

As I read this report, I have the same feeling I’ve had each time I read the findings: something does not line up.  I know that the argument people are tempted to make based on the findings - that RateMyProfessors.com is a pretty accurate measurement of a course and a professor/instructor because it is getting feedback that is similar to course evaluations - is somehow completely bogus, but I cannot articulate why using statistics. 

Thinking about my unease with the conclusion that RMP is a good measuring tool of the quality of our teaching, I think about the course evaluations I filled out as an undergraduate, and of my peers’ evaluations in those courses.  I ponder the RMP reviews of instructors and professors whose work I know well, remembering my initial response as to whether the website’s contributors were accurate reviewers. 

Maybe students have gotten more honest and hard-nosed in their reviews of professors and courses since I was an undergraduate, I think.  Then, without even a second’s pause: I think not! 

I remember the course evaluation being used as revenge against a professor for any number of perceived infractions:

A) Course perceived as too damned boring for the student’s liking (generally due to subject matter, not teaching method),

B)  Professor perceived as unreasonably demanding - in other words, professor encouraged actual learning through course activities, and honestly measured whether it looked like learning was taking place,

C)  Professor perceived as politically divergent from student’s own cherished belief system: student believed this was biasing their grade, and in turn this gave students grounds on which to completely ignore any feedback from professor during the term.

D)  Professor is not white

E)  Professor is not male, and is not apologetic about holding high course standards, is not perceived as attractive enough to be objectified (and summarily dismissed because they have been inserted into a sexist paradigm).  Professor is perceived as either taking revenge on the world for her perceived unattractiveness through insisting on high academic standards, or is perceived as too attractive to have achieved her position through expertise in her field.  The former is punished by sexist reviews for being too much "like a man" (e.g. possessing too much brainpower or expertise in a field for their limited notion of what a woman "should" be like), but the latter is punished for being too much "like a woman" (e.g. despite anything she says, she is perceived by sexist reviewers as not having anything of intellectual or disciplinary value to say).

I am thinking more specifically about two professors I had as an undergraduate, and how my peers and subsequent students rated them both in course evaluations and on RMP. 

The first, Dr. R, was a white male professor whose course consisted of lectures and discussions over assigned readings.  Students were required to pass several tests on both lecture and reading material, and were required to write a course term paper.

The second, Dr. W, was a female professor from China whose course consisted of lectures and discussions over assigned readings.  Students had to pass take-home essay exams over the readings, and were required to write a term paper and present a panel session on a topic of their choice to the class and professor.

Students reported that they evaluated Dr. R. as being unreasonably demanding - the scuttlebutt about his courses was that they were hyper-intellectual contests of doom for students.  The students claimed that you could easily fail his courses, that his tests were voluminous, unnecessarily difficult, and designed to trick you.  Dr. R. was loathed by many students because he unapologetically demanded that students know the material that the course covered.  If they did not demonstrate knowledge of the material, they failed.  He also demanded that students be on time to class, and locked the classroom door to prevent the interruptions of students coming in 20 minutes late and walking past the lectern to take their seats.

In my second class with Dr. W., I was sociable with my fellow undergraduates and was privy to their thoughts and reviews of Dr. W.  They thought she was far too demanding, but more than that, they claimed that they could not understand her when she lectured due to her (very slight) accent.  I knew this to be bullshit - her speech was clear and easy to understand, and the students complaining were the worst slackers in the class, never doing the readings, never speaking in class, rolling their eyes behind her back as she wrote on the board.

When I found out about RMP and first visited the site, I looked both professors up, and lo and behold, there were many reviews online that echoed what these students reported in the course evaluations. 

There were (and still are) about three kinds of reviews on RMP:

A) Slacker students slam professor because they believe they should get ‘A’s in courses they have not successfully completed,

B) Decent students praise professor because they recognize the quality of her/his teaching of the subject.

C) Fraternally-Motivated students rate the course’s difficulty in terms of how much work, participation, and attendance it took to earn a good grade.

So what were my evals of these professors, and what reviews did I leave on RMP?  I gave Dr. R. highest marks - his lectures were brilliant syntheses of what had been said and what was known and speculated on his topics of specialization.  I loved the degree to which his exams measured exactly what had been covered in class, reinforcing what I had learned.  He was more than fair in his grading of my earnest but problematized term paper, noting where in the argument I was weak, and where my argument gained strength.

I defended Dr. W.’s intelligibility in my review of her courses - she was easy to understand for those who wanted to listen.  Her grading was demanding, but I learned more in this kind of course than in the courses that gave me a good grade for little work.  The courses I remember most, in hindsight, are the hardass professors’ courses.  The information I remember most is from these well-constructed courses.  Knowing more after having attended college and after having earned a degree in something is a good feeling, at least for me. 

This brings me back to the false correlation between the similarities of the course evaluation results and the RMP results: the same pool of students is reviewing professors through both venues, but does either venue really measure the quality of learning that goes on in a given course?  I have always found that they measure other things: how much the students like that subject, whether the student is comfortable and open to learning from women or international professors, and the student’s overall attitude toward what they want to get out of their college classes, be it specialized knowledge or easy ‘A’s toward a degree that they hope will get them a good salary.

Though it might seem like a strange question, it’s not.  Why have books turned out the way that they have, materially?  Why have they taken the form that they have today, and how might we see that form change in the future? 

-It’s in part the nature of paper itself.  Because we write on paper, folios were needed (covers).  To carry a large stack of papers around, we needed to a) fold them in half (made pages), and b) cover them with some form of water-resistant binding, both to hold them together and to protect them from damage.

It’s sort of a wild guess.  I need to read my sources and find out exactly why a book is a book.  This doesn’t even get into why a page looks as it does, with grots and white space.  Why left to right?  I suppose, as it has in other cultures, the reading pattern follows the writing pattern.  This is why some works are written to be read up to down.  I think I heard via PBS Documentary on Japan that the Japanese thought it proper to read top to bottom, because it corresponded naturally with the human body, head to toe.  Left to right must have seemed horrifically unbalanced and barbaric.  What does Left to Right say? Hand to hand?  This skips the mind, the face, a respectful addressing of the head, and is reminiscent of tossing a ball back and forth playfully.

This is merely babbling: I’m off to read something solid to begin to ground these fanciful, flyaway musings.

This blog will be pieced together in the midst of the ceaseless noise of everyday life: people talking to me, those sudden noises that make the mind skip its groove, the singing that never stops, music playing and then the interruption of music not playing suddenly, phones ringing, ringtones, buses going by in the road, writing at what essentially is a waystation in my life….or is it? 

I hope to write a great deal about things that I watch and read.  I read mostly things I shouldn’t be reading, and watch too many movies to boot.  I spend too much time writing curriculum that my students (Freshmen and Sophomores) often hate and view as "busywork."  I spend a lot of time answering my children’s questions, which can be a little incessant, endearing and infuriating at once.  They are smart kids, and ask good questions, and if I can just get a lot done by way of my academic work while they are at school and asleep, I’ll have done pretty well.  I think that one thing I’m afraid of is that I can’t ever get enough work done in my free hours. 

Then there’s the gym.  I want to be going daily, but with the bus ride (parking passes cost a lot extra, and I’m on the doctoral student budget plan), it eats 2 hours every day that I go.

This doesn’t even take into account scouting, soccer, piano lessons, meetings, go club stuff, bullies at school, or my psychotic student (first legit psycho student ever, I’m happy to say - quite a feat for having taught this class ten years).

I have got to delve a bit more deeply into my texts and narratives, examining and questioning methodologies, and getting right off the computer when my spouse needs to go online (which I’m doing right this minute)…..anyway, that’s in a cliched nutshell my plans for this writing space.  More about the title later.