We're Done (for now)
(5/23/08):
This semester began as an experiment in collaborative
learning. With twelve students willing to follow
(virtually) blindly into this morass, the class took on an
adventurous spirit. By the final weeks, the students were
creating the content with their presentations on Shelley's
The Last Man. Each student brought his or her own
specialties to the presentation and widened our understanding of
this apocalyptic, queer, classical and existential novel.
In August 2008, I will present about TechnoRomanticism and our
pedagogical experiences at the
North American Society for the Study of Romanticism
international conference in Toronto, Canada. Below is
the initial abstract but I have much more to incorporate over
the coming Summer months. It was a thrill to watch this
experiment unfold and the frustrations/fears of students abate
(somewhat) by the course conclusion this week. Since
students were responsible for creating their final projects as a
website using Google's Page Creator, they are responsible for
maintaining and sustaining them for other students to ogle.
They are, however, all ALIVE
and viewable from the
Student Projects page.
*****
TechnoRomantic Anxieties: Our Hideous Progeny
to be presented at NASSR 2008, Toronto, Canada
Dr. Katherine D. Harris
At the publication of Lyrical
Ballads� second edition in 1800, print technologies were
just beginning a great upheaval that would change the production
of the book and consequently, the commodification of idealized
and monastic authorship: The wooden and iron handpress give way
to the platen and cylinder printing presses. Handmade paper
becomes mechanized with a later conversion from rag/linen paper
to wood pulp that causes the cost of paper to drop by half.
Illustration processes become more elaborate, eschewing the wood
engraving for the metal plate and eventually the color
lithographic process. Type punches are still created by skilled
craftsmen but the work of casting letters into usable type
doubles in production by the 1820s. The invention of
stereotyping allows printers to free up their type (their main
capital) to perform multiple jobs in a single day. Copyright
will not be updated until 1842, and international copyright will
not protect British authors for another eighty years. All of
this innovation in print culture makes available an avalanche of
reading materials for Romantic-era audiences, as has been
discussed by William St. Clair and other book historians.
However, Romantic scholars do not
necessarily have access to all of this cultural material and
must rely on libraries, archivists and, only recently, digital
editions and archives. With this shift to the digital, Alan Liu
and Jerome McGann, among others, have proffered that current
information technology represents a version of Romanticism.
Similar to the Rosetta Stone or even Borges� "total book," the
Web has become a venue for expanding cultural knowledge. But why
use Romanticism to help students, even scholars, understand
current innovations in technology? Is it the assertion of self
or loss of individuality; the change in literacy; the alteration
of symbolic language; the revision to publishing; the
oversaturation of the visual; the shift in capitalism and
industry; the decimation of the natural environment? This list
makes Romanticism seem like an antidote to our current
technology-dependent culture. Before we can talk about the
Romanticizing of technology in our twenty-first century, we must
first consider the technologies contemporary to Romanticism �
primarily the technology of the book. These technologies shaped
the commodification of authorship as well as print distribution.
In studying these technologies, scholars and students gain an
understanding of the cultural moment as well as participate in
the same type of creativity that the Romantic authors
experienced: not the monastic creative moment that is so often
touted about our Romantic authors but the collaborative, textual
rendering of literature.
In an effort to capitulate this
collaborative culture, I am asking fifteen graduate and
undergraduate students to participate in an environment that
will wade through technology (and the inherent anxiety) as it is
apparent in Mary Shelley�s Frankenstein. In an effort to
reproduce the cultural moment, we will move through the semester
in the style of radial reading, a literary multi-tasking that we
perform so well today. Each week will require students to read
only a few chapters of Frankenstein; however, at the same
class meeting, other texts will also be introduced to explicate,
exonerate or complicate these chapters. In this way, students
will be just as inundated with texts as Romantic audiences. In
the spirit of Mark Phillipson�s Romantic Audience Project
wiki, students will create a new edition of Frankenstein
by annotating, linking and collaborating using Google Apps, a
collaborative digital space that resists proprietary software �
similar to copyright debates of the early nineteenth century �
and mimics the collaborative nature of Romantic literature.
Using such online resources as the Romantic Chronology,
NINES Collex, Thomas Carlyle Letters, Blake Archive,
Rossetti Archive, Poetess Archive and many others,
students will gain an understanding of literary production. By
the end of the semester, students will have replaced this ideal,
utopic Romantic author with collaborative models that they
themselves participate in � students become agents of
Romanticism. For this presentation, I will address not only the
Romanticization of information technology in the twenty-first
century but also the groundwork laid by the Romantics�
revolution in print culture as seen by the primary audience for
this study, our "cool" students. Since NASSR occurs after the
conclusion of this course, I will also be able to provide
insight into using new tools and a curriculum that is more
familiar than we think.