From Text to Txting: New Media in the Classroom

Introduction

xi This book is a response to two changes in humanities education since the 1980s: on the one hand, there has been an explosion of popular , paraliterary, and digital cultural forms, which have an increasing grip on our students; on the other hand (but not entirely unrelated), there is a need for humanities departments to change their tools for remediation in the face of demographic and textual sea changes.1 In an age when the word “text” is increasingly used as a metaphor (the text of the ----), when “read” can mean any interpretive act (a reading of a photograph), when screens have replaced books, emoticons have reintroduced the pictograph, and students are infinitely more familiar with the storylines of video games than the plots of Shakespeare’s plays, humanities departments risk becoming (even further) marginalized in the academy unless they retool. Academic literary critics who do not engage with the profound shifts in the delivery of narrative, verse, and argument stand on the cusp of becoming curators of an outdated print culture, antiquarians of the book. The contributors to this book believe that literary critics should be doing just the opposite: with our knowledge of literary history and form, our skills of close reading and cultural contextualization, literary critics should be interpreting, assessing, and explaining the effects that the remediation of print is having now to a populace that, for the most part, simply accepts these innovations as technological fashion. The chapters in this book, then, seek to address the question of the value of the skills that literary studies promote in an age when more people read “tweets” than essays and Introduction Paul Budra and Clint Burnham xii · Paul Budr a and Clint Burnham text messages than newspapers. In this introduction we would like to accomplish two tasks, the first of which is to argue that literary studies has to recognize the historic mutability of its object(s). These texts have swung in and out of historical fashion (and fascination) and they have come to be seen, increasingly, as signifying practices. Second, we argue that such studies today should take their cue from the abundance of critical methods to be found both in literary history and in parallel or emergent disciplines. We can, and should, engage with the literarycritical practices to be found in theory, in popular discourse, and in dialogue with the historical situation of our classrooms and students. This is not to say that there are not difficulties, and we address these challenges too. The reluctance of some literary critics to make this engagement is partly driven by a misunderstanding of what constitutes the subject of their study. Both Roland Barthes and Raymond Williams have argued for the comparative recentness of “literature” as a category of imaginative writing.2 The etymology of the term seems to support their claim: the English word “literature” did not appear until late in the fourteenth century and then it meant an “acquaintance with ‘letters’ or books” (OED), in short, knowledge of written culture, a sort of secondary literacy. The word does not take on the meaning “[l]iterary work or production; the activity or profession of a man of letters; the realm of letters” until the late eighteenth century. As for the most common definition now, “[l]iterary productions as a whole; the body of writings produced in a particular country or period, or in the world in general,” that did not appear until a decade or so into the nineteenth century. This understanding of the literary and the academic field of study it generated seems to have given literature scholars a blinkered notion of the scope of their subject: literary studies started sometime in the late eighteenth century in response to the proliferation of texts and the bourgeois phenomenon of recreational reading and so it is defined by text and print. Period. But Barthes and, especially, Williams were making polemical points with their radical historicization of the term. And while they are certainly right about the proliferation of the text due to print technology , they are demonstrably wrong in the assertion of the newness of the literary as a conceptual category because they ignore the classical Introduction · xiii roots of the term: “Littera means letter, and litteratura in Latin was a translation of the Greek word grammatiké, the knowledge of reading and writing, as Quintilian tells us in his Institutiones” (Wellek 16). Classical writers made fine distinctions within this broad meaning: “In Cicero . . . we find the terms Graecase literae, historia...