Transforming the Teaching of Literature from Daniel Anderson on Vimeo.

I decided to do my Computers and Writing presentation this year as a Sophie book. Sophie worked well at bringing together a number of videos and images and also at allowing me to weave in snippets of text. Having the ability to use timelines to sequence the pieces was also very helpful. The Sophie book is currently over 100mb, so I'm not linking it here. Instead, I have just done a screen recording of the project. In addition to this one from vimeo, there is a 30.8 megabyte QuickTime file.

6:10 minutes (5.65 MB)

Our notions of what counts as literary shift constantly, a theme woven throughout much of the work that has happened in courses I've taught this semester. Sometimes as these shifts play out, it can be difficult to recognize the emerging forms among an evolving landscape formed around stalwarts like Shakespeare, Faulkner, Austin, Morrison. We need podcasts like this to help us make such identifications.

Here is a draft of my bit for the panel Jenny Edbuaer Rice, John Biewen, and I will be putting on in New Orleans. The panel is on sound in composition, so it's a bit ironic that the audio quality of this is somewhat dicey, but you do what you can.

Musical Pieces: Readymade Audio Projects and Creativity from Daniel Anderson on Vimeo.

16:08 minutes (14.77 MB)

This is a repost of a playlist composition I want to share with some classes. I'm posting here an audio mix of the playlist and the textual mix below. Prompted by the phrase "was dead three days," the story is about missing time.

---

Three Days Dead

"One Tree Hill" U2 (lyrics)
The story begins today, steeped in references to our shared memories. The black center of The Heart of Darkness and the songs of folk found in Jara’s music trick us into thinking these are only our struggles. But the tale leans back, archetypal, toward the symbolic scene.

---

"Babylon" David Gray (lyrics)
Three days bind the story. Its deeper movement starts with anticipation.
An eager descent softened by hope:

Friday night I'm going nowhere / All the lights are changing green to red

A blessed mistake.

Only wish that you were here

You know I'm seeing it so clear
I've been afraid

To tell you how I really feel

Admit to some of those bad mistakes I've made

The long passage back.

Turning back for home

You know I'm feeling so alone

I can't believe

Climbing on the stair

I turn around to see you smiling there

In front of me

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"Sympathy For The Devil" The Rolling Stones (lyrics; Salon piece)
This big picture plays out in close up, the curtains rich burgundy, velvet and deep as blood. Not fabric, but membrane screen image flickering as grey light comes up from the back of a stage. The lit grey screen contracts into a tight circle and swings off stage to the woman, wracked. The light swings back, center stage. The dead.

So if you meet me
Have some courtesy
Have some sympathy, and some taste
(woo woo)
Use all your well-learned politesse
Or I'll lay your soul to waste, um yeah
(woo woo, woo woo)

The dead shimmer as the man extends his arms and gathers them, shapelike, collecting them like clouds dissipating in summer sun. He breathes deep. Looks off stage. The light dilates, brightens, and swings with his gaze, highlighting the woman. Her face is framed at the bottom by fingers, steepled over lips. Eyes closed with thought. Brow set, wrinkled. He looks to the light. Turns.

---

"In The Garden" Van Morrison (lyrics)

The streets are always wet with rain
After a summer shower when I saw you standin'
In the garden in the garden wet with rain

You wiped the teardrops from your eye in sorrow
As we watched the petals fall down to the ground
And as I sat beside you I felt the
Great sadness that day in the garden

His fingers curl over the back of her hand. Nerves race up his side and fire up his face. He radiates. She breathes, opens her eyes. He’s fixed. She too.

And as it touched your cheeks so lightly
Born again you were and blushed and we touched each other lightly
And we felt the presence of the Christ

And I turned to you and I said
No Guru, no method, no teacher
Just you and I and nature
And the father in the garden

---

The man awakens. He stretches, expectant. Remembering the garden. Sunday. Ascendance. The morning light warms the side of his face. Questions. The circle of light surrounding him on the empty stage expands and all around him the dead. He squints toward the sky. The morning sun makes no sense. Three days and still he sits among bankers, butchers, mothers, fathers, sisters, sons, the lost souls of the darkened world. Sunday’s past and something’s wrong: “They call it stormy Monday but Tuesday’s just as bad.”

"Stormy Monday" Eva Cassidy (lyrics)

---

"Black" Pearl Jam (lyrics)
The sadness smacks personal and profound. Lured by pain and beauty to betray the world, he feels now the loss and fingers at his own soul like a sore, remembering. That joining. That giving, that, allowed just an instant, instantly changed forever.

And now my bitter hands shake beneath the clouds
of what was everything?
Oh, the pictures have all been washed in black--
tattooed everything.

---

"Pacing
the Cage" Bruce Cockburn (lyrics)
Reflection comes much later and brings with it nothing more than the slow turn of the proverbial screw. The unjust judge and the pearl of great price. He wanders the timescapes of the past, stepping into this very present. The rusted ships, scuttled on distant shores and waiting to turn to scrap. The lights of cities, biting and empty in their brilliance. The thrum of the engine soundtracked beneath the song of the lark. He wonders aloud, how is it that you’re just now “finding yourself in a place that you've willingly waltzed into. Suddenly, you realize it's not such a good place to be, and it's hard to find your way out, hard to know where the next step is supposed to go.”

---

"All
Along The Watchtower" Bob Dylan (lyrics)
Swiveling days compile their despondencies and urgent little victories. An adoption in Armenia. Plundering in Mertz. A library in Egypt. A Caldera vaporizes a village. A man has a dream. Resigned, he turns toward each event, draping shawls over corpse and cold soul alike. Lowering and lifting to the timeless rhythm of the rise and fall. More, he finally cries. I now need nothing more.

Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl,
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.

---

"Across The Universe" The Beatles (lyrics)
The sound of horse’s hooves rises from the edge of the stage in clops like gentle rain. The ebbing and flowing circle of light that baths the man swells to full brightness and the two riders join the scene—the woman and the father, smiling. Musical feet fill the gaps as the horses stop, and with each beat figures step on the stage. Teachers. Farmers. Runners. Writers. Young and old, they step forward like members of a choir and mouth the sounds that change the world.

Jai guru deva om
Nothing's gonna change my world,
Nothing's gonna change my world.
Nothing's gonna change my world.
Nothing's gonna change my world.

---

"With or Without You" (live) U2 (lyrics)
As the crowd gathers on stage, another sound swells from behind. A whistle. Clap. Clap. Whistle. Clap. Looking out he sees more souls pouring in from doorways and climbing down from the rafters. The days, he understands, have nothing to do with the scattered sequences of noon and night. The days instead have played out over these millennia in each ragged cough and lover’s cry. Three days dead, he understands he’s not alone and he “give[s himself] away”

My hands are tied
My body bruised, she's got me with
Nothing to win and
Nothing left to lose

And you give yourself away
And you give yourself away
And you give
And you give
And you give yourself away

She takes his hand. The sound turns smoky and swirls over the scene. It surrounds the man and the woman and slowly lifts them, as if on filaments of thought, invisible and rising skyward.

We'll shine like stars in the silver light
We'll shine like stars in the Christmas night
One heart. One home. One love.

If you've got an extra twelve minutes and a decent Interent connection, feel free to take a look at a screencast for an upcoming NCTE presentation. The sound is not quite right, but the root of the problem is I recorded it too hot in the original Camtasia files and I'm not going back and have had enough tweaking.

47.5 mb movie

I've posted a video reflection of a recent annotation assignment. The Flash video is about 35mb, so click the image or use the link below only if you have a decent Internet connection. For the assignment, we used a CommentPress text set up by the Institute for the Future of the Book.

Lot's of good things happened. I pretty much stepped out of the way (my favorite teaching style) while students worked with one another to pick apart the text. We wove in video clips from the film version of the story, so we got to think about media and narrative and a hybrid interpretation of the story. Great interaction among commentators. You can check out the online edition of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge we created or watch my video reflection on Student-Centered Literary Studies on the Web.

Tucked next to the long rows of book after book sits the empty shelf for my recently added literature class, Major American Authors. Strolling through the rows and rows of books selected by colleagues for every class imaginable in the English Department, I’m overwhelmed by all the good stuff. I’d love to work through all these stories and flashes in the cultural frying pan, but I just don’t see how to fit it in with my teaching style. We need to make things in class. We need to learn tech. We need time to think for ourselves instead of soaking up all these pre-packaged words and ideas. Don’t get me wrong, I need content. I love to read and to teach texts, and my book is on the way, arriving two weeks late. Still, hard pressed by the long rows and stacks, my empty shelf calls out the question, What is literature? In class we’ll follow this up with What is American? What is major? What are authors? And now as I type this, the earbuds just pushed Bob Marley into the equation. Book envy gone now. “The waiting feel is fine.”

I've been thinking about the "ragpicker" approach to creating media--the term I've culled from reading Geoff Sirc. I've been using this approach to teaching video creation for the last several years, but I've noticed that the model has shifted a good dea to enable the collecting of not only still images, but also videos. The projects are shifting from slide shows to found video compilations. I'll link this approach to a conversation Alex initiated about access and the WPA outcomes statement. I'd like to reiterate that the access concerns are really a cop-out when you think about what can be done with even basic levels of technology. To make the point I'll share this video from summer school. The video was created with nothing but found materials from the Web, snippets from a music collection, and the ubiquitous consumer video editor. Anyone who has a computer with a net connection can compose a video like Derek Sanders's Lost at Sea

There has been a good bit of discussion lately about the recent piece in CCC about revamping first year composition as an introduction to writing studies, but I’ve actually been thinking about another piece in the same issue takes up the question, What are English majors for? The question comes at a good time for me, as we’ve been working on the revision our undergraduate curriculum for the last year or so, and it’s time to concretize the plans.

Much of our curriuclum revision stems from the experience of asking graduating English majors what they thought of the program and having them list a number of disconnected classes—“I took Shakespeare, Af-Am literature, a poetry class, etc.” There is little coherency and no sense of a trajectory that one takes through the program. To give the program more of a narrative arc we want to implement two seminar courses, one at the sophomore level and the second at the senior level—the idea is to create on- and off-ramps to the curriculum, an introduction to the major and a capstone experience.

Clearly, though, revising a curriculum in any significant way requires more than adding a couple of courses. In “What are English Majors For?” Thomas P. Miller and Brenda Jackson ask departments to transition from literary studies to literacy studies, opening paths for departments to focus on education, creative non fiction, media and other areas more relevant to students’ lives and the contemporary communications landscape. This makes good sense, and I hope that some of the changes we implement can move in these directions. Of course, local context is everything and the “let’s turn English into Communication Studies” approach is likely surely to be a non-starter here. In fact, one of my biggest concerns is that we will rearrange deck chairs and not do much to transform what it means to be an English major.

You can see some of the reshuffling in the goals behind the new curriculum. Roughly, we’re thinking students should

• develop a sense of the historicity of literary studies (old school),
  
• practice writing and revision of print essays and other forms of expression (new school),
  
• have in-depth exposure to several exemplary authors (old school),
  
• have a sense of major literary genres (with some emphasis on narrative and poetry) and a strong grasp of one or more specific genres (old school),
  
• understand a number of approaches to literary texts and representation (old and new school),
  
• understand the relationships between texts and historical and cultural situations (old and new school), and
  
• recognize aesthetic dimensions of works under study and identify connections between literature and their personal lives (old and new school).

Ideally, the on- and off-ramp courses would be developed around these goals. The tricky part in thinking through a revision, though, is figuring out what to do with the courses one takes in the middle of the English major. Right now, requirements essentially spread courses out chronologically and geographically, so students must take at least one pre sixteenth-century British literature course, one twentieth-century course, and so on. It looks like we will loosen some of these requirements but keep the general focus on time and place as an organizing principle. The challenge, then, is to layer over these requirements some additional criteria that can create a sense of narrative and coherency while opening avenues for pursuing the larger curricular goals and arriving at more significant transformations.

My response is to think about ways that tagging might possibly be used to reshape some of the offerings and the help students create connections within the array of courses that meet their needs. So, a course might be tagged British, Poetry, Theory, and Gender, to name some possibilities. The hope is that this might add more flexibility to the traditional ways of organizing the middle areas of the curriculum—not just time and place. Ultimately, though, I’d like the tags to do more in terms of transforming the curriculum. Faculty could extend their course designs by layering new categories over the existing, and admittedly constraining, containers. I’m imagining tags like Composition, Media, Education, Studio, and so on that would indicate different learning emphases and teaching models.

The challenge would be to limit the number of tags/categories so that a coherency can derive among related courses. What number of tags would allow connections to form among six or eight courses taken during a career? How many tags would be too many? What tags are essential for conserving the traditional values of an English major? What tags are likely to open avenues for transformation of the curriculum?

I'm thinking about ongoing and upcoming curriculum revision efforts in our department and thought I'd get started by putting the course descriptions of all of our Fall offerings into a tag cloud--the cloud includes terms that occur ar least eight times in the compile descriptions. Interesting that the most frequently occuring term by far is class, followed by course. Not surprising because many descriptions have a phrase like "This course. . . ." Still, illuminating in some ways that the thought process and engagement terms don't bubble to the top much. Discussion has some weight. Thankfully more than quizzes. Here is the tag cloud