As promised, here are some guidelines and ideas as you do the reading for the next session and write your first blog post. The readings for this week are kind of “meta,” having us read about reading and think about the often-unthought ways that we produce, process, consume, and engage with words. I’d thought to give you a nice prompt that synthesizes the four texts, but I’m finding that approach to be too Procrustean, given the diversity and richness of the different scholars’ approaches.
Instead, I’d like to leave it up to you to draw your own focus on themes and/or texts you find most compelling. For those who, like me, find it difficult to winnow things down and get started, here are some themes you might engage:
- Price argues against what she calls the “myth of exceptionalism” governing our moment of ascendent digital media forms. Pressman also resists declension narratives that assume that our current reading practices represent a degraded version of what we used to do much better in a prior Golden Age of literacy. What do you think? Is Google making us stupid? What kinds of evidence do Price, Coady and Pressman marshal, and what weak spots, if any, do you find in their arguments?
- Liu’s somewhat antique piece (2013) on the shift from Web 1.0 to 2.0 emphasizes changes in the “core circuit” linking authors, readers, and other players in the game of textuality (editors, developers, etc.). How, according to Liu, do these infrastructural changes relate to changes in the literary field? How does “reading” something called “a text” start to mean something different in the era of Web 2.0?
- The readings are delivered to you, as is often the case in the post-Web .- world, variably: two are in .pdf, one is in a proprietary ebook format used by libraries (Ebrary), and one was composed/reviewed/read using CommentPress, a “social reading”-oriented WordPress theme. What are the effects of these different “circuits” we find ourselves in when reading these texts? Where does each position us vis a vis the author and other agents in connecting us to the text? What are some of the “affordances,” the implied ways we are invited to interact with an object (here, a text) at work in each of these examples?
The best posts will:
- be about 500-800 words in length (over is not an issue if you’re in the groove)
- reference the text specifically, with quotes or paraphrases of particular moments in the argument (though not with full-bore MLA style: a page number is sufficient to orient peers to what you’re talking about!)
- have a clear focus, honing in on a particular theme that interests you
- be written in an engaging way, communicating your investment and conveying a sense that what you argue has real stakes
I look forward to reading your work!
