Re-reading Wardrip-Fruin on playable media this week, I thought of Wallace Stevens’s great long poem, “The Blue Guitar” (1937). The poem is a long riff on the way “things as they are” are transformed through the refracting energies of poetry (the titular “blue guitar”). I think both Bogost and Wardrip-Fruin, in different ways, want to think about how digital texts can marshal some of this deformative energy and create new ways of thinking about the same old, same old.

Here are some excerpts from the poem for those who are interested from a charming olde website of yore from one of my mentors, Al Filreis.

We’ll put our heads together and choose a text to “play,” beginning next week. There are no hard and fast rules on what makes for a good text, but in my view here are some general criteria:

• size matters: there’s a lot of work (well, play) in order to read the text and understand it, plus do enough research on your character in order to play them competently. So novella-length is good. Also, a modest number of main characters is much better than a Tolstoyan dramatis personae.
• rich history helps: the play really cooks when you can activate the penumbra around a text rather than just enact what happens within its pages. So texts that have interesting reception histories or performance histories or controversies around them are a good fit.
• lively voices: since you’re basically ventriloquizing characters, authors, readers, etc., one hopes for fun, lively characters to inhabit.

A few suggestions:

• At the risk of tedium, my earlier suggestion of Sinclair Lewis’s novel imagining a dystopian fascist USA, It Can’t Happen Here, would be great. I dimly remember that it was turned into a play that was widely performed in the 1930s and would be interesting to delve into.
• How about Jonathan Franzens’ The Corrections, given that it sparked the notorious Oprah Affair and occasioned all kinds of discussions about literature, media, and commerce?
• A novel with a coterie of famous readers around it might be cool, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein?

I’m sure you’ll have your own ideas, and we can have 2 or 3 games going on different texts if we like.

Finally, a few examples:

• These 720ers played Nella Larsen’s 1920s Harlem Renaissance novel of passing, Quicksand.
• And these Hunter undergrads played a cycle of Charles Chesnutt’s revisionary plantation fiction stories, The Conjure Tales.
• Finally, these 720ers played Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

The Teaching-Learning Center (TLC) and the Grad Center Digital Initiatives have some great-looking workshops coming up. In particular, check out the workshop on social annotation with hypothes.is this Wednesday (details below). We’ll be using hypothes.is and talking to hypothes.is OG and VP, Education Jeremy Dean about the platform on 10/17.

The 10/5 workshop will touch on Manifold Publishing, a platform that might appeal to groups for the second group project. Note that the 10/12 workshop will go deeper on Manifold’s possibilities, so that is must-see-TV for groups who want to use Manifold!

The final component of your first group project is to reflect on your group’s work and your role within the group.

To repeat the simple prompt from the assignment,

The last requirement is that you compose a brief post for the blog (500 words or so) reflecting on a) the process/product as a whole and b) your specific role within it, with an emphasis on what the experience taught you that merely reading about audiobooks (or, of course, merely reading the text in question) would have missed. The post is due on 10/17.

If you’d like to see an good example, check out Lisa’s from a very outre approach to Melville from 2020…

Interesting piece on the 1980s Choose Your Own Adventure series of children’s books that touches on some of the overlap between print and screen-based media we discussed last night, insofar as the CYOI series anticipates some of the 1990s giddy fascination with “hypertext media” and the contemporary proximity between cinema, video games, and the novel.

BTW if it isn’t obvious, this is your space too: feel free to post anything course-relevant on the blog as we move through the course.

For our next meeting on 9/19, I want you to write a blog post and report on it with a very brief (max 5 min) presentation on any audiobook version of a fiction text that you can get your hands on. Sources might include:

• free/open texts read by amateurs on librivox.org or similiar public domain repositories
• texts you download/check out from your local library or the GC’s library
• texts you buy from iTunes or Google Play or audible.com
• texts you own or discover at flea markets/secondhand stores

I’d like you to think about and comment on some of the following:

• production values: how much went into the recording, in terms of vocal training, editing, recording technology, etc.?
• style: is there a single voice or multiple voices? Does the narrator (or do the narrators) do “voice characterization,” modulating the voice for different characters, or not?
• fidelity: is the recording abridged or unabridged? Does it stick rigorously to the text or deviate from it?
• affect: what does it feel like to “read” this text? How does it differ from reading a printed work of fiction?

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!

This linked CUNY Academic Commons site + group will keep us organized and in close contact this term. If you’re unfamiliar with WordPress and/or the Commons, don’t fret: we’ll work through the onboarding process and any other issues in August and September.

I look forward to meeting/seeing you all in a few weeks!