Keeping a learner active and challenged means constantly expanding one’s skill-set with what learns, and keeping in mind that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I would like to to approach my final project by designing a course syllabus that integrates many concepts that I have learned over the semester.  I would like to put into practice some of the ideas we have worked on to expand the interaction of a story and its ‘program’ to  make reading communal, to make it multi-modal, to make the user experience more involved.  I would like to use our course projects as a source of ideas to include on a syllabus for  a freshman English class.

Our team chose to work on Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos for our second group project.  The team included Miaoling, Raquel, Patricia and myself.  As soon as the assignment was given, we all proceeded to acquire a copy of the novel and started reading, each with some general ideas on how we would annotate the novel.  One week later we met an hour before class to discuss what we have discovered so far and to brainstorm for our next step. We all had many realizations to share with the group.  From my point, I realized how incredibly episodic and jumpy the novel is and mentioned that as I was reading, I was making notations of which scene lends itself to an annotation due to graphic descriptions as we had discussed in class (and from our readings.)  The other members thought it was a good, time-saving idea to do so. I also mentioned that I had acquired sound effects, musical numbers, and photographs that seemed appropriate for a specific scene I read.  For example, while diners were eating, I found busy restaurant ambient sounds, music from the era for when a scene was in a lounge, etc. During our discussion, Miaoling mentioned that she would like to take the annotations much further than what we mentioned and wanted to see how creative we could be.  Several ideas were brought up but when she mentioned that it would be interesting to see how AI generated images would work with the idea of the annotations we were discussing would play out, we all had the same reaction- what a great idea.  That caused a big spurt of energy and discussion. Then, Patricia mentioned that it would be very interesting to go along that route and add avant-garde paintings from that era to the annotations.  The group thought that our direction was coalescing.  We then divvied tasks for each member.  Miaoling would look into AI generated work; Patricia would look into art from that era; Raquel would take on the task of site engineer; and I would read the novel, note scenes ripe for annotations and continue acquiring images and sounds.

We communicated via email to update each member’s progress, and then we met again an hour before the next class to discuss our project.  At this meeting, we realized that we would only annotate the first chapter/section of the book as the novel became more character focused and less descriptive.  Miaoling looked into AI generated images and was excited by what she generated.  She also generated a visual map of the characters and their connections to each other.  Patricia discussed the different types of art she discovered to be included, the covers of the first edition of the novel she retrieved, and discovered that Dos Passos was also a painter himself and would like to include his work in the annotations.  Raquel was putting the site together using WordPress and adding elements to it, overcoming limitations and giving advice as to what is possible to be included. For my task, I finished reading the entire novel and summarized each chapter into 5-6 sentences and passed that long to the group. I stopped looking for sounds and images as that didn’t seem as exciting anymore.

Looking at the finished project, we were all excited for how it came out.  Although there were a few hindrances, such as not being able to play background sound while reading, we were very happy with the end product.  I believe our goal was achieved; the novel was expanded by several new reader-generated dimensions, and the story’s ‘program’ was heightened in unexpected ways. It was a very engaging project, and I leave it with new skills in hand and a memorable group project.

As We May Think by Vannevar Bush was a sumptuous article that I had to read twice.  For a person to have such a grasp of so many varying fields, their present state of development and to be able to foretell by several generations where each field is headed with specific designs was stunning to me.  His understanding of how, “Machines with interchangeable parts can now be constructed with great economy of effort” will revolutionize the various scientific fields is hyper foresight. I was taken by how prescient Bush was in the specifics of inventions that would occur in many areas.  He articulated so many specific examples that I had to remind myself of the date it was written.  Some examples that stuck out are: “The camera hound of the future wears on his forehead a lump a little larger than a walnut,” is the Go-Pro of today. “There have long been films with diazo dyes which form a picture without development, so that it is already there as soon as the camera has been operated,” foresaw the Polaroid by several decades. “Consider a future device for individual use, which is sort of a mechanized private file and library… (the) memex,” is the PC or smartphone. The list he included is much longer. For an individual to have such a grasp they must need to have a high vantage point only achievable after some focused and serious work.  I was struck by his knowledge, his grasp of the material at his disposal, and his easy going, articulate matter-of-fact manner with which he dispensed his nuggets of wisdom.

Reading the article a second time with its sheen somewhat faded due to exposure, I was a bit more critical.  Yes, he has some brilliant observations and predictions (ignoring the dated sexism.)  The first to come to mind is the catch-22 that is a bane of our present age: We are bogged down by specialization but need specialization for progress, he notes. How can we continue to specialize and yet contribute to the larger field of science when most everyone is telescopically focused and we publish much but don’t understand most. He states, “A record if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored and above all it must be consulted.”  And here’s the rub: nowhere in the piece does he mention how given the incredible achievement of the scientists during this period to have come together to work together and achieve a common goal (defeat an enemy) this focus, this comradery could be used for the benefit of humans.  We won the war; could we not have gone on to win the peace? Why progress for progress’ sake? Given the era he just emerged out of, why not think of humaneness?  Why not harness this incredible energy to solidify institutional, scientific codes or systems of humaneness- progress must serve specific human endeavor, e.g. eradicate hunger, build affordable homes, renewable cooking contraptions for nomadic peoples?  Reflecting of those ideas made the piece a bit different for me.  Yes, he was still prophetic, but, now, as a somewhat, detached scientist wanting to only progress for progress’s sake.  An element of hubris drifted in, something of a Victor Frankenstein element. Technology is not an altar to worship at but a toolbox only to be consulted conscientiously. This echo rang in my brain.

Deformance and Interpretation by Samuels an McGann reads like a treatise with all of the attendant aspects such a monograph involves, such as returning to it over and over, to gain insights, guides of action, ways of understanding, and novel techniques to use in the area.  This is definitely the case in this laden dissertation. The authors extend our ability to interact with an imaginative work. Instead of, “the usual object of interpretation (which is) ‘meaning,’” the authors postulate, “… alternative moves to break beyond conceptual analysis into kinds of knowledge involved in performative operations- a practice of everyday imaginative life.” They want the reader to gain new insight into a work by the act of poiesis rather than just dissection or criticism.  Because a creative work is open for performance, it’s also open to more. They give 4 possibilities for such an extension: reordered (reading backward), isolating, altering, or adding. They draw from history to show lineage of these ways of interrogating a text to help a reader open up more avenues than just plain meaning.  They refer to Blake who wanted this extension as well as Dickenson who wanted to discover what is possible from an imaginative piece to Dante for whom ‘meaning is a dynamic exchange than a discoverable content, and that the exchange is best revealed as a play of differences.” Several of the deformations made intuitive sense to me.  It is something I practice in a visual mode.  When looking at a photograph or a painting, I (when physically viable) turn it upside down.  This opens up new ways of looking at the piece.  New relationships, new compositional elements, new negative space elements show themselves. Following a footnote led me to a musical equivalent by John Cage in his Silences: Lectures and Writings where he deformes Satie and Varese.  This stimulated the grey cells a bit faster and I realized that this was the birth of what is now hip-hop.  The birth of hip-hop is rap where an individual practiced 2 of the methods mentioned- reordered and isolated the original creative piece to extract new meaning – poiesis! By ‘reading backward’ the LP or 12” and isolating certain sections, the ‘reader’ was able to create new meaning from the original piece. The process was exactly the same as that elucidated by Samuels and McGann. The original imaginative piece was used as a basis of poiesis rather than mere interpretation or analysis. Samuels and McGann offer a useful tool to add to my creative toolbox.

Going into our group project, I didn’t know what to expect from the product of our group. I didn’t expect the audio book to be as interesting and exciting as it turned out. We were a group of 5: Majel Peters, Patricia Belen, Raquel Neris, Brianna Cazatt, Kai Prenger, and myself. Bri suggested that we do something with The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which I was immediately drawn to as I really like the story, but she wanted to do something unusual and suggested that we intersperse it with another story.  We were all intrigued and on board. I recommended The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin, another story I’m familiar with and thought it would seamlessly work with TheYellow Wallpaper.  From there Natalie suggested The Box Social by James Reaney as a good one to include as it has the same theme as the other two- controlled women. All the members had read 2 of the 3 but none had read all three, so there was some anticipated excitement in the air. The group started humming with ideas and we became eager to see what we could do.  Bri did most of the heavy lifting by cutting and splicing the text together.  At first, I thought I would like to be a reader but changed my mind as all the stories had women narrators, and I was annoyed while looking for an audiobook to listen to in the previous week and discovered that most all of the readers were men for women narrators.  That made me averse to being a reader. The group decided on roles by stating what each member liked to do.  Majel took the reading part for The Yellow Wallpaper as did Patricia for The Story of an Hour as did Raquel for The Box Social.  Kai and Natalie had much experience and took the sound engineering roles.  I took the presenter role. Over the course of the week, we emailed back and forth ideas, edits, suggestions, and it took shape.  The whole process and the group workings were so natural that they seemed pre-destined.  Everything fell into place. When I heard the first recording when Majel email it to us, I was stirred by how natural and hypnotic was her voice.  At first, I was sitting while I was listening hesitant to stand for fear of losing concentration.  But, after about 10 minutes I noticed that I was putting some clothes away and still immersed in the story. That was an awakening for me.  I knew that Leah Price had talked about the bullet point of being able to do something else while listening, but it was the actual experience that made me believe it.  Again, over the course of several days, my group mates were very diligent in doing their part of the task.  When I received the final version, the combined stories became a whole new story that was very engaging and made my visual of narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper more vivid.  It seemed natural for a writer who was prevented from writing to imagine a story, especially one that speaks to the situation that they are in- control and life not under a thumb. Being able to do a mindless chore such as putting away my clothes while listening to an audio book made sense to me now.  I can actually ‘read’ more now and maybe my reading list just might have a chance to getting diminished a bit faster. I’m happy to report I now have a new ’shelf’ for more books.

The time Walter Benjamin was writing The Storyteller was not dissimilar to our own.  Both eras had economic upheaval; both had tumultuous political rattlings; both had cultural gyrations; and both had new technologies coming to the fore.  The focus of his essay is a critique of the writer Nikolai Leskov, and in expounding his views he prefaces his points by analyzing what a storyteller is and what is their trade, concluding that the art of storytelling is dying, if not already mostly dead.

For Benjamin, the storyteller is one who practices his craft orally.  The source of stories is oral tradition which contains practical and useful life insights. As he states, “experience which is passed on from mouth to mouth is the source from which all storytellers have drawn” (Benjamin 84). He continues to explain that there are two types of storytellers equivalent to those who stay round their homestead practicing guild craftsmanship and those who travel afar and return to share their escapades.  Both types perform similar services which is to pass along, “openly or covertly, something useful’ to act as “having counsel” in several modes whether it be moral advice, practical advice or a proverb (Benjamin 88). This counsel is not so much an answer as it is a “proposal concerning the continuation of a story which is unfolding” (Benjamin 88). In this way the listener gains valuable insight themselves and at the same time propagates the culture because stories have many interpretations and will be interpretated appropriately for each era. They are appropriate because they are motivated by the universal human condition of death, which is the fundamental motivator of all stories.

Death as a motivation for stories is developed in more detail by Peter Brooks in his essay Freud’s Masterplot. In it he explains that the model of a narrative plot- a story- “is constituted in the tension of two formal categories, difference and resemblance” (280). The transformation between them is a synthesis which can be called a metaphor (Brooks 280). I believe it is this metaphorical aspect that allows stories to withstand time and are interpreted differently in different eras. The specific key in metaphor is metonymy which provides the movement, the tension, of a narrative. Quoting Todorov, he states, ‘[transformation] is an operation in two directions: it affirms at once resemblance and difference; it puts time into motion and suspends it, in a single movement; it allows discourse to acquire a meaning without this meaning becoming pure information; in a word, it makes narrative possible and reveals its very definition” (281). He makes clear the distinction between story and information which Benjamin was discussing as a major reason that storytelling is fading. What makes us gravitate towards stories as a moth to a flame is as Barthes noted,” the passion that animates us as readers of narrative is the passion for (of) meaning” (Brooks 282). Barthes continues with the idea that passion is a desire for the end whether it baffles us or fascinates us (Brooks 282). The example of the strongest articulations of this point is from Sartre’s La Nausee where Roquentin says, “In reality you have started at the end…but the end is there, transforming everything” (Brooks 283). Brooks restates, “ the beginning in fact presupposes the end.  The very possibility of meaning plotted through time depends on the anticipated structuring force of the ending” (283). In other words, the beginning is predicated on the ending, so we animate our lives with death in view and as the animating force to tell our story.  It is indicative that Sartre, a proponent of Existentialism, which views the individual as being responsible for their own life creating meaning and purpose- creating their own story- as the person who articulated most clearly (according to Brooks) what animates a narrative.

While Benjamin was heading down the pessimistic path for stories and their death by thousands of novels and newspapers, others aren’t as fatalistic. Danton wrote ”What is the history of Books?” in 1982 focused on book history to gather a cohesive overview of the field as, at the time, it seemed very discombobulated.  He discovered that the communication leading to a book had 6 stages and surprisingly, historically, the mundane stages took the majority of effort.  Getting paper was 50% of the effort. Revisiting the article in 2007, he had further insights.  Although fragmentation was still in existence, he proposed three questions for the field: How do books come into being? How do they reach readers? What do readers make of them? (Darnton 497) He also noted that an exciting endeavor of book history in 1965 was “history from below” (Darnton 496). This started the discussion of ordinary readers on the street and their reading habits and away from those higher up the reading scale. What he discovered through McKenzie’s work was that text resonate across the ages and through social class (Darnton 506). He notes how McKenzie showed, “the character of Congreve’s plays was transformed from scrappy, bawdy quartos of the late 17c to stately classicism of the 1701 octavo edition. Although the texts remaind essentially the same, their meaning was modified by page design, new modes of presenting scenes and the typographical articulation of all the parts” (Darnton 506). A historical example of meaning modified by design.

In an interview with Merve Emre, Leah Price noted that book history “represents a shift in understanding from looking at texts through the vantage of the author to looking at texts from the vantage point of the reader” (Emre 2). She continues with the vantage view ‘from below.” Bringing book history to our era shows the distinction between our point of view and that of Benjamin.  Whereas he was sentimental and fatalistic, our era is more optimistic. Johanna Drucker in The Virtual Codex from Page Space to E-space ushers us into our present environment. Although the birth of the e-space has had its spurts, it is stabilizing. One hindrance that held the e-book back was the insistence of publishers to try to mimic the physical codex in electronic form- a kitchy proposal (Drucker 216). The approach now in view is not about replicating the way a book looks but extending the ways a book works as we go digital (Drucker 216). Taking how a book works as a starting point, we can move forward with our approach to stories and storytelling.  Drucker appropriates an architectural metaphor in explicating how a book works. The architectural profession says ‘program’ for the formal structure of an entity to denotes how it works.  “Program” consists of the activities that arise from a response to the formal structure (Drucker 220). With this in mind, she continues that the “program” of a book involves activities that she names the phenomental book- the complex production of meaning that arises from dynamic interaction with the literal work (Drucker 221). From there we can develop virtual books to replace the traditional codex.  Features of the electronic space need to add new functionality for it to be relevant and not repeat the mistakes of the origin of the ebook (Drucker 219). Tracing the history of reading puts this in perspective. She draws a summation. In the 12^th century, reading was monastic where reading was solitary followed by contemplative prayer. This was followed by an emphasis on Aristotelian rhetoric and logic. During that time, readers needed meta-textual structures to help with analysis. Heads, sub-heads, tables of contents, page numbers, etc. (Drucker 225). Our era is a continuation of that development. Examples such as Sophie at SpecLab and Collex are attempts to push the boundaries further of the ‘program’ of a text.

The publishing industry is publishing more and more, with a strong growth of audio books bringing ‘reading’ to more people, more often.  The drive for narration is alive, well, and thriving.  One can say that it has taken a utopian element in that Librvox is a community that is based on idealistic tenets and it is thriving. It has a community that shares and cares for its members without the added negativity that is usually contained in ‘reviews.’ The space is a public collective repository of public domain texts that are made into audio books by volunteers (Weber 210).  It is a new iteration of a traditional book community with an innovative aspect. “Librivox demonstrated how collaborative, amateur forms of production could work in a cultural space” (Weber 211). It has not only added a new functionality, which was a point that Drucker mentioned, but it has also “engaged the reader in ‘a process of creation’ that involves both (re)interpretation and then (re)creattion” (Weber 213).

Unlike Benjamin where for him storytelling was bound to fade away, the converse is happening. Librivox is one example which has elements of a fully participatory utopian community where everyone is an author and an artist. What next? Political reform?!

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller.” Illuminations. Schocken Books. NY

Darnton, Robert. ‘”What Is The History of Books?” Revisited’. Modern Intellectual      History. 2007 doi: 10.1017/S1479244307001307

Drucker, Johanna. “The Virtual Codex from Page Space to E-space”.

Emre, Merve. “Public Thinker: Leah Price on Books, Book Tech and Book Tattoos” Publicbooks.org. 2022

Weber, Millicent. ‘”Reading” the Public Domain: Narrating and Listening to Librivox Audiobox. Book History, 24.1. Spring 2021.pp. 209-243. Johns Hopkins Press.

Reading the articles for this weeks, rereading previous articles, and incorporating new sources, I had a framework in mind when I went to listen to the first audio book. This is something that I haven’t done in a very long time, so I was curious for the experience.

First, I found a copy of Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour and gave it a listen at home at my desk. The quality of the reading was high as it was done by a professional. The voice was clear, crisp, with strong Standard English enunciation. I followed story and kept my focus on it. About 1/4 of the way through I fidgeted as I didn’t appreciate a man’s voice for the narrator. Interesting, I thought. This put on the trail of other versions, which I found- 3 to be exact, all male voices. This gave me pause, so I went searching for another book- Sweat by Zora Neale Hurston.Again, I found a copy voiced by a male with high quality production which I listened to with the same reaction. Searching further, I discovered one voiced by a female. However, this wasn’t professionally done but was done by an academic. The quality was acceptable but distracting. The speaker was a Southerner which lent the voice a closer connection to the words, but the misspeaking and throat clearing were a distraction. This made me think of the points that English brought up in the article, “Teaching the Novel in the Audio Age,” where he listed drawbacks that have to be overcome as we incorporate aural books into our classrooms, a concern for me. This also made me reflect on D..E..McKenzie’s point in his sociology of text where he mentions text may be the same but the meaning is modified by page design, new modes of presenting scenes, and articulation of the parts. I continued and searched for  Steinbeck’sChrysanthemums. This was off putting as the male voice was heavy handed for the male and lisp for the female. I continued  and  I searched for Gogol’s The Overcoat and was going in circles until I found that audio versions have it translated as The Cloak. I have very long daily commutes, where I usually read. One day, I put on my earbuds and listened to the story. I was happy to give my eyes a rest. Something I didn’t notice until half way through the story. I also found myself unwinding a bit by sitting back and closing my eyes. This was a treat. This made me think of Price when she was having an interview with Emre and she said that, no, her work is not to be a  “killjoy” but the opposite and bring more into lives.

A new chapter is happening and I didn’t even turn a page.