Colloquium Roundtable: Literature and Technology

Digital technology has introduced new literacies into the humanities classroom. New ways of conceiving texts through the use of audio, video, and hypertext have changed what were once considered to be stable texts. Liz Bailey, Olin Bjork, and Jeff Howard will lead this roundtable discussion about the intersections of literature and digital media. They will also address how the CWRL classroom provides a unique space in which we can talk about such intersections. This roundtable will discuss ways of “mashing up” literature with digital technology: King Lear with hypertext, audio technologies with Paradise Lost and video game design with The Crying of Lot 49.

In Liz Bailey’s hyperessay: “Shocking Scripts: Bodies of Thought in King Lear and The Melancholy of Anatomy (Linking Shakespeare to Modern Hypertext),” Shakespeare’s King Lear resonates with anxiety over fragmentation and change. Bodies and text are mutable, but can we legitimately graft modern hypertext onto the body of King Lear? Shakespeare’s play suggests that the body and the nation are created by constantly changing texts: in a 'material reality' that is largely scripted by language, those in power will be writers who continue to play an active role in creating reality. As academic writers, we need to confront the persistent desire to create stable forms by reconsidering the body of our own texts. The shocking and shattering forms of hypertext fiction fused onto the body of King Lear map out the need to reformulate the body of the academic essay

In "The Rationale of Audiotext," Olin will address the current state of literary hypermedia on the Web. Because editors of electronic editions often choose design metaphors inherited from older media, an interface appropriate to new media has yet to be developed. Jerome McGann's archive metaphor, for instance, leads developers to privilege markup of electronic texts/images and to neglect the importance of an information architecture accessible to teachers and students as well as to scholars. Audio is underutilized, particularly for poetic content. With the help of an LAITS grant, Olin and John Rumrich are seeking to develop a pedagogically sound interface for their project, a Web-based “audiotext” of Book Nine of Paradise Lost.

Jeff Howard’s “Literary Pedagogy as Game Design: Interactive Fiction and the Rules of Heretical Reading” describes a strategy for using theories of computer and video game design within the literature classroom. Jeff will discuss ways of teaching postmodern novels, such as Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, in conjunction with a type of text-based computer game called interactive fiction. This method seeks to use classroom discussion to transform printed novels into interactive fictions in order to encourage freedom in the form of interaction with the text. The various interpretative operations performed on a text during discussion change the ways the text is imagined and experienced, just as players of an interactive fiction direct the outcome of a story by typing input in response to prompts. This method is a pedagogical component within a larger interpretative strategy called “heretical reading,” which operates programmatically through rules in order to give classroom discussions of postmodern fiction a recognizable purpose that includes but surpasses poststructuralist reading strategies. Jeff makes use of these pedagogical theories in his class "The Rhetoric of Detective Stories."

This is the fourth of a four-part series about the CWRL Colloquium. The colloquium will take place on November 5 in the Eastwoods Room of the Texas Union. Upcoming spotlights will describe each of the colloquium roundtable discussions.

Colloquium Roundtable: Feminist Pedagogy

Please contact facilitator Matt Russell at mrrussell@mail.utexas.edu" if you have questions about or would like to attend this panel.


Most graduate students have a working teaching philosophy in mind when they prepare to go on the job market. However, at the beginning of graduate school, new teaching assistants and assistant instructors often find themselves struggling to find their teaching approach. New instructors who identify themselves as feminists often wonder how to be feminists in the classroom. In an effort to get graduate students thinking about these issues earlier in their careers, this roundtable will workshop a feminist pedagogy website for graduate student instructors at the University of Texas.

Our website aims to be a compilation of resources to help instructors incorporate feminist teaching philosophy in the classroom. Potential content includes sample teaching philosophies, syllabi, assignments, and classroom activities as well as links to relevant journals and reference materials and related interest groups on campus. In building this website, the main challenge will be organizing content for feminist instructors across disciplines and making the website a site for community where instructors can collaborate and participate in developing content.

The participants in the workshop and collaborators on the website, CWRL instructors Erin Boade, Lee Anne Gallaway, Amanda Moulder and Jodi Relyea, will present a working framework and design of the website. We welcome anyone interested in pedagogy and technology to the workshop and look forward to any feedback and suggestions on how to design a website useful for graduate student instructors interested in feminist pedagogy across the university.

This is the third of a four-part series about the CWRL Colloquium. The colloquium will take place on November 5 in the Eastwoods Room of the Texas Union. Upcoming spotlights will describe each of the colloquium roundtable discussions.

Colloquium Roundtable: Cyber-nicities

Please contact facilitator Woo Yeom at auden@mail.utexas.edu if you have questions about or are planning to attend this roundtable.


One of the most interesting outcomes of the Internet has been the creation of mediated social networks occupied by individuals of every imaginable race, creed, color, and national origin. The past thirty years have witnessed the evolution of diverse, highly specialized online social networks from simple text-only electronic bulletin boards, listserves and usenets, accelerating in the last few years with the creation of centrally administered, and often commercially driven, virtual neighborhoods, online communities, cyber-salons, cyber-commons, community networks. This diverse ecology of alternative identities and communities continues to be deciphered by those both in the humanities and social sciences in interesting ways. This roundtable hopes to contribute to the ongoing discourse as both researchers and instructors in the CWRL.

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We will first examine the construction of “cyber-nicities” in larger social networking websites like "friendster.com" and "thefacebook.com," as well as websites designed for specific ethnicities such as "arablounge.com," "alllooksame.com," and "irishfriends.com." We will discuss ways in which ethnicities are constructed in these sites, both as exclusive in-groups and as inclusive diasporic multi-ethnic communities. With regard to the politics of identity in cyberspace, many questions come to mind: How are we to understand virtual identities? Does the online world bring something new to the identity formation process? Do online groups and communities shape the identities of their members? What is the link between virtual communities and the wider post-traditional social universe? These questions intrigue us as researchers.

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But what are the pedagogical implications of such inquiries? While these sites provide rich case studies of the formation and socialization of ethnic identities, within larger communities or in apposition to them, the inherent risks to both the students’ privacy and the instructor’s professionalism and authority create serious obstacles to using these sites in the classroom, to say nothing of the essentially voyeuristic activity it entails. We will evaluate the usefulness of such sites to teaching ethnic-American literature, while exploring the possibilities of connecting these sites to the use of technology in the classroom more generally, solutions to the ethical problems of undermining the instructor’s classroom authority, exposing the students’ privacy, and making the private thoughts of strangers the object of discussion.

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We envision this roundtable as a way for instructors to talk about the use of cyber communities in their own research and in the classroom.

This is the second of a four-part series about the CWRL Colloquium. The colloquium will take place on November 5 in the Eastwoods Room of the Texas Union. Upcoming spotlights will describe each of the colloquium roundtable discussions.

Colloquium Roundtable: Objectifying Technology in the Classroom

Please contact facilitator Jim Brown at jimbrown@mail.utexas.edu if you have quesitons about or are planning to attend this roundtable.


The CWRL classroom is a peculiar place for a class about technology. There are a number of questions that arise for any instructor in the CWRL: Do we think enough about how these computers, scanners, and software tools inform our teaching practices? Do we run the risk of letting this technology melt into the background? This roundtable discussion will take on questions about objectifying technology. The term objectify tends to be pejorative. In fact, in discussing the title for this roundtable discussion, there was disagreement about the appropriateness of the term. Do we objectify technology in the CWRL, or is it more of an intricate balance between practice and reflexivity? We hope the title of this discussion can be a jumping off point for an exchange about the complicated relationship CWRL instructors have with technology.
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The three instructors leading the roundtable discussion all deal explicitly with technology in their classes. Mariela Gunn’s “Computers and Writing”, Doug Freeman’s “TechRhet: The Rhetoric of Technology”, and Jim Brown’s “Arguing the Digital Divide” all make technology part of their course content. One could argue that the questions we’ve raised become magnified when technology is the topic of your course. Is it easier or harder to talk about technology in these classes?

We envision this roundtable as a way for instructors to talk about strategies and theoretical underpinnings of CWRL classes. Those interested in using technology in their classes or making technology a central theme of their course may find this discussion especially helpful, but we also believe this discussion will be broad enough for any CWRL instructor to find it useful and interesting.

This is the first of a four-part series about the CWRL Colloquium. The colloquium will take place on November 5 in the Eastwoods Room of the Texas Union. Upcoming spotlights will describe each of the colloquium roundtable discussions.