Computers, Writing, Rhetoric and Literature

Ed Madden
Department of English
University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC 29208

Contrast is fundamental to understanding, for no subject, idea, or text is an island. In order to become intelligible 'in itself,' it needs to be seen in its relation to other subjects, ideas, and texts.
- Gerald Graff, Beyond the Culture Wars (108).

1. Much of the work of the literature classroom is teaching students how to make associations. Of course, there are the necessary tasks of teaching important names and texts, of providing historical contexts, of tracing periods, of describing genres, but the overarching task is teaching students how to read by making connections -- making associations and comparisons between and among texts, and reading those texts within the various contexts of genre, history, biography, period, culture, ideology, and theoretical approach. Whether it be a New Critical tracing of similar themes in a number of modernist poems, or a historical analysis of Samuel Taylor Coleridge responding poetically to William Wordsworth, or a feminist analysis of Wordsworth reworking details from his sister Dorothy's journals, or a political and poststructuralist comparison of a contemporary version of a canonical text to its more traditional predecessor (such as Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre, or Eliot's "Journey of the Magi" and the gospel account), the business of literary analysis is that of making associations and comparisons, and of abstracting meaning from those associations. I, as a teacher, am delighted when students make not only intertextual comparisons but comparisons which cross generic, historical, cultural, and canonical boundaries. For example, in a recent modernist poetry class, I was thrilled when students compared the "Crazy Jane" poems of William Butler Yeats not only to Chaucer's Wife of Bath but also to popular singer Madonna and to television character Murphy Brown (pace Dan Quayle!). The students were doing what I had hoped they would do: making thematic associations, reading in historical and generic contexts, and making political and theoretical comparisons.
   
   
2. I want to suggest that the use of hypertextual software in the literature classroom demonstrates and facilitates the making of such associations. Hypertextual software, such as Hypercard and StorySpace, makes possible a kind of reading that makes literary texts intelligible through comparison and context, and hypertexts provide a way of teaching students to read associatively -- whether those associations be literary, historical, cultural, or political. Hypertexts provide a way of reading and teaching literary texts that is theoretically and politically responsible, culturally productive, and pedagogically useful. To illustrate these three points, I examine below three applications from a survey of British literature which I taught in a networked computer classroom at the University of Texas at Austin (though I think even a literature class that had only occasional use of computers would find hypertextual applications useful). The first example (and the example I will develop most in this essay) is a HyperCard document based on W. B. Yeats's "Leda and the Swan," a document which I thought was theoretically and politically responsible in the way it foregrounded the gender politics of a canonical text. The second example is a StorySpace hypertext on the "Bog People" poems of Seamus Heaney. This text incorporated a number of cultural contexts (aesthetic, historical, biographical), and thus allowed the students to read the poems in relation to those contexts rather than as isolated literary icons. While I as an instructor designed both of these hypertexts and used them to teach certain texts, the final example is a set of student-generated hyperdocuments. The final assignment for the course was a group project, utilizing StorySpace, in which the students were supposed to trace and explain a theme through a number of texts, canonical and otherwise. In the five student projects developed for this assignment, the students demonstrated their understanding of how texts may be read in association with other texts and contexts. In all of these examples, hypertextual software facilitated the interpretive and pedagogical processes necessary for a literature classroom.
   
   

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   Re:Writing the Myth of Leda

   Leda worked late
   at the library that night.
   - Robert M. Chute, "Apprehended: White Male"

3. I begin with a problem, the problem with which I began my sophomore British literature class: how can you teach William Butler Yeats's "Leda and the Swan." The poem is artful, canonical, and compelling; yet ultimately it is also a poem about rape, a poem that uses the image of rape as a central figure for inspiration, for poetry, and for history. As a poet, I find the poem to be beautifully crafted; as a modernist scholar, I think it is a historically important part of the modernist canon; yet as a feminist critic, I find it troublesome and potentially repugnant to some readers. When I teach "Leda and the Swan" in an introduction to poetry class, I like to teach it alongside the sonnet "Leda's Version," written by contemporary Canadian poet James Harrison, a poem which attempts to rewrite Yeats by giving Leda a voice. (The poem is included in Harrison's 1983 collection, Flying Dutchmen.) Harrison's poem engages the myth of Leda and the sonnet tradition, and but it also specifically revises Yeats's poem. For example, Yeats's grand opening, "A sudden blow: the great wings beating still," is rewritten as "A furtive blow, more like." Harrison demythologizes Yeats's "feathered glory" by having Leda sarcastically describe the god's "fake/ webbed feet and wet feathers," and she further ironizes the whole situation by noting that this "lord of the sky" was "in just as clumsy a rush as all the rest" -- a deflating revision of Yeats's "white rush," an abstract image that metaphorically collapses both bird and semen into a sense of divine, male power.
   
   
4. Putting the two poems together allowed me to feel more comfortable teaching the Yeats, since to do so foregrounded issues of voice, gender, and sexual politics. But how to do this comparison effectively was another problem altogether. The third edition of the Norton Introduction to Poetry (1986), which I once used in poetry classes, includes both poems (291 and 313), but, problematically, the more recent fourth edition of the Norton Introduction to Poetry (1991) has dropped "Leda's Version" (360) for another Harrison poem "Penelope".The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Major Authors of course includes only the Yeats (2312). Harrison's wonderfully teachable and politically efficacious poem, "Leda's Version," appeared briefly in textbooks, then quickly dropped out. To simply copy the Harrison poem for the British literature class did not seem to me adequate, since a photocopy does not have the same cultural weight as a hefty anthology of great men and their great works. One discourse -- that of masterworks and major authors -- quite literally outweighed the other.
   
   
5. Admittedly, the networked computer classroom did allow me to complicate the discursive space of the classroom in a number of ways, ways that seemed to trouble the traditional authority of the lecturing professor and the traditional canon. As many analyses of the networked classroom have noted, the space is marked by increased "social interaction and engagement, cooperative discourse, intellectual exchanges, and the formation of discourse communities that are student-centered rather than teacher-centered" (Hawisher and Selfe 10), aspects which decenter the instructor as the monological and authoritative center of the class. In an attempt to further decenter or at least trouble the authoritative centrality of the textbook anthology, I had begun the class with Maya Angelou's inaugural poem, "On the Pulse of Morning," and I insisted in an introductory memo to the class that our focus would move from the textbook to other contemporary cultural texts. The software used in the classroom (the Daedalus Integrated Writing Environment, or DIWE) included a classroom mail system and a directory for class files, so I put additional texts, such as contemporary poems and popular songs, in mail messages to the class and in files designated for class access. The students themselves suggested other texts and issues both in mail messages and in class discussions. Since most of our discussions took place on the computers, using a real-time discussion program (Daedalus Interchange), the discussion transcripts themselves could become "texts" available for study, review, and analysis. I filed these printed transcripts in the reference room of the undergraduate library for study, as well as in the directory of class files. All of these aspects of the networked classroom may complicate the traditional discursive space of the literature classroom, focused as it is by lecture, discussion, and textbook. The networked classroom shifts focus from professor to student, from lecture to discussion and collaboration, and from textbook to textuality.
   
   
6. However, in thinking about how to integrate the Yeats and Harrison poems, I decided that none of the options offered by the networked classroom were exactly what I wanted. I wanted the Harrison and Yeats poems to be read clearly in dialogue, in conversation. I further wanted to situate the Yeats poem in another discursive context, in a conversation about issues rather than a textbook about great men and their great texts and great ideas. Typing out the Harrison text as a mail message, or including it in the directory of class files as a text to be accessed, or simply adding Harrison's book to the library reserves, or -- worse -- handing out a throwaway photocopy: none of these would work. My solution was a hypertext. The idea came from a colleague of mine, Margaret Downs-Gamble, who had told me about placing versions of various John Donne poems in conversation on the computer screen -- either through simultaneously opened files or through a HyperCard document. With her help, I designed a HyperCard document on literary and visual representations of the myth of Leda, displacing Yeats's sonnet into a visual and textual conversation with a number of other texts.
   
   
7. As it evolved, the Leda hyperdocument included much more than the two poems by Yeats and Harrison. I incorporated Olga Broumas's "Leda and Her Swan," a contemporary lesbian version of the myth (from her 1977 Beginning with O); a contemporary poem by Robert Chute called "Apprehended: White Male," which explicitly rewrites the tale as a modern rape (set in New York's Central Park); a turn-of-the-century poem by Michael Field (penname for Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper), "A Pen Drawing of Leda" from Sight and Song (1892); Yeats's other annunciation poem, "Mother of God"; and notes on Yeats's poetry from A. Norman Jeffares's Commentary on the Collected Poems. I also included versions by the recent American poet laureate Mona Van Duyn: "Leda" and "Leda Reconsidered" from the poet's 1971 To See, To Take. The Van Duyn poems, like the Harrison poem, are feminist revisions of the myth, and they, like Harrison's sonnet, specifically address Yeats's question of whether Leda "put on his knowledge with his power," but Van Duyn adds a biographical context by reading Leda as an allegory for Yeats's relationship with Maud Gonne.
   
   
8. Each poetic text was assigned a card in the HyperCard stack. (HyperCard operates metaphorically as a stack of index cards, though each "card" may hold an indefinite amount of information.) Each card also featured a "Notes" button; students might point and click on this button for critical commentary or background information. Referring to Ian Fletcher's 1982 Yeats Annual article, which discusses a number of visual representations that Yeats might have had in mind, and with the help of the computer lab staff, I scanned in a number of pictures, tying a visual representation to almost every poem in the stack (also accessed through a button on the card). The Field poem seemed especially relevant in this context, since it is a poem explicitly about a visual representation; as Bradley and Cooper state in the preface to Sight and Song, "The aim of this little volume is . . . to translate into verse . . . the lines and colours of certain pictures" (v). Downs-Gamble later added a response option to the Hypercard stack, so that students could add their own comments to the overall document.
   
   
9. Obviously, situating Yeats thus in the hypertext enriched our reading by displacing the canonical text into a larger conversation about the representation of Leda, providing visual and verbal interconnections, foregrounding a number of relevant issues (particularly the gender politics of the poem), and indeed suggesting a larger cultural conversation available about the poem, the myth, and about representation. I unknowingly scheduled the poem for the Friday of the University's "Rape Awareness Week," and this serendipity gave the hypertext additional rhetorical force, since students read this literary representation of rape within their own contemporary cultural and politcal context, a context inevitably reflected in their own written responses to the text. The addition of the student response option more clearly established a critical conversation, one which the students could join. If the impulse behind the creation of this hypertext was my desire to be theoretically and politically responsible in teaching a poem that uses rape as its central metaphor, and a desire to give voice to the traditionally voiceless (hence "Leda's Version" of the story), then this final addition of student voices was surely an important aspect of the document. Such a dynamic document not only rereads the literary icon in larger contexts, but it also makes students part of the conversation; they are part of the production of cultural meaning, and their voices become part of the text itself.
   
   

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   Digging Up the Dead, or De/Composing: Seamus Heaney's Bog People

   Between my finger and my thumb
   The squat pen rests.
   I'll dig with it.
   - Seamus Heaney, "Digging"

10. Hypertextual applications seem especially conducive for placing texts in conversation. Not only may an instructor discuss the dialogue at work in a set of poems, but by using a hypertext he or she may also place those texts visually in conversation, though connected "cards" in HyperCard or "spaces" in StorySpace. Such programs provide an incredibly effective way to visualize and read texts intertexually, both with and against other literary texts and in the context of other discourses. With the Leda document we not only put Yeats in conversation with Harrison (and the myth in contrast with Leda's version thereof), we also displaced the literary icon into a community of discourses -- visual art, textual commentary, the relations of literature and politics, feminist critique, and student responses. The other hyperdocument I used in the class, a StorySpace hypertext about Seamus Heaney's "Bog People" poems, also incorporated the literary into a broader field of discourse, perhaps more effectively than the Leda document since it allowed greater freedom in student interpretation.
    
    
11. Using the image of the Iron Age bodies discovered preserved in the peat bogs of Northern Europe, contemporary Irish poet Heaney wrote several poems comparing prehistoric violence of religious sacrifices to the contemporary religious and sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. Heaney had read a book called The Bog People, written by P. V. Glob, and the photographs in the book provided a visual stimulus for his own poems. (Heaney discusses this connection in his 1974 essay "Feeling Into Words," published in Preoccupations). I wanted the students to have this visual and interpretive context. I could have simply checked out the book from the library and passed it around the classroom during discussion, but I thought it would be much more interesting -- perhaps much more fruitful -- to tie each poem to the relevant visual image.
    
    
12. More specifically, I thought that to tie each poem to relevant visual images would suggest the connection at work in the poet's composition and might mirror the connections of his imaginative process. I also thought that it would suggest the importance of examining intertextual connections (the Glob book and Heaney's exploratory essay), that it would strengthen the imagistic force of the poems, and, finally, that it would augment any discussion of the abstract and metaphorical connections Heaney was drawing between distant historical periods and cultures. When reading Heaney's description of "The Grauballe Man" --
    I first saw his twisted face
    in a photograph,
    a head and shoulder
    out of the peat,
    bruised like a forceps baby
    
    -- it seems appropriate to be able to access the actual photograph of the head and shoulder rising from the peat in the act of reading. And when Heaney compares the Grauballe Man to the ancient statue of the Dying Gaul, it also seems helpful to provide a picture of that statue (particularly since many of the students may not know the work or may not be able to visualize the comparison Heaney suggests).
    
    
13. I constructed a StorySpace document "Into the Bog," which incorporates the Heaney poems, photographs from the Glob book, a picture of the Dying Gaul, and some critical commentary and relevant quotations from Heaney essays. The inclusion of excerpts from the essay "Feeling Into Words" -- in which Heaney describes his search for appropriate "emblems of adversity" (57) and his discovery of the Glob text -- gives students an interpretive basis for comparison of text and image, and for thinking about the poet's search for an image (or "emblem") that would represent his sense of and poetic interpretation of contemporary violence. StorySpace allowed me to highlight and make connections among texts, words, and images at a number of levels. Students could move from the text to the visual image, from one text to another, or from one word to a critical comment. More interestingly, perhaps, since StorySpace utilizes spatial metaphors, the format itself facilitated a certain spatial way of reading, moving through the hyperdocument horizontally, from one space or text to another, or going down in the text vertically to the excavated bodies which creatively and visually lie under the poems. Or readers might move in more complex and discontinuous and subterranean ways through the various connections or "paths" marked connecting words and commentary in otherwise disconnected texts. The possible interplay of surfaces, connections, depths, paths, and maps provides a textual "bog" through which the students might move.
    
    
14. The text/photo correlation may help demonstrate Heaney's creative process as well as enrich student readings of the poems, but the hyperdocument further suggests the variety and levels and possibilities of connections that might be made among a number of texts. I like the StorySpace document more than the HyperCard for a number of reasons. First, it is easier to construct -- since StorySpace has a limited number of commands, and once those are mastered you can create quite detailed and complex texts. Second, I like the spatial metaphor, since I think it suggests a way of thinking about texts that I find theoretically and pedagogically useful, imagining texts in relation to one another, not just as a series of cards with notes, and not just as texts placed alongside one another in conversation, but a spatialization of texts in relation to one another, with relationships and connections mapped out at a number of levels and in any number of directions. Such a rich map of connections produces a number of readings; students might pursue thematic connections, historical comparisons, political readings, aesthetic analyses (of the relation of visual to verbal), all of these present in the hyperdocument itself, which foregrounds the relation of the literary to broader cultural contexts.
    
    

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    The Smell of Crayons: Ways of Reading

    Like literature itself, hypertext remains an open, changing, expanding system of relationships, one that allows one to read [Wole] Soyinka without abandoning Homer.
    - George Landow and Paul Delany, "Hypertext, Hypermedia, and Literary Studies" (29)

15. It was a StorySpace document which I assigned to my students. There were five groups of 3-5 students, and each group was supposed to collaboratively construct a hyperdocument for their final project. The class assignment listed the following requirements: "one project hyperdocument (using at least 5 primary texts about the proposed theme, including the equivalent of 10-12 pages of written analysis); also one group statement (1-2 pages), summarizing the theme for class presentation, and one individual statement (2-3 pages) explaining your own individual understanding and rationale for the project." During the last week of class, each group was to present their text to the class. I put the hypertexts on the classroom server (the computer through which the classroom computers were connected or "networked") so that everyone could read them simultaneously on their computers. The group statements were photocopied and distributed ahead of time; these statements were intended to provide the class an introduction to each project, summarizing argument and theme.
    
    
16. I provided the class with a list of themes -- most having to do with our class focuses on narrative, storytelling, and retold stories. The actual themes chosen were: women's versions, retold myths, retold religious tales, monsters, and the relation of memory to community. Interestingly, I discovered that the students often used the "conversation" trope as a heuristic. Many of the texts, perhaps drawing on the Yeats-Harrison comparison as a model, focused on revisions or new versions or retellings of traditional stories. As well, form often seemed to match content. A text on literary monsters was, indeed, monstrous, with no visible beginning or ending and a chaotic series of connections. The document on women's versions included many visual representations, an important part of their gender critique. The hypertext on retold religious tales -- which was fraught with personal anxieties about potentially offensive tales, something this group had grappled with all semester as devout Catholics -- incorported personal response as an important part of the document itself. Some of the texts were loose structures, like the monster text; others were very hierarchically designed, even rigid structures. In the memory text, for example, most sites in the text only offer two options of movement into the text, and one option to back up, so that by the time you got to the end of one path, you had to back all the way to the beginning to go elsewhere in the text.
    
17. Of course, that format was to a great extent a function of the makers of the document rather than the self-reflexive mapping of form with content. Every group had a designated leader, and every group had a designated "StorySpace person." I met with each StorySpace person for an hour tutorial, during which I taught them basic commands, and we built a mock document. In part I had designed the Heaney hypertext so that I would have a good idea of what I was asking my students to do. Some of those people taught their teams, contributing to the creation of texts like the monster one, in which everyone was involved in the designing and constructing and connecting. Others, such as the memory group, let one person do all the programming, so he made a very rigid, very top-down structure to lead the reader through the arguments.
    
    
18. Grading was not easy. My students truly showed that they had learned a way of reading literature, a way of reading texts in conversation with other texts, with ideas, and in broader cultural contexts than the literature classroom. But grading involved an assessment of the texts chosen, of the connections and arguments made, and of the actual construction of the document, as well as the demonstration of associative and critical reading. (At the most reductive level of this, StorySpace allows one to count the number of spaces and links, and I was able to print out the pages of analyses.) Complicating evaluation further, the documents were subject to the usual problems of group work, especially the problem of unevenness. The retold myth hypertext, for example, had some incredibly detailed analyses (primarily by one of the most diligent students in the class, a classics major), and some incredibly poor analyses, dependent on who was doing the writing. But I still thought the assignment worked, in that the students did demonstrate their understanding of reading texts associately, of comparing them, of contextualizing them, and of abstracting from those comparisons an argument of some kind.
    
    
19. I began thinking about my class with the problem of how to teach Yeats's "Leda and the Swan" in a theoretically and politically responsible manner, and in hypertexts I discovered an answer. My use of hypertexts also addressed a number of other pedagogical problems: how to foreground the politics of canonicity, how to incorporate the visual into the process of reading, how to displace the iconic texts into a textual conversation. More generally, the dilemma was the theoretical problem of intertexuality. By "intertextuality" I mean the relation of literary texts to other texts (literary and nonliterary) and to the other discourses and systems of signification at work in the culture. In terms of the classroom, this problem of intertextuality has to do with how to read and discuss and write texts in a way that puts them in conversation with other texts, other images, other discourses -- indeed, how to study literature in a way that mirrors how we think, and how I want my students to think about literature.
    
    
20. Hypertexts, as Landow and Delany note, make it easier for one "to create and perceive interconnections" (17). In the Hypertext/Hypermedia Handbook (1991), editors Emily Berk and Joseph Devlin write:
    

    Hypertext builds upon the relative strengths of the human mind and the digital computer: the computer holds the data and presents it to the human, the human chooses which way to go by pointing at each juncture. It is an intuitive approach in which the ability to link associated text matches the brain's natural tendency to think associatively. So, for example, the smell of crayons reminds you of Miss Hyperlove, your first grade teacher, whose intoxicating scent made it easier to remember how to spell "intoxicating." (10)

21. Or, one might say, for example (as the four women writing about women's versions demonstrated), that reading Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own" reminds you of an Indigo Girls song, "Hammer and Nail," which might remind you that women's creativity is more often imagined as children than carpentry, which causes you to think about an advertisement you saw in Vogue, or a poem by Kate Braid that you saw in an anthology of women's literature, or a Kate Bush song. It is this associative dynamic that makes the hypertext most rewarding in the classroom. Whether one wants one's students simply to be able to compare Wordsworth and Coleridge (or Tom Stoppard and William Shakespeare, or Yeats and Harrison), or whether one wants one's students to become avid cultural critics, approaching all texts (literary or nonliterary, canonical or otherwise) with the same semiotic acuity, hypertexts provide a means to the end, in that the end in either case is teaching our students to think and read associatively, to make connections.
    
    
22. This associative -- perhaps creative -- dynamic is not only at work in the writing of a hypertext, but in its reading. Berk and Devlin say:
    

    Well-designed hyperdocuments are magical. They allow readers to explore collections of ideas nonsequentially, by stepping back and getting an overview, zooming in for details, learning by association, experiencing the sound and images . . . and reading or playing the same data at their own rate -- repeatedly if necessary. (10- 11, ellipses mine)

23. This openness to both reader and writer suggests the real pedagogical impact of hypertext. Students learn to think and read associatively both in the reading and the writing of hypertexts, and these processes are coimplicated, even imbricated in the hypertexual experience. A reader may proceed however he or she wishes in the Bog People text, creating and interpreting through his or her own series of connections and his or her own interpretive sequence. In a sense, one writes one's own literary or interpretive text through one's own experience of the hypertext, through one's reading. (Of course, in the Leda hypertext, students may even include their own responses to the poems and images as part of the hypertext's continuing interpretive and critical creation.) To teach reading through hypertextuality is, then, to involve students in the very production of meaning in the classroom.
    
    
24. As readers and as writers, students are no longer passive recipients of a professor's seemingly arcane knowledge of the "hidden meanings" to be found in a iconic and canonical text. Through hypertexts students become active producers of literary and cultural meaning themselves -- following links, perceiving visual conversations, and making connections with the click of a mouse. When I opened the women's versions project and saw what that group of students had created, beginning with a quote from Chaucer's Wife of Bath ("By God, if wommen hadden writen stories. . .") and moving from literature to popular music to advertising, I saw a way of reading at work that is not only interesting and exciting in an otherwise canon-oriented classroom, but a way of reading that is theoretically responsible, culturally productive, and pedagogically useful. My goal, as a literature professor, is for my students to leave my class able to make the kinds of comparisons (thematic, historical, or political) that these hypertexts facilitate; I want them to leave my class as active and critical readers of culture, not passive repositories of a canon.