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.