I will begrudgingly admit that I’m intrigued by the Nook, Barnes & Noble’s new device, previewed today, which seeks to be an Unnamed Other E-Reader Killer (follow that link and scroll down; apparently the K-word was banned from today’s announcement). There are three things about it that have me most intrigued:

First, that it’ll be running Android. The open source platform means it’s arguably hackable and developable-for.

Second, that it’ll have some as-yet incompletely understood lending capability. How it sounds like it’ll work is this: I have a book, I share it with some friend who can read it on their Nook for fourteen days, and during that time I don’t have access to the book. After fourteen days, I assume it returns to me — which is more than I can say for a lot of books I’ve lent out.

And finally, and most interestingly, that it’ll apparently provide some kind of interface between the e-book store and the physical bookstore:

Both 3G and Wifi will be free in the store, meaning consumers can do digitally what they’ve alway been able to do: “flip through the entire book, in their favorite book store.”

Bob Stein was thinking about this not too long ago, attempting to imagine the “place for books” as we move further into digital textuality. The ability to browse and buy in the physical store is one of the things I liked best about the future imagined by the French publishing group, Editis, in their video, “Possible ou Probable?”

The Nook doesn’t as yet look as cool as those little leather folios, but it’s a fair step in that direction, I think, recognizing the multiple ways that readers want to interact with books. And its basis in Android suggests that it may be at least a small step in the direction of a device that interacts more flexibly with the internet as a whole.

The following was originally published as a guest post on Infinite Summer.

As you may have seen mentioned in a countdown post here, this past spring I taught a single-author course focused entirely around the work of David Foster Wallace. And as one of you noted, we read pretty much all of it — the short fiction, the long fiction, the non-fiction — with the exception of a few uncollected pieces. (Although, to be honest, I’m pretty certain that almost no one in the class actually finished reading Everything & More, except for the four students who’d signed on to give a presentation on it.) It was alternately a terrifying and exhilarating experience, spending a semester that deeply enmeshed in a body of work as rich, allusive, and smart as this one. And it was also a risky experience, emotionally speaking; Dave was a close colleague of mine, and the course was meant to give me and a group of students the time we needed to engage with both the loss we felt and the astonishing legacy that Dave left us.

And I don’t think I’m exaggerating, or at least not by much, when I say that it was the best teaching experience of my career thus far. Not that it was easy, either for the students or for me; they had an overwhelming amount of reading to do (though for many of them, at least some portion of it was re-reading) and a lot of writing as well, and I had a lot of preparation and a lot of grading to do. And then there were moments when I just felt unequal to the task of keeping the course from turning into a sort of Cobain-esque spectacle of mourning, in which we could all stew in the horror of his death by ferreting out — okay, they’re not all that hard to ferret — every reference to suicide or depression or more generalized anomie.

My students, however, were way more than equal to the task. Having given them, the first week of the semester, Wimsatt and Beardsley’s essay on the intentional fallacy, along with Wallace’s essay on Joseph Frank’s Dostoyevsky and an interview Larry McCaffrey did with Wallace pre-Infinite Jest, we had a long conversation about the complexities of the relationship between any text and its author, and more importantly about the distinction between the author as we think we understand him from the text and the actually existing human being who set pen to paper, all as a way of getting at why the class was going to be focused on this figure named “Wallace,” and not on “Dave.” A solid subset of the class strongly resisted Wimsatt and Beardsley, and held tight to the idea of the meaning of a text deriving from some idea held by the author, but they all got the distinction between the imagined author of a text and the biographical person, and were more than generous in going along with my insistence that because we couldn’t conceivably know what Dave might have meant by something, an appeal to his biography in interpreting his writing wouldn’t help. What we had before us were the texts, and rather than use what we knew of his life to help make sense of them — or worse, to use the texts in an attempt to make sense of his life, in a way that would treat the work as mere autobiography, utterly discounting and dismissing the role of imagination in his writing — we needed to use the texts themselves, and the references and allusions to other texts that they contain, as the sources for our interpretation. And that’s what the vast majority of the class had signed on for. We all somehow understood without saying that reading these novels and short stories and essays as nothing more than evidence of the tragedy to come not only sold the texts themselves short but also missed the crucial point that the act of imaginative identification with someone outside himself was precisely what had kept Dave alive, and that we owed it to the texts to focus on their search for human connection rather than its failures.

I’d taught Infinite Jest twice before, as part of a course called The Big Novel. In that one, we read Gravity’s Rainbow, Underworld, Infinite Jest, and Cryptonomicon, attempting to think through the impulse of a subset of recent authors toward producing such encyclopedic novels, and what they have to do with the state of U.S. culture after World War II. In each go-round of that class, Infinite Jest was both a highlight and the odd-novel-out, the one that seemed to be most about us and who we are right now, but the one at the very same time not about how we got here, but where we’re going if we don’t watch out. Reading Infinite Jest this past spring, not in the context of Pynchon and DeLillo, but in the context of Wallace’s own previous and following work, took some of the emphasis off of the particular forms of cultural change the novel posits and focused it more on the philosophical questions that recur throughout his writing, and in particular the relationship between self and other as mediated by language, or perhaps that relationship as complicated by the impossibility of ever really saying what you mean, coupled with the absolute necessity of trying to do so anyhow.

But I was left with the puzzle of how to structure the class. If we read the texts in chronological sequence, Infinite Jest would fall much too early in the semester, and would threaten to take the wind out of the sails of everything that fell behind it. But leaving it for the end of the semester, as the culminating text, wouldn’t allow us to see how Wallace’s thinking developed after its publication. I finally settled on a kind of half measure: we started Infinite Jest at the proper moment in the chronological sequence of the texts, but stretched it out across the rest of the semester, spending one day each week on another of the books and one day working through another section of IJ. On the whole, I think it worked out really well, though I suppose you’d have to ask my students for confirmation. The hardest part of that schedule — for me, at least; for them it was no doubt the quantity of reading — was trying to figure out how to talk in sufficient detail about the 100 pages on the table for that week, drawing attention to the things I knew were going to turn out to be important, without giving away too much about why they were important. But as you can tell from my students’ blog, they had lots to say, lots they wanted to consider, and discussion only very rarely flagged.

The first semester I taught my “Big Novel” course, on the last day of class, I did my usual “any lingering questions that you’d like us to talk about” schtick, and one student raised her hand and asked me why I hadn’t had David Foster Wallace come talk to them while we were reading Infinite Jest. And I was so surprised that I wound up blurting out the truth: because I had never talked with him about the class I was teaching. Because he would have hated it, hated the idea that his work was being discussed in the very building in which he was trying to be someone other than the Famous Author of Infinite Jest. Because both of us suffered from a kind of self-consciousness that made it absolutely necessary for him to pretend like he didn’t know I was teaching the novel (and it was pretending, I’m certain; it’s a very small college), and for me to pretend like I didn’t know he knew, if we were going to be able to function. So no. No visits from Dave.

I thought about that moment all last semester, and the fact that I could only teach perhaps the best class I’ve ever taught precisely because he wasn’t there anymore. And I still don’t know what to do with that, but I hope that if he’s out there, wherever, he’ll understand.

Today is the last day of what has been alternately a difficult and an exhilarating semester. Honestly, it’s the first semester in I can’t remember how long that I’ve been sorry to see end, the first semester in several years in which I’ve actually felt good about my teaching way more often than I’ve felt badly about it. But it’s also been a bit of an emotional rollercoaster. And a good deal of both the up and the down of it all has been attributable to the class I taught this semester on the work of my late colleague, David Foster Wallace.
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I’ve just posted on MediaCommons in order to point to Lisa Spiro’s fantastic post rounding up and reflecting on important developments in the digital humanities in 2008, with particular attention to issues of scholarly communication and open access. This post is the second in a series; the first reflected on the development of the digital humanities both as a term and as a collection of interest groups and communities over the course of the year. Both posts provide links to a range of important and exciting resources and include a wealth of thoughtful commentary. And I’m not just pointing this out because she says such nice things about my own project…

I was somewhat bemused to see the white paper recently released by the MLA, reporting to the Teagle Foundation on the goals and objectives of the undergraduate major in language and literature in the context of a liberal arts education. (From what I can tell, the report itself was actually released in December — as reported by Scott Jaschik in Inside Higher Ed — and posted on the MLA website or announced as available yesterday.) This paper argues strongly for the core values that have long rested at the heart of such an education (in particular, language proficiency as developed through and complemented by the careful reading of literature), while at the same time proposing to bring students into these majors by acknowledging and even including in the major the many other kinds of texts that comprise the contemporary cultural scene.

However, it’s clear that the center of gravity remains in a fairly dated definition of the literary in particular and of reading in general:

While we advocate incorporating into the major the study of a variety of texts, we insist that the most beneficial among these are literary works, which offer their readers a rich and challenging—and therefore rewarding—object of study. Our cybernetic world has brought us speed and ease of information retrieval; even where the screen has replaced paper, however, language still remains the main mode of communication. Those who learn to read slowly and carefully and to write clearly and precisely will also acquire the nimbleness and visual perceptions associated with working in an electronic environment.

This is a move that has repeatedly been made by English departments, precisely the thing that gets them accused of a colonialist approach to interdisciplinary studies: incorporating the texts and methodologies studied in other fields, but only insofar as they shed light on the still narrowly defined category of the literary, and refusing to imagine that those other fields, methodologies, and texts might have their own histories and significances apart from the light that literary studies can shed on them. In part, this colonizing project is evidence of a field reacting against its apparent decline. One might see, for instance, Mark Bauerlein’s evaluation of the report, in which he sees “the realization that unless literature is defended, literary study will shrink with each media expansion. Long novels and complex poetry cannot compete on their own, not in a Web 2.0 universe. English and foreign-language professors are the guardians of them, and the MLA report is an inspiring example of that duty.” It’s fine, both Bauerlein and the MLA report seem to suggest, to use things like film to sex up the major enough to bring in the students, but once they’re in, they need to be taught what’s really important: print, and not just print, but literature. The understanding of reading presented here is as narrowly circumscribed as is the definition used by the NEA in its much-discussed reports, Reading at Risk and To Read or Not to Read — how can anyone be shocked that a small percentage of the population reads when reading is defined in such particular (and dare I say elitist) terms?

This kind of colonizing gesture is one of the reasons why a few of us on the executive council (or whatever it is we’re called) of the MLA’s discussion group on Media and Literature are scheming a change in that group’s title, making it simply “Media Studies.” If the MLA wants to read the texts that we read, in the ways that we read them, we’re happy to engage in that dialogue with them. But the organization, and the field of literary studies more broadly, needs to understand that media texts aren’t just the frosting on the literary cake; they are texts with their own histories and their own modes of study, and engagement with them requires literacies that include but are far from limited to a facility with language.

In short: the future of the literature major, it seems to me, is in media studies, in its interdisciplinarity, its openness, its acknowledgment both of the specific histories and literacies engaged and promoted by different media forms and of the multiplicity of ways those forms interact in an increasingly complex media culture. I encourage the MLA to think less about how media might be used to promote the primacy of literature than about how the notion of literature might be opened to interact with (rather than take over) the serious study of other kinds of cultural texts.

This completely made my day:

One wonders whether the final outcome (please god) of this debacle will get anything like the coverage (so to speak) that its origin did: the Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals has overturned the fine of $550,000 levied by the FCC against CBS after Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction during the 2004 Super Bowl.

There are multiple mitigations of this judgment: CBS, of course, already paid the fine, and apologized profusely. And goodness knows that the amount they’ve paid their lawyers to handle this over the last three and a half years way outstrips the fine itself.

But here’s to the Third Circuit, for pointing out the obvious: that the FCC had “arbitrarily and capriciously departed from its prior policy” of not punishing accidental, unplanned, brief, and otherwise stupidly trivial violations of “standards.”

And let this be only the first of the insanely stupid things that have happened in the U.S. since January 2001 to be undone.

Earlier so-called communications revolutions wrought only partial transformations: the increased emphasis on the image in photography and film; the recovery of orality in telegraphy, telephony, and radio; the creation of mass consciousness through broadcasting. Though they began to challenge writing as the primary foundation of culture, these media did not affect the conditions of writing itself. This was good news for academics. It was possible to study just about any medium through the miracle of content — by which we meant, written representations of our experience of the other medium — without having to become much more than auditors or spectators. Among other things, this allowed the academy to draw a bright line between production work in various media (mere techne) and the writing of criticism and theory (the primary work of scholars).

With the coming of cybernetic communication systems — hypertext, the World Wide Web, soon now the Semantic Web — the conditions of all media are strongly transformed, and writing is clearly included.

from Stuart Moulthrop, After the Last Generation: Rethinking Scholarship in the Days of Serious Play.

There’s been a lot of discussion in the last few days of William Deresiewicz’s article in The American Scholar, “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education.” I’m mildly annoyed by the opening of the article — I suddenly realized the shortcomings of my super-fantastic education when I couldn’t think of anything to say to my plumber? — but much of the analysis that follows strikes me as spot-on: the pressures toward producing markers of success rather than real quality of mind, the homogenizing force of “normality” despite a superficial commitment to diversity, and so forth. Despite Deresiewicz’s repeated suggestion that such pitfalls might be escaped by leaving the elite universities for the small liberal arts environment, my sense is that the problems he’s discussing are less produced by a particular type/size/structure of institution than by that institution’s self-regarding focus on somehow being — and producing — the “best.”

But what most caught my attention in the article was the section in which Deresiewicz explores the differences between his and his students’ experience of the institution of higher education and that of his friend who attended Cleveland State. There is a rather astonishing safety net underneath students at elite institutions, one that simply doesn’t exist for students at the vast majority of non-elite schools, and I’ve often felt that rather than protecting students, enabling them to take chances without fear, such safety nets often leave them ill-equipped for life in a world — a corporation, a city, whathaveyou — that simply doesn’t care if they’re struggling. On the campus of an elite institution, few choices students make have any real, substantive consequences. On the one hand, we want to give our students those four years out of time, insulated from mundane worries, so that they can think and explore — but if that insulation makes them risk-averse, or perhaps risk-unaware, have we done them a service?

The other point in the article that, perhaps unsurprisingly, resonated most strongly with me was Deresiewicz’s acknowledgment that, at his Ivy, he “learned to give that little nod of understanding, that slightly sympathetic ‘Oh,’ when people told me they went to a less prestigious college.” I’ve seen that nod, more times than I can count, not to mention any number of less polished, less polite variants ranging from mild surprise to outright shock. How can I be where I am, the look seems to say, teaching “the best and the brightest,” if I wasn’t one of them myself? Or, even worse, that my humble institutional background demonstrates that we really do inhabit a meritocracy in the academy, that even someone from a crappy third-tier state institution can go on to work at a top-ranked school. Since graduate school it’s been made clear to me, time and again, in some ways very subtle and in some ways not at all, that I either remain the scholarship kid, present largely as a marker of the academy’s collective broad-mindedness, or I am now assumed to be “one of us,” that my background must have had the same privileges and possibilities as everyone else’s.

But one thing that Deresiewicz doesn’t really explore is the presence of the scholarship kids within the very elite student populations he’s exploring, and the fact that their experience of the elite college safety net can be, as Oso Raro recently described, brutally temporary, and that for some of those students, graduation can be “more like an expulsion than a celebration, the end of a particular dream state.” Which of the privileges of their elite educations do these students get to carry with them, and which disappear? Are these students more likely, as Deresiewicz suggests the bulk of elite college students are not, to choose career paths that don’t provide traditional markers of success? Deresiewicz claims that “the way students are treated in college trains them for the social position they will occupy once they get out,” and yet the scholarship kid is very often unable to occupy that social position after college — unable to take the prestigious unpaid internship necessary to breaking into some fields, for instance. Are these students more or less likely to take risks in their career choices, to consider, for instance, the kinds of public service that Deresiewicz suggests elite students often won’t, or do pressures toward security leave them unable to do so? Where are they in this portrait of the elite of the future?

The article leaves itself open to many such questions, but that it at least creates a bit of space to question many of our assumptions about elite education is rather extraordinary.

My friends over at the Institute for the Future of the Book yesterday announced a new project, in which they’re working with the British Arts Council and Harper Collins to publish an electronic, CommentPress-like edition of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, hoping to produce a conversation in the margins both among a small number of centrally invested readers and among a broader reading public.

They’re asking for input into how such an experiment might be conducted, and in particular, into who those core readers might be. If you have thoughts, pop by and leave them in the comments. I’m quite excited about this, not least because I’m hoping to use the text and its mechanisms as part of my Literary Interpretation class in the fall. This experiment presents a compelling possibility for thinking about the new modes of reading and interacting with texts in digital spaces, as well as a means of reflecting on the transformations in notebooks and their authors…