I’ve been following with great interest a conversation developing over at George’s place on the possibility of creating an open-source collection of resources for teaching literature.  It now appears that the first iteration of such a project will be a group-authored blog.  If you’re in the field, and want to get involved, drop him a line.

This week, in The Literary Machine, we’re reading Ellen Ullman’s Close to the Machine, which has led me to think a bit about the course’s subtitle, “Writing in the Human/Computer Interface.” Originally, I imagined that interface functioning differently in the different types of texts we read—some traditional novels that contain representations of computers (in which case the novel and its representations become the interface), some more properly cybernetic fictions that appropriate systems principles to literary ends (in which systems theory becomes a sort of interface), some electronic fictions that use the computer itself as a mode of representation (in which the interface becomes, well, the interface).  So as I built the syllabus, I thought a lot about the varying ways that “interface” in my subtitle might be defined, and about the varying kinds of “writing” that might be done with respect to that interface.

But I didn’t think very much about my choice of preposition—“in.” Re-reading Ullman has, more than any other text we’ve read thus far this semester, highlighted for me the question of “in-ness” w/r/t the interface.  Crossing disciplinary and professional boundaries between computers and readers, between programming and the literary, between “end users” and code, Ullman has a very different relationship to the interface than do the other writers and theorists we’ve studied.  She is the means of translation from human purpose to machine commands; she is our means of understanding a technoverse that many of us can never inhabit.  Despite her rhetorical insistence on moving “close to” (and, by implication, away from) the machine, if an interface is something one can be “in,” Ullman is truly in it, rather than existing to one side or the other of it; one might even argue that she in fact is that interface.

This begs, for me, a question that Noah, my summer research assistant, raised as we were planning the course, and as he argued for Ullman’s inclusion on the syllabus:  where are the other such memoirs of technology?  If there is something about the first-person memoir of the programming life that allows the writer/programmer to find her way in, what other texts might similarly be imagined to inhabit the interface?

I’ve been intermittently concerned, over the last weeks, with questions of repetition, particularly surrounding the scholarly impetus to reread and rewrite.  Now I’m replaying those concerns, as I find myself teaching Adorno & Horkheimer’s “The Culture Industry” and Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” for what must be the eighty-fifth time.

There’s not much getting around it—the two essays are sufficiently key to almost any culturalist or materialist approach to media theory that they are a necessary starting point for half of my classes.  The catch is that media studies majors here, who generally take more than one class from me, get Frankfurt-schooled in multiple fashion.  I don’t think that’s a bad thing—in fact, I exhort my students who have read these essays before to re-read them carefully, with new eyes (figuratively, that is) each time—but there comes a point in my (re-)teaching when I could use a little shot in the arm, a little refresher of my own.

I’m planning to re-read, yes.  But I’m afraid I’ve been through the essays so many times that I can’t step back from them enough to see them afresh.  So here’s my call for help, for those of you who work with these essays:  what’s the most important thing in them that you feel too often gets overlooked?  What have I, lo these eighty-four previous sessions, missed?

I guess there’s no denying it, now—the semester has begun.  It actually began yesterday, but as I’ve moved, this semester, from my accustomed Tuesday/Thursday afternoon teaching schedule to a bright-and-early Monday/Wednesday/Friday morning one, my only evidence, yesterday, of semester’s onset was attending convocation.

Convocation is a lovely event here, a bookend to commencement, a second annual opportunity to make the purchase of the academic regalia seem cost-efficient.  This year’s was particularly momentous, as we greeted our new president, only the ninth in the college’s 116-year history.  Aside from the welcomes, however, both to the president and to the class of (gulp) 2007, there was a greater-than-usual dose of back-self-patting this year:  not only is the college ranked fourth among liberal-arts colleges by the eminent (when we like their results; questionable when we don’t) U.S. News and World Reports, but our students are apparently the second-happiest in the nation, according to the Princeton Review.

But I don’t know that my students are any happier than anybody else’s, at 9:00 in the morning.  Nor, I fear, are their professors.  This new schedule is going to take some getting used to.