Literature in a Wired World

Due: 5pm Monday October 30th

The Asylum and Reagan Library are both complex works that require you, the player/reader/viewer to engage in complicated activities to navigate, interpret, and if possible, complete the work. Today you will have voted for one of these two works to be the topic of our dialog/debate. As we have discussed in class, there are many different aspects of each of these works to consider, and as we have seen in our class discussions, exploring certain aspects of the works leads us to consider other aspects in turn. (At the same time, our focus also prevents us from considering other aspects, but that is always the case.)

Your dialog/debate will address this question: for the work the class has chosen, what is the most important aspect to explore first, and why is it the most important aspect?

There is no page requirement for the Position Paper. The final document will probably be around 2 pages long, but if you include all of the required parts and it is either longer or shorter than that, fear not.

Your position paper will include the following parts:

• A well-developed statement that clearly and forcefully articulates your position, and that can be forcefully argued against
• Talking points explaining and supporting your position (at least five)
• Documentation/citation for all of your claims (it’s not enough to simply say “Moulthrop/The Asylum says…” — you need to be able to point us to the specific passage(s) that support your claim)
• A conclusion developing from your position that shows in-depth analytical engagement with the material

The Position Statement

Your statement of position is similar to a thesis — it’s the arguable idea that guides and structures your work in the paper. It can be one sentence or it may be longer — this will depend on the complexity of your position and how you feel you can most persuasively express it.

Talking Points

Your talking points are brief encapsulations of the reasons why we should agree with your position. These should be polished rhetorical messages that work to persuade your audience (and even, ideally, your opponents in the debate) to agree with your position. These should be brief, and yet you may include a paragraph or so of text to support/explain your meaning.

The Importance of Rigorous Citation

You must cite to all of your assertions, quotations, and references. This may be done parenthetically in the text of your paper, or with footnotes or endnotes — whichever you prefer. This requirement is non-negotiable, because during debate, you must be able to instantaneously respond to a challenge of your ideas. Going to the text is an excellent method of refuting such challenges. For Reagan Library, I expect you to cite to the title of the page from which you took the text/image (“Blue Pavilion,” for instance). For The Asylum, things are a little trickier. Citing the animal being treated, the treatment you performed to prompt the material you’re citing, and the relative progress of the treatment should be plenty for us to be able to duplicate your progress. So, for instance, you would cite the growling coming from inside Dolly thusly: (Dolly, Medical Examination, early in treatment).

Your Conclusion>

Your conclusion is the “so what” of your position. Let’s assume that you have advanced your position and supported it well. So what? What does your position mean? What does it suggest to us about the work in question? What does it suggest to us about digital literature in general? Or about games, or about virtual reality, or about (stuffed) animal/human relationships, or about storytelling, or about our own responses to narratives? What does it suggest about you or about us as readers? Any or all of these questions might provoke your conclusion.

The conclusion is often the most important part of a political position paper because it sets forth the action(s) to be performed by all right-minded individuals who happen to read the position paper.

Your conclusion is the most important part of your position paper, because it explains why we should care at all about your position. (Yes, yes, we care about your position because it is your position, and because you are a unique snowflake whose positions deserve care. But the conclusion gives us a view of the bigger issues at stake in the debate, and that makes us care in a different way.)

Thinking About the Conclusion in Academic Papers

When writing academic papers, the same process should apply. Your position is analogous to a thesis, your talking points to the prongs of your argument, and your conclusion sets forth the important issue(s) at stake in your analysis. In writing an academic paper, ideally your conclusion (which you will probably only reach after thinking through all of the other steps/parts) should inform the entire paper.

By this I mean that if your thesis is that, for instance, Codex demonstrates the equally addictive properties of books and video games, then you may conclude that Grossman is attempting to show that video games are no more “harmful” to modern mental health and productivity than books have ever been, and that the current panic over video game violence is no different from the fears that have always accompanied narrative and/or immersive media. You’re proving that Grossman sets these two media up as parallel sources of “danger,” but when you have proved that, you and your readers are able to reach the conclusion that this source of “danger” is not very dangerous at all, and that the crusaders against video game violence probably need to find a more productive hobby.

For your follow-up to Exploration 7, write down your thought(s) on the connection(s) among the four (we presume?) narrators in Reagan Library.

Your thoughts don’t have to be fancy, and they certainly don’t have to be a full page long. Just write them down or type them up (isn’t it funny how our prepositions change in different compositional situations…) and attach them to your Exploration 7. Both will be due in class on Thursday.

Occassionally I get e-mails that may be of interest to you. This is one of those. If you’re interested, or know someone who might be, check it out.

Hi,

I am writing to tell you about an exciting research study [at SUNY Stony Brook] related to the experiences of gay male undergraduate students. All gay male students at public universities between the ages of 18 and 25 are eligible to participate.

You will receive $100.00 for completing all aspects of this study. Your participation will involve a total of 4 hours spread out over six days. Everything can be done online (I will call you to explain the study and answer any questions you have). Here is a breakdown of your participation:

• Day 1: 60 minutes ($5.00)
• Day 2: 20 minutes ($10.00)
• Day 3: 20 minutes ($15.00)
• Day 4: 20 minutes ($20.00)
• Day 5: 60 minutes ($25.00)
• Day 6: 60 minutes ($25.00)—this day will occur three months after Day 5

All participants should participate every day. All participants should also have access to a personal computer in a secure, distraction-free environment for five sequential evenings and to be able to receive telephone calls from the researcher throughout the course of the study.

If you are interested in this study, please send an email to me at
John.Pachankis@sunysb.edu. In the email please provide your telephone number and the best time(s) to call you in the next three days.

I hope you will choose to participate,

John Pachankis
Department of Psychology
State University of New York at Stony Brook

Reagan Library, by Stuart Moulthrop
Due: In-Class, Tuesday October 24th

“The number of pages in this book is literally infinite. No page is the first page, no page is the last. I don’t know why they’re numbered in this arbitrary way, but perhaps it’s to give one to understand that the terms of an infinite series can be numbered in any way whatever.”
(Borges, “The Book of Sand” 482)

Overview:

The computer has become ubiquitous in Western society, and html is its lingua franca. The code that allows for the creation of killer web pages, however, can also be used for more literary pursuits. Imagine the network of web pages linked to each other that comprises the World Wide Web. Each page contains information, and each page links to other pages that have something (usually) to do with what you “clicked on,” to activate that hyperlink. We’ve read and watched a few online narratives already this semester – Lovely by Surprise, The Neverything, “An Ode to Pants,” and “Lasting Image” have all used hyperlinkages and fragmentation across Web pages and episodes to tell their stories in particular ways. Collectively, this mode of storytelling is called “hyperfiction.”

For this Exploration, you are to visit English Literature Professor Stuart Moulthrop’s web site, and read a hyperfiction story included in the hypertext fiction of the site, entitled Reagan Library. The URL for the story is:

http://iat.ubalt.edu/moulthrop/hypertexts/rl/

Hypertext is a way of creating linkages instead of linearity. Instead of reading from word to word, sentence to sentence, and page to page, you must choose which hyperlink to activate, which “path” to take through the constellation of textual fragments that comprise the story. For this reason, reading hyperfiction can be quite confusing and frustrating. This is normal, and an important part of the aesthetic experience of reading hyperfiction.

Reagan Library, like “Lasting Image,” is a narrative comprised of text and images. Each page has a piece of text, and a panoramic graphic depicting the “world” around you. You may click on the hyperlinked words or phrases in the text, or you may explore the panoramic image and click on the objects you see. Both navigational methods will move you through the text/world of Reagan Library.

This Exploration has two parts: notes, and a written summary. In the first part, you are to take notes on at least the first 50 lexias you read. (A lexia is a “chunk” of the work, usually displayed by itself on the screen in hyperfiction.) Your notes should consist of four types of information: 1) lexia name; 2) link selected; 3) what you expected – or hoped – to find by choosing that link; and 4) how your expectations were either met or frustrated by choosing that link. You may record this information in any format you like, although something legible would be nice.

Part 1: The Four Types of Data

Lexia Name

Write down the name of the lexia you are currently reading. In Reagan Library, the lexia names are given in a colored strip to the left of the page. You may note, however, that some of the names are the same except for either the color of the strip, or the color of the sky in the graphic, or both. Because of this, I suggest that you record the color of the strip (and, in the black strips, the color of the sky) along with the lexia name. Make a list of the first 50 (at least) lexias you read as you progress through and around Reagan Library.

Link Selected

Which link did you click on? In Reagan Library there are two different types of clickable links. You may click on: 1) underlined words or phrases in the lexias; or 2) the objects visible in the panoramic graphic. (You may zoom in toward the objects by pressing the SHIFT key, and zoom out by pressing the CTRL key.) Because your choices are important to the development of the story, I encourage you to think through your choices before you implement them.

Expectations

As you think through your reading experience, try asking yourself questions about your reading. What do you already know? What characters do you know? What do you know about them? What do you want to find out? What sounds interesting to you? The answers to these questions will tell you what your expectations are for each link/lexia.

Outcome

So? How did your link satisfy your expectations? Was the new lexia what you expected, or something completely different? What connections do you see between the lexia you just left, and the one you just arrived at? What is the author trying to say by connecting these two lexias? Is it what you expected?

Part 2: Reflection

This Exploration is an attempt to get you thinking about the ways we think when we read. Because of this, expect it to be both hard and frustrating. But after your excellent work with “An Ode to Pants” and the Gunn films, I have confidence that you are up to the challenge.

For the reflection part of this Exploration, I want you to write a prose narrative of your experience. Consider the following questions: how do you read; what are you thinking as you read; what things do you do as you read; which of these thoughts and actions help you to understand what you are reading, and which ones prevent you from getting it; what was the story/stories; how do these different stories/characters connect? Most importantly, how did you figure out these connections?

This part of the Exploration should be the usual 1-page, single spaced.

Because of the difficulty of this Exploration, I will assign bonus points to exceptional Explorations. Specifically, in the first part, I will reward detailed descriptions of why you selected links and what the outcome was. In the second part, I will reward students who really attempt to engage with the material, its unconventional format, and the process of reading, in a thoughtful, reflective way. Why is the story being told in this form? What does that accomplish?

Due: In-Class October 17th

So when u call up that shrink in Beverly Hills
U know the one - Dr Everything’ll Be Alright
Instead of asking him how much of your time is left
Ask him how much of your mind, baby

‘Cuz in this life
Things are much harder than in the afterworld
In this life
You’re on your own
– Prince “Let’s Go Crazy”

This exploration, and the next one, will help us to prepare for the upcoming Dialog/Debate.

The Asylum is a computer game, and a strange one, at that. It features enough bizarre and bizarrely-affecting material to provide us with a wide array of topics to discuss and debate. For this exploration, you are to compose three arguments about The Asylum.

These arguments may be on any topic relating to The Asylum, but they must include the following features:

• Each must engage with The Asylum
• Each must make a claim about The Asylum
• Each claim must be non-obvious
• Each claim must be arguable both for and against itself by reasonable people

Each of your three arguments will be interpretations of some aspect of The Asylum, and/or interpretations of your interaction with the work. This means that you will need to spend time with the work and spend time thinking through your experience(s) with it.

For each of your three arguments, provide a brief paragraph explaining how you would support/argue your claim. In other words, explain what supporting material or logical progression (or both) you would set up if you were to expand your argument into a full paper.

This exploration does not need to be a full page long.

Roger Chartier’s Forms and Meanings & Lev Grossman’s Codex

Due: Thursday, October 12th

As we discussed in class (at some length), in chapter 1 of Forms and Meanings, Roger Chartier argues that each significant change in the reproduction of texts, materiality of texts, and style of reading those texts “redefines the exercise of power, social roles, and intellectual practices” (13).

As we’ve also discussed in class (at some length), Edward Wozny, the protagonist of Lev Grossman’s Codex, is obsessed with three things: books (and the Viage in particular), computer games (MOMUS in particular), and work (at first his career as an investment banker, later as an employee of some sort of the Duchess of Bowmry). Each of these three fields has the potential and a widespread reputation for “sucking people in” to their particular worlds. In other words, in each it is easy to become immersed.

For Invention 2, you are to select one of the three worlds in which Edward Wozny is or has been immersed (books, games, or work), and discuss “the exercise of power, social roles, and intellectual practices” in it.

You may want to discuss these in relation to the novel, exploring Edward’s “exercise of power, social roles, and intellectual practices” in the world you choose.

Or you may want to discuss your own experiences in that world. Many of you have professed deep and abiding affection for, and extensive experience with, books or computer games. You may, alternately, have work experience you wish to discuss.

Finally, it may interest you to discuss the changes in “the exercise of power, social roles, and intellectual practices” that affect Edward Wozny or yourself as one or both of you move between these worlds.

The choice is up to you.

An important note: while these questions are intended as a starting place for your discussion, you do not need to answer all of them, nor should you use them to structure your essay. A good way to begin is to choose two or three key passages from Codex or meaningful experiences in your own life around which to center your response, moments that seem significant and that can help you to explore both Chartier’s ideas and Grossman’s novel. Make sure to cite in parentheses the page numbers where any quotations you use can be found.

If possible, please e-mail your invention to me.

I won’t be in town for this, but if you’re going to be around Champlain College on Saturday, October 7th, I heartily encourage you to check it out!

For a clearer version of the flyer, click here: http://www.uvm.edu/~reparent/media/dean-panel-flyer.pdf.