Teaching to Digress
The “difficult” text and digressive reading
Central aims:
•
to teach the “difficult” modernist text
•
to emphasize the social element in reading
•
to focus students’ attention on the “material support”
upon which texts rest
What Tech?
•
Digress.it: a plugin for the WordPress blogging platform
•
Developed out of CommentPress, a WP theme
designed to facilitate scholarly communication and
collaboration
•
Bloglike interface that
•
a) shifts reader-generated comments from scroll at
the bottom of the page to the margins at the side and
•
b) pegs comments to particular chunks of text if
desired
highlight = object of
currently visible
comments
comment
author
prominently
displayed
comments are
threadable
numbered
icons
refer to #
of
comment
s per
section
Anatomy of the interface
Project design
•
Two groups of about six-eight students
•
Each group has about a month to research, write, and
prepare
•
Two products:
•
a “digressive edition” of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste-Land
(1922)
•
a lesson plan for a 30-min presentation to peers of
the object/process/implications
Group 1: making reading
visible
•
one-half of members record spontaneous, uninformed
comments in margins
•
sharp counterpoint to reading/commenting in heavily
annotated print editions, with TSEs notes, “Norton
notes,” paratexts like Sparknotes, and the like
•
central challenge is not mastery of text but textualizing
non-mastery: how to display one’s habitually silent
mode of puzzling over “difficult” experimental texts
•
other 1/2 teach lesson:
•
challenge is to “teach” the object as well as the
process of making it
•
students emphasized the links between the
“digressive” Waste-Land and looser, performative
modes of poetry (e.g., poetry slams)
•
they also noted that the “difficulties” of the modernist
text were more visible and less alienating in this
environment
•
one student posed as the ethnographer of the group
itself, making sociological notes on the
kinds/categories of commentary (her idea, not mine!)
Group 2: Reading 1922
reading The waste-land
•
Goal: digressive edition of Eliot’s poem inserting
comments of his first wave of readers in 1922-3
•
Source material: published reviews, published letter
exchanges, quotes from secondary lit derived from
unpublished letters
•
Product: synchronic slice of reception of Eliot’s poem,
one that reveals the social dimension of reading in a
prior moment in the long history of reading
broader implications
traditional lit-crit pedagogy
networked approaches
private reading and
annotation
public reading and annotation
writing addressed to single
instructor
writing addressed to
prof/peers/public
students write individual
paratext to explicate primary
text
students produce
collaborative edition of
primary text
More new avenues
•
from (private) informal response papers to (public)
course blogs
•
from private, solitary reading to collaborative reading
(e.g., using twitter + course hashtags)
•
from private consultations re: research with instructor to
collaborative bibliography collation (e.g., via Zotero or
Mendeley)
•
in sum: from writing for practice to producing for
publication
The Big picture
The work is normally the object of a consumption; ... (t)he Text ... decants
the work ... from its consumption and gathers it up as play, activity,
production, practice. This means that the Text requires that one try to
abolish ... the distance between writing and reading, in no way by
intensifying the projection of the reader into the work but by joining them
in a single signifying practice.
In fact, reading, in the sense of consuming, is far from playing with the
text. 'Playing' must be understood here in all its polysemy: the text
itself plays (like a door, like a machine with 'play') and the reader plays
twice over, playing the Text as one plays a game, looking for a practice
which re-produces it, but, in order that that practice not be reduced to a
passive, inner mimesis, also playing the Text in the musical sense of the
term. ... The Text is very much a score of this new kind: it asks of the
reader a practical collaboration.
Source: Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text” (1971)