JEFF ALLRED ++

Novel Hacks
New Approaches to Teaching the Novel Genre
I majored in American Studies at the high point of the canon wars of the
early 1990s, and so I came into the field amid heavy crossfire regarding the
validity of popular culture as a subject for academic study. I note with pleas-
ure that discussions of the fundamental worth of popular culture have faded
in the sense that pop content of all kinds now occupies a central position
in our pedagogical and critical work. What remains more problematic, espe-
cially for our pedagogy, is the status of popular modes of cultural consump-
tion and reading. To conceive of cultural artifacts in a neo-Arnoldian vein
as a repository of sweetness and light to be defended against hostile
Philistines and populace seems absurd to the vast majority of humanists
today; however, there are vibrant, urgent debates around reading practices
that pit residual humanistic traditions of deep focus, intensive reading, crit-
ical distance, and a hermeneutics of difficulty against emergent practices that
draw their energies from surfaces, fast-moving modes of attention, and
immersiveness (Arnold 51, 99104). Here, the conservative arguments (and
I use the term in a non-pejorative sense) merit serious scrutiny, as we ask
whether Google really makes us stupid, whether the ubiquity of social
network interfaces, smartphones, and immersive forms of multimedia con-
tent makes us alone together, and, most crucially to our pedagogical
work, whether students capacities for intensive focus and critical orienta-
tion will survive amid competing claims for their (our?) attention lurking at
the margins of the window, a mere click away.
1
As my metaphor suggests, a central way to conceive of these broad
changes is the shift of reading from print-based to screen-based media.
2
This
is not a transfer of a neutral content from one container to another, facil-
itating faster, easier, and more ubiquitous access to texts that retain their
essential character. Rather, screen-based media constitute a matrix from
which new forms springblogs, tweets, and feeds, for exampleand older
ones are remediated, a process in which old content is transformed in and
through a new medium (Bolter and Grusin 5). As I began thinking through
the implications of this shift for my teaching, research, and reading, I devel-
oped a new undergraduate course designed to engage the tenuous relation-
ship between tradition and innovation in the shift from print to screen, one
in which students would learn to make their own reading, and the technolo-
gies that enable it, an object of contemplation and criticism. The course is
called Novel Hacks, and it braids together three strands that allow us to
think about our own emergent reading practices in richer and more subtle
terms than those of conservative censure or ahistorical celebration: a) a brief
sketch of the history of the printed book and the novel genre that became,
JEFF
ALLRED
1 Makes us stupid refer-
ences an influential arti-
cle by Nicholas Carr, and
the alone together the
title of Sherry Turkles
recent humanist dissent
against absorptive cultur-
al technologies.
2 For a broad historiciza-
tion of this shift, see
Chartier, Languages.
For a more theoretical
analysis comparing texts
in print and on the
screen, see Drucker.
Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy| Volume XXIV Number 1
&
2
http://web.njcu.edu/sites/transformations published semi-annually by New Jersey City University
++o transformations
by the mid-nineteenth century, the dominant literary genre associated with
it; b) a few prominent theories of the relationship between texts and their
material supports, especially networked screens; and c) collaborative projects
in which students must hack a novel using web-based tools to make it
new in some meaningful way. I will address some of the problems that
emerged from such a broad framing of the course. My primary focus will be
on the group projects, which were the most productive and successful course
components. In retrospect, what stands out to me most sharply is the way
that combining classic texts and emerging digital technologies of
writing/recording/disseminating texts clarified for students the historical
relationships of each to the others. Through the projects, they became aware
of the disruptive newness that attended the emergence of now-classic forms
and of the roots of todays modes of screen-based reading in past practices.
The novel is a particularly interesting site to have students examine this
broad shift for several reasons that exist in productive tension with one anoth-
er. First, the novel has enjoyed a long reign as our most prestigious literary
form, and having students play with novels, using digital media to renovate
classic texts in various ways, helps to dispel some of the problems that emerge
when students kowtow to high cultural forms: the stilted language that
results from writing up to a mystified cultural artifact, the reliance on cribs like
Sparknotes, and the anxiety of being a less-than-ideal reader of a text that
seems from a students perspective to issue from a lofty space. Second, even a
quick and sketchy examination of recent work on the rise of the novel
helps students to put this very aura of prestige into question, as they learn that
the genre grew into its current respectability only very slowly, and only by
shedding its roots as a new entertainment medium in the early eighteenth
century (Warner xi). As the novel continues its slow process of ceding ground
to the emergent media platforms of the twentieth and twenty-first cen-
turiesprimarily the cinema, television, and video gamesstudents are often
shocked and intrigued to learn of its checkered past as a corrupter of youth,
scrambler of minds, and deranger of proper sexuality. Finally, reading novels on
screens, and hacking them for screen-based reading, sharpens and heightens
the oppositions and values often assigned to printed books and screens as
material supports for reading: on the one hand, the fixity, durability, and self-
contained aspect of the book; on the other hand, the fluidity, ephemerality, and
linked intertexuality of words on the screen. I wanted to join my students in
thinking about what it means to read the deepest genre on the shallowest
surface, to do the most focused and intensive kind of reading within the most
distracting and extensive spaces of reading, to engage a genre associated with
long, solitary stretches of time via technologies that insist aggressively on short,
interruptive bursts of socializing within and without the main text.
In what follows, I will advance two arguments regarding the relation
between the novel genre and the ongoing migration of reading from print
to screen. First, novel reading might become more and differently social. E-
readers like the Kindle (2007-present) have encouraged the widespread
adoption of more social modes of reading novels (and other long-form prose
JEFF ALLRED ++;
narratives), allowing readers to share highlighted passages and marginal com-
ments with their social networks via Facebook and Twitter.
3
The open-
source tools we use in the classroom are predicated on a further departure
from the conventions of print reading, hailing readers as co-writers or co-
producers of the text in more subtle and wide-ranging ways that are preclud-
ed by the relatively closed, digital rights management ethos of the Kindle,
Nook, iPad, etc. Reading in this manner materializes in fresh and dramatic
fashion past utopian theories of the writerly text or the writer as produc-
er or technician (Barthes, S/Z 4; Benjamin, The Author as Producer
2225; Dos Passos 79). It also allows dimensions of reading that are often
invisible or obscure in reading printed books to appear in sharper relief. The
voices of a text belonging to narrators and characters, for example, which
are virtual and often somewhat submerged during silent, solitary reading,
become literal and fascinatingly problematic when producing an audiobook.
Secondly, many aspects of emergent networked reading practices are not rad-
ically new but developed out of nineteenth-century antecedents, such as
reading aloud for family and friends in the home or the exchange of mar-
ginalia in printed novels. There are surprising commonalities or points of
contact between past reading practices and our own.
The central value of hacking novels, creating sharable editions rather
than writing critical analyses, is not that is makes students better readers, or
even better readers of reading practices, though I think it does both. Rather,
it shifts our orientation to the processes and products of student worka
reorientation that is gradually spreading throughout the discipline under the
aegis of digital humanities. Rather than engaging in a process of solitary
reading and markup leading to a strenuous rewriting of the primary text that
is addressed to a single professor, in the Novel Hacks class, students collabo-
ratively build an object addressed to peers in the classroom and, potentially
at least, a wider public audience via the Web. This reorientation is ongoing:
Jerome McGann began calling for such a transformation in the 1990s, insist-
ing that the next generation of literary critics would be at least as involved
in making things as with writing text (19). More pithily, Mark Sample has
recently described his pedagogy as making things and sharing them. This
ethic of (re)making cultural artifacts in the classroom strongly parallels, and
can draw inspiration from, developments in popular culture, where one finds
countless examples of audiences convening to inscribe, remix, and comment
upon a wide range of media forms in ways I will describe.
The Decline of Storytelling
and the Rise of Networked Reading
A useful jumping-off place for thinking about the relationship between
novels, reading, and the history of the material text is Walter Benjamins
compact history of the novel, The Storyteller, a text my students read at
the beginning of the course. The most innovative aspect of Benjamins
argument is its framing of the novel, not as a distinctive narrative mode in
3 For an overview of this
functionality on the
Kindle, see the Share
Notes and Highlights
page on Amazons Kindle
User Support site: http://
www.amazon.com/gp/
help/customer/display.
html?nodeId=201242030
(accessed September 26,
2013).
++ transformations
an evolutionary sequence of literary forms, but as a function of changing
relationships between storytellers and their auditors with the advent of
printed books. This materialist focus on novels as printed objects, and the
contrast between print culture and a largely lapsed tradition of oral narra-
tive, allowed students to think through the assumptions embedded in novel
reading that are so deeply internalized that we fail to recognize them most
of the time: the isolation that separates authors from the mass of readers and
each reader from the others; the aura that elevates the author (especially of
literary fiction) over the mass of consumers; and the distinctive closure
of novels that, unlike oral tradition, not hail readers as embellishers or
retellersnarrators in their own rightbut simply end.
From our present-day perspective, Benjamins argument fails to antic-
ipate that the sociality he associates with traditional storytelling persists in
modern times. I was pleased to see students objections or revisions of the
argument on this score. Many students shared ways that their isolated
reading feeds back into social, oral/aural settings: some discussed their
book clubs, others the blogs they visit and comment on, and the ubiqui-
tous Facebook loomed large as a source of ideas for novels to read and dis-
cussions of them. Another student pointed out, very much in the spirit of
Benjamins analysis, that some authors are changing their writing practices
to exploit new writing spaces and thus have different relationships with
readers: she cited her enjoyment of twitterature, an umbrella term to
describe prose narratives that thread together many tweets with a hashtag
to comprise a long-form story (Twitterature).
I pointed out to students that Benjamin was writing his essay in the
1930s, an era in which media like radio and cinema were disrupting tra-
ditional literary practices in ways that parallel our own moment. Thus his
argument that storytelling was giving way to information, and that the
novel was the last gasp of conveying experience, as opposed to a disartic-
ulated jumble of facts in newspapers or radio reports, should be read as an
attempt to think about how literary forms evolve in and through media.
In what ways, I asked, does our moment bear out Benjamins thesis of a
modern readership awash in information but lacking in real exchange of
experiences? In what ways might we be witnessing a return, even with
deep differences, of some of the sociality of traditional storytelling that
Benjamin so values?
To get at these questions, I asked students to reflect on differences in
their reading practices when they are reading on screens or in print.
Several students described the pleasures and the problems of distraction in
screen-based reading: the visual and aural cues that signal new information
coming in, from texts to emails to push notifications, for example. Another
student claimed, a bit puckishly, that he didnt read anything anymore, in
the sense that reading on the screen pulls him out from a given text into
others, so that any given reading session takes in an improvised weave of
texts rather than the kind of solitary, stable object Benjamin imagines. But
the most vibrant discussion stemmed from the question of isolation. A
JEFF ALLRED ++,
minority of students moved with the grain of Benjamins critique,
expressing a nostalgia for a prior moment when serious reading was
more widespread, or noting irritation with the superficiality of web cul-
ture. But most students expressed enthusiasm for screen-based reading and
especially for its capacity to let them share their reading experience and
commentary, be it on blogs or via social network interfaces or even (in
one students provocative example) product reviews.
I will now engage some of the issues raised via Benjamin in more
practical ways by focusing on two of the group projects I assigned to my
Novel Hacks seminar, to show how emergent technologies and reading
practices are best understood through the lens of the long history of the
material text, and, conversely, how the history of the material text must be
understood in light of ongoing changes in how we read. The first group
project involved the production of a public domain audiobook eventually
deposited online and made available for general use.
4
In the second proj-
ect. students produced a marked up version or revision of a novel to
bring out some aspect for a peer audience of advanced undergraduate
English majors. For both projects, I gave students broad latitude to choose
texts and shape the product, offering suggestions as to software, secondary
readings, and primary texts, but making no specific demands beyond a set
of incremental deadlines. I will discuss the pros and cons of this self-direct-
ed approach in detail in the last section of the essay; for now, I note only
that I will provide more structure and less freedom in future attempts. Each
group had 6-7 students and had about a month to research its respective
topic in consultation with me, divvy up the tasks, and produce its object.
Each group shared the requirements of defining basic roles: researchers
who gathered and shared secondary materials, producers of the basic con-
tent of each project (e.g., the audiobooks reader-performers), editors who
cleaned up, compiled, and shared the final product, and teachers who led a
thirty-minute lesson/presentation to the class as a whole. Each group met
with me at the end of the second and third weeks to track progress and
troubleshoot. At the conclusion of the project, every student was responsi-
ble for a 500-word reflection on the project as a whole and his or her role
within it.
Both of these projects used free, off the shelf resources. I am not a dig-
ital humanist by training, and my college has neither a DH institute nor
much in the way of space and support for digital pedagogy. Moreover, my
students overwhelmingly come from working-class backgrounds, are
working their way through school, and have long commutes to campus,
so I had to design projects that could be achieved with razor-thin budgets
of both time and money and without face-to-face collaboration outside
of class. To frame these constraints more positively, open-source technolo-
gies can be free in multiple senses: they have been produced with donated
time and money; they allow for a freer relation between reader, author,
and text; and products created with them can be freely shared with the
public with a few precautions. Both projects were fun to explore and
4 The audiobook can be
accessed via jallred.net/
teachingprojects.
5 Several chapters from
Audiobooks, Literature, and
Sound Studies, edited by
Matthew Rubery, engage
this history. For a critical
reflection on the rise of
books on tape in the
1970s and 80s, see Sven
Birkerts, The Gutenberg
Elegies 14150.
thought-provoking for students and provided a pedagogical jolt that posi-
tioned students and myself in an unconventional relationship to canonical
texts. Both provided me with abundant examples of what works and what
doesnt in these kinds of projects, and I will reflect on these issues in the
conclusion.
Novel Hack #1: Narration,
Recitation, and the Audiobook
Listening to recorded texts has its origins in Edisons vision for the
phonogram as a literary delivery system in the 1870s, and develops
through the radio dramas of the 1930s, literary recordings on LPs in the
postwar period, and especially the rise of books on tape in the 1970s.
5
Recorded performances of all kinds of literary textsand especially nov-
elsare more popular than ever, and the commercial mainstream has
transitioned seamlessly from tapes and CDs to digital audio files distrib-
uted over the internet by audible.com and similar vendors.
In composing this assignment for students, however, I was inspired not
by commercial recordings but by a subcultural form known as the dis-
tributed audiobook, recordings produced by a loosely affiliated network
of amateurs, and compiled and offered for download by sites like lib-
rivox.org. The distributed audio book is an innovative and dynamic form
of recorded literature and has fascinating resonances with the long history
of novel reading. Nonprofessional performers work collaboratively, most
often alternating by chapters, so that a long novel might have dozens of
readers. Unlike commercially produced counterparts, volunteers donate
their time and energy to cultivate a parcel of the cultural commons, rean-
imating texts that, in many cases, have gone out of print and/or are not
considered viable by profit-oriented audiobook producers.
The distributed audiobook throws a wrench into the works of the novel
genre by replacing its narrating voice, the dominant narrative presence that
instructs, delights, seduces, and informs us from a privileged and often
inscrutable position, with a protean voice, as the narrative is passed from ama-
teur to amateur. Consuming a novel in this format becomes a journey shared
with an assortment of voices and bodies, as one hears the same textual voice
put on different ages, ethnicities, genders, volumes, qualities of recording
equipment, degrees of privacy (the occasional crying baby or moaning stereo
may intrude from other rooms), and readers different levels of competency
and/or cultural capital. Listening to novels in this way radicalizes the het-
eroglossia of the novel genre (Bakhtin 259-300), and tugs even the governing
narrative voice into the centrifugal and democratizing vortex of the genres
social energies. Listening to a distributed audiobook also makes the narrative
more visible as a construction. Unlike in a professional recording by a sea-
soned performer, the quality Roland Barthes described as the grain of the
voice is not sanded out (The Grain of the Voice 271). The remaining res-
+:o transformations
6 This and all following
quotations from students
are drawn from brief
reflections on the project
submitted for a grade.
Out of respect for stu-
dents privacy, I leave the
sources anonymous.
onant roughness is an active signifying presence in the distributed audiobook
generally, and in those produced by students in the Novel Hacks class.
I asked a group of six students to produce an audiobook of a public-
domain novel. They chose both the text and the style of performance col-
laboratively. They chose Robert Louis Stevensons The Strange Case of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, since several group members were familiar with the
novel and all members agreed that it would make for a dramatic spoken
text and was of manageable length. Rather than use DIY software like
Audacity, they booked time at our colleges radio station to record their
performances using professional-grade equipment, at the urging of a group
member with his own radio show and a willingness to help peers. Students
also discussed some aesthetic issues: whether to add a soundtrack with
background music and/or sound effects; whether to divide the text by
character (as in a radio play) or by chapter (with each reader doing all the
voices in a given chapter); whether to agree on a uniform style or allow
each narrator to stylize her chapter as she saw fit. In the end, they chose a
simple and straightforward approach, as do most narrators on texts hosted
at librivox.org, with each narrator reading one chapter in whatever style he
deems comfortable. In making this choice, members cited time constraints
above all: they were understandably wary of approaches that would require
hours of rehearsal, multiple meet-ups, and complex post-production work.
In their comments on the project, several students noted the technical
challenges of being a co-producer, rather than a reader, of a novel. The stu-
dent who was assigned to post-production commented that she became
aware of the fuzziness of distinguishing between edit-worthy mistakes
and more subtle infelicities that could be left in, especially insofar as I
found myself becoming more forgiving of my own mistakes than those of
peers.
6
Students also noted issues of readerly competence and affect: one
student noted, I came across a few words I had never seen in my life nor
had I known how to pronounce them out loud, and another lamented
that even her best-prepared peer struggled with pronunciation of outdated
words, and everyone managed to either switch words to constructions we
were familiar with, or changed words to do the same. She thus acknowl-
edged that a compelling performance of the text was bedeviled by the per-
formers lack of mastery at certain points and that the desire to produce an
effective oral performance might justify changes in what is ordinarily con-
ceived of as a fixed, stable printed object. Her comment also gestures to ways
that I could have structured the assignment to challenge students to better
mastery of the oral performance: asking them to keep logs, for example, of
pronunciations they looked up, unfamiliar words they learned, foreign
phrases or names they researched. After experiencing the final product, stu-
dents considered the differences between a spoken text and a text consumed
via traditional silent reading. One student regretted his failure to convince
the group to use the radio play approach, complete with sound effects and
a soundtrack, which would have been a lot more fun and would have
enlivened the text with more vivid voices. Another noted that her experi-
JEFF ALLRED +:+
+:: transformations
ence producing an audiobook might feed back into her silent reading prac-
tice, since I enjoyed reading with emotion, rather than the internal monot-
onous tone of my voice that I now notice when I read to myself. Her
comments derive from Matthew Ruberys work on audiobooks, an article
the group read together and presented to peers. In a discussion of the audio-
book and Victorian literary culture, Rubery argues that such struggles with
voice characterization link todays readers/listeners to an earlier moment
in cultural history when people were accustomed to evaluate their own as
well as professionals skill performing varied vocal registers to represent dif-
ferent characters in the narrative, an act that can be challenging for nar-
rators reading stories outside the range of their own biography and thus
summons up issues of cultural difference and competence (Play It Again,
Sam Weller 67). The comments of students on their own perfomances
reveal how voicing classic texts in new ways might recapture some of the
grain of the voice that Barthes mourns, or open up a new axis along
which to think about Bakhtins heteroglossia.
To produce an audiobook points to both past and future. On the one
hand, it remediates prior cultural technologies. It imports a nineteenth-cen-
tury form into a twenty-first-century material support, the portable digital
audio player. It distributes the reading through time and spaces in ways that
produce a strange combination of intimacy (the whispered voice of a
stranger in ones ear[bud] during the morning commute) and estrange-
ment (the substitution of a panoply of others voices for ones own virtual
inner voice) (Bolter and Grusin 218). Chris Phillips has described the
capacity of digital audio recording technology to defamiliarize and
enhance aural reading as a way of learning and conveying critical knowl-
edge (55). In his courses on nineteenth-century US poetry, students self-
produce recitations of poems using simple USB microphones and the open-
source audio editing application Audacity; their products range widely,
from the simplest recitations that focus on issues of voice characterization
to more intensive remediations of texts that mix multiple tracks, employing
echo, sound effects, musical accompaniment, and the like (56-9).
Comparing this complex set of remediations to my classs more modest
first attempts, I agree with the student who speculated that mixing voices
and sound in a radio play format would be both more fun and, perhaps,
allow for more points of contact with the history of the novel. In a future
iteration of the course, I may assign students to examine and work from
remediated novels from prior periods, such as the amazing adaptations of
classic novels for radio by Orson Welles and John Housemans Mercury
Theater of the Air in the 1930s United States. I would also work on more
and better ways to publicize the project: for all practical purposes, the proj-
ect was private to the course, shared via Blackboard with course partici-
pants, although I have since posted it on my own website. In the future, I
would consult with librivox.org to publish the final product there and
make it freely available and brainstorm with students on ways to attract lis-
teners in the interests of sharing our work more widely.
JEFF ALLRED +:
Producing distributed audiobooks also connects current reading prac-
tices to those from the nineteenth century. Listening to books rather than
reading them attunes our ears to the differences between our own and
Victorian-era reading practices, when reading aloud was more integrated
into domestic life. Famous authors readings were a major form of enter-
tainment (Andrews 10925). Public readings by famous authors were a con-
spicuous feature of the literary culture of the period, and Rubery and others
have argued that authors used these occasions to comment implicitly on
their own texts through performative choices. Public readings therefore
were not so much passive reproductions of a master text as new editions or
textual variants (Rubery, Play It Again, Sam Weller 68; Bernstein). DIY
audiobooks, such as those the students produced, shift the personality of the
author and the uniformity of the narrative voice to the background and
emphasize the text as script or score, in which the smooth interface linking
author, narrator, and voice actor is grittier and more discontinuous. The
most dramatic effect of reading/speaking/hearing novels in this way is to
make students aware of a critical distance between listeners, performers,
texts, and authors, a distance that deauthorizes notions of canonicity and
textual purity and emphasizes plurality, variety, textual corruption, and dif-
ferent possibilities for dissemination.
Novel Hack #2:
Through the Looking-Glass 2.0 and the Digressive Edition
The second novel hack my students attempted was the creation of a
marked up novel, again using a public-domain text and free, open-source
tools. Whereas creating an audiobook uses emergent technologies and
practices to help readers recover some aspects of a lapsed sociality in lit-
erature, marking up a novel uses them to expand the margins of novels
and populate this new space with a company of reader/writers in ways
that change the dynamics of novel reading. To publish an annotated or
otherwise marked-up edition of a novel, even in a simple DIY format, is to
claim a textual authority that has traditionally rested with a tiny cultural
elite; reader and writers (or, better, the reading and writing functions, since
most subjects perform both roles in this environment) are brought into
much closer proximity. In the digital environment, the entire atmosphere
that defined the novel genre for Benjamin is transformed: rather than the
isolated reader scarcely warming her detached self in front of a hermetic,
isolated and isolating text, we have a writer/reader inscribing herself with-
in and without the margins of a text on several distinct levels amid the
visible-audible hum of other readers doing the same, often in real time.
My students used digress.it, since 2009 one of several WordPress plugins
and themes that tweak the basic contours of blogsa primary post by
the blog author or authors and a series of secondary comments that fol-
low the postto allow for more subtle relationships between primary
7 Kathleen Fitzpatrick has
exhaustively examined
the potential of WordPress
-based tools to facilitate
scholarly communications
and publication, particu-
larly in her book, Planned
Obsolescence, which dis-
cusses CommentPress,
another WordPress plugin
that is similar to digress.it.
(20920).
text and commentary. The main change is that comments can be append-
ed to a particular paragraph rather than to the entire text of the post, and
that comments appear in the margins next to the paragraph they com-
ment upon rather than appearing at the end. The result is a more dynamic
relationship between primary and secondary texts, author and reader,
body and margin. This reading/writing space shifts the work of literary
criticism from the strenuous rewriting of imaginative texts that, as close
reading, has been at the center of the humanities for almost a century, to
the co-writing of such texts. Within an environment like digress.it, critical
inscriptions are appended to the text, almost like leaves on the tree of the
original text, a metaphor that is intensified when multiple critical voices
are inscribing the same primary text. In less formal and more institu-
tional terms, digress.it (and similar tools) allow for a cheaper, faster, and
more spontaneous mode of critique than traditional publishing outlets.
7
The democratic impulse behind the design is manifest in designer Eddie
Tejedas description of the project, where users are encouraged to turn
documents into conversations and collectively dissect public documents
like political speechesor government transcripts (digress.it). Tools like
digress.it thus offer the wider distribution of a traditionally rarified subject
positionthe public critic of texts and/or producer of authoritative
annotated editions of classic texts. This emphasis on spontaneity and
sociality draws from and parallels aspects of user generated content with
which most students are familiar: from extremely nuanced analyses of
serial fictions like Breaking Bad or Lost on blogs, wikis, and discussion
forums, to collective annotation of presidential debates via Twitter to the
sophisticated annotations of rap lyrics, poems, and many other kinds of
texts among the hundreds of thousands of users of the site Rap Genius.
In each case, an authoritative primary text is inscribed with copious com-
mentary by authors with no special credentials or institutional platforms.
One wide use of digress.it in a literary critical context is the New
York Public Librarys Candide 2.0, a marked up version of Voltaires
classic released in conjunction with an exhibition on the novel at the
library in 2009-10. Perhaps the most sophisticated aspect of the project is
its careful construction of the text to foreground the interplay between its
content and form. First, the editors preface emphasizes the way Voltaires
text was marked up from the start, appearing as it did amid intense con-
troversy regarding the relationship between writers civil liberties and the
states interest in controlling the flow of ideas. As the editor puts it, the
text invited both private marginalia and public comment, both authorized
texts and pirated or otherwise unsanctioned editions:
Almost immediately upon its publication in 1759, Candide was
translated, pirated, and responded to in pamphlets, unauthorized
sequels, and adaptations for stage. [] Although police tried to
seize the book as it was sold underground and it was placed on
the Vaticans list of forbidden books in 1762, the controversy
made it all the more attractive to readers to get their hands on it.
+: transformations
Readers responded actively to Voltaires tale: they wrote about it,
sometimes in the margins of their own copies they bought under
the table, but often in public forms of repudiation for its religious
irreverence, defenses of Leibniz and Rousseau, and imaginings of
what would happen after Candide and his companions were left
to cultivate their garden in the Orient. (Boone)
Thus Candide 2.0 is not a radical departure from its printed progenitor, but
a continuation of a tradition of paratextual commentary that was part of
the text from its very origins. Second, the project uses the metaphor of the
garden to govern the markup procedure. Voltaires text culminates in the
injunction that we must cultivate our garden, and this trope, with its
implications of a harmonious interplay between rational culture and anar-
chic nature, permeates the text. The garden of Candide 2.0 was executed
by restricting access to the text to a handful of experts (including the
exhibit editor Alice Boone, a graduate student; several tenured professors;
an independent scholar; a novelist; and a playwright) who seeded the
text with comments prior to public access. The text was then opened up
to public comment for over two months, before being closed on April 25,
2010 (it remains available as a read-only text as of this writing).
This procedure, allows for a mixture of authoritative and highly struc-
tured commentary from experts with a more democratic mode of partic-
ipation from lay readers, whose contributions were constrained by the
temporal limits of a) being excluded from commentary until the experts
had created some critical scaffolding and b) the closure of commenting
after a set interval. The result is a finished text where readers will note
the tension between the seemingly effortless erudition of the gardeners
and the more unruly or anarchic reading style of some lay readers
(Wittmann 2902; Petrucci 3567). In one example, in the eighth para-
graph of chapter one, Nicholas Cronk, a seeder, provides a learned gloss
on Voltaires satire on arguments from design in the text: that Voltaire
uses Pangloss to point out the absurd claims that, for example, the nose
has been formed to bear spectaclesthus we have spectacles or Pigs
were made to be eatentherefore we eat pork all the year round. Three
lay readers link to this comment, jumping from Cronks comment that
Pangloss obviously didnt bother to ask why God didnt design the world
for Muslims or Jews to a discussion of the history and rationale of kosher
laws. This kind of digressiveness is clearly part of the pleasure of becoming
a reader-writer in an environment like digress.it, and it points to the deep
differences between reading in a dynamic digital space and reading print.
Even from the standpoint of the reader of the closed text, who does not
inscribe it in any public way, there is the question of how to read it: does
one interrupt Voltaire with the 226 comments appended to the various
chapter and paragraphs? Or read Voltaire, and then read the commentary?
One might also track the output of any of the sixty-six commentators,
since digress.it allows one to sift out the comments of a single contributor
into a separate page. More radically interruptive strategies emerge from
JEFF ALLRED +:
+:o transformations
the links that many commenters post, ranging from materials from the
related exhibit on Voltaire posted by curator Alice Boone to the many
links to personal blogs and sites by lay readers: as with all browser-based
reading, ones attention to the primary text is constantly diverted and
rerouted around an infinite web of textuality..
With the example of Candide 2.0 in mind, I wanted to see what
would happen with a more unruly marking-up process. A second group
of six students from my class chose a novel in the public domain and, using
digress.it, marked up all or part of it as they saw fit. The group assigned
four members to do the actual annotations, one to teach a lesson to the
whole class (which focused on different modes of screen-based annotation
of texts), and one to clean up and prepare the final product. As the group
was assembling its project, the entire class examined Candide 2.0 as a
model. All read historical and theoretical texts by Roger Chartier, Joanna
Drucker, and Christian Vanderdorpe that compare the often subtle ways
that print and screen-based media structure reading and writing through
layout and other, often invisible, elements of textual presentation. The
group chose Lewis Carrolls Through the Looking-Glass to annotate. My
sense is that Looking-Glass was attractive for its manageable length and its
familiarity to all group members, as well as to the class as a whole. As in
the first group project, I did not build the text into the syllabus, and thus
require all students to read and study it, a decision that I regret, since stu-
dents lack of prior mastery of the novel hampered their ability to think
through and implement a coherent edition of it. In a preliminary organi-
zational meeting with group members, I urged them to think about how
to make it new for an audience of peers and suggested ways to focus
their markup by choosing a theme to limit and focus the scope of the
annotations. Although I left them free to choose, I gave two examples of
possible approaches: glosses on the political references and caricatures in
the text, or the history of visualizations of the text in popular culture.
The result starkly contrasted to the Voltaire project. Whereas Candide
2.0 has deep roots in scholarly practice and the history of annotated texts
from literary and religious canons, Looking-Glass 2.0 is rooted in what
Lawrence Lessig calls the remix culture that todays students share: one
in which texts are woven out of prior texts, often mixing different media
promiscuously using digital tools (689). The first and most striking dif-
ference has to do with the notion that the text is a unified whole con-
tained within a book. The students marked up only the first chapter; it was
evident from the comments that some students neglected to read the
entire novel, an act that could be read as laziness or evidence of time pres-
sure. On a practical level, I might have done more to enforce a fuller mas-
tery of the text and more complete markup in the form of incremental
deadlines. The students own hack of my assignment might also be read
as a function of the digital writing space, and of readers whose practices
have been formed in and through that space, allowing readers to enjoy a
text with little regard to the relationship between parts and the whole.
JEFF ALLRED +:;
They mixed spontaneous personal responses (a comment that clearly
Alice hasnt been to NYC in response to a pastoral description of a snow-
fall), more nuanced critical comments (a discussion of the recurrent use of
black and white to signal shifts in valuation), decontextualized links to
other texts (an indie bands song based on the novel, a Wikipedia article
on the novel), and so on.
I was disappointed that the markup lacked a coherent focus and did
not address the text as a whole, but in retrospect, this frustration fails to
account for the ways in which the notions of focus and the text are
evolving and perhaps becoming vestigial. The history of reading is full of
moments in which readers, practices, and platforms are out of sync, and
many of our most highly esteemed formsthe novel among them
emerged as disruptions of prior value systems. My students reading prac-
tices can be understood as the inheritor of a centuries-long shift from
intensive to extensive reading: that is, from repeated reading of a few
sanctified texts, often including manuscript copying, verbalization, and
memorization, to one-time reading of parts of many different texts, often
in the service of information seeking and/or the composition of new
texts (Chartier and Cavallo 249). Readers like my students are habituated
to infinitely, effortlessly extensive reading. Many of my students com-
ments can be read as stemming from the forces that are wearing down
habits of intensive reading: one comment consisted of an image of an
Alice-themed chess set via Google Images; another likens the mirror-
image printing of the poem Jabberwocky to the redrum/murder ref-
erences in Stanley Kubricks The Shining. But one exchange suggests
something nearly opposite is going on. One student, tongue firmly in
cheek, said of the mirror-image Jabberwocky, I find myself wanting to
press the like button :/ Another replied that the urge to like made
him think of a potentially negative consequence of this kind of anno-
tation: that the critique of a text could become diluted by a mass of
facile reactions just as Facebook liking pigeonholes users into an either
or choice rather than a more nuanced mode of reflection. This exchange
suggests a way in which an assignment like Looking Glass 2.0 uses the fric-
tion between older texts and modes of reading with new texts and modes
of reading to give students a critical purchase on their own habits of read-
ing and cultural consumption.
Perhaps the most profound change in novel reading in this new envi-
ronment is the new visibility of the reader of reader-response theory or
the mass readership of sociological approaches to literature. Increasingly, to
read a text on a screen is to read with and against others in ways that begin
to undermine the dominant model (which began to solidify in the late
thirteenth century) of silent, solitary reading (Saenger 1367). This
dynamic is most conspicuous in a WordPress-based environment like
digress.it, where a community of readers forms around the text, dialogues
with each other, and sees new comments emerge in real time. In this envi-
ronment, the intimacy often assumed to structure novel readingthe
+: transformations
8 The One City, One Book
movement is an interest-
ing example, whereby
readers self-organize in a
given city to read and dis-
cuss a given book at a
given time, usually mixing
social networking modes
of communication and
physical meet-ups. For an
example, see the events
organized by the San
Francisco Public Library
at http://sfpl.org/index.
php?pg=2000352501 and
the Twitter feed associated
with the group at http://
twitter.com/onecityone-
book (both accessed April
4, 2013).
9 In addition to Carr and
Turkle, see Birkerts.
genteel author addressing a dear reader in Dickens, or the isolated read-
er warming his hands at the flame of the novels plot in Benjamin
gives way to a complex feedback mechanism in which ones reception of
the text is mingled with that of others. And so we have an emergent neo-
salon culture via Twitter, in which novels can be read by scores, hundreds,
or thousands of readers sharing a common hashtag and commenting on a
text in ways that are both dispersed in space and time and yet somehow
together.
8
E-readers and tablets both reflect and shape more social modes
of reading. Nicholas Carr, Sherry Turkle, Sven Birkerts, and others suggest
that our job as humanists will be to preserve quiet space for intensive
modes of reading and the medium of print that has historically sustained
it.
9
But I suspect that Allan Liu is right to argue that the literary is
undergoing fundamental change and that humanists are best served think-
ing about how to function within this new ecology of knowledge work
that subsumes our practices within a broader and noisier sphere of activity,
often organized by corporations in ways that cut against our critical and
pedagogical purposes (110).
Conclusions and Resolutions
My first foray into a pedagogy of making things and sharing them had
its pitfalls. I made both strategic and tactical errors: the course was too
broadly framed, attempting to take on big chunks of secondary literature
in the vast fields of the history of the novel and the history of the book,
as well as work on more recent developments in cyberculture and online
writing practices and spaces. Moreover, the group projects were not
aligned closely enough with the broad units of the course, so that each
project felt like a sidebar in the syllabus to me, and Im sure to the students
as well. I wish I had devoted more time to walking students through pos-
sible tools and interfaces, laid out a clearer set of expectation for the final
project, and, organized projects around texts that the entire class would
study more closely over a longer timeframe. There was, however, a silver
lining even in these mistakes, in that students used the slack to reveal a lot
I hadnt known about their habitual reading, researching, and writing
practices, and they made the projects their own in ways that illuminated
both the problems and potential latent in the crossroads where popular
modes of reading and traditional literary pedagogy meet. N. Katherine
Hayles has recently argued against the notion of a widespread crisis in
reading popularized in the wake of a 2004 report by the National
Endowment for the Humanities. Instead, she asserts that we are living
through a gradual shift in reading that moves from deep attention to
hyper attention, enabled by the interactivity of screen-based texts that
begins to erode the boundaries between reading and computer gaming
(187). For Hayles, if there is a crisis afoot, it is a crisis in literary pedagogy,
which needs to engage not just the content of popular culture, but the
forms, platforms, and practices that enable it. Doing so makes us reexam-
JEFF ALLRED +:,
ine some of our basic assumptions about what we mean when we talk
about reading, writing, analysis, and attention.
Once again, cultural emergences resonate with cultural residues, since
Hayles promotion of the playful spirit of gaming as a model for pedagogy
points back several decades to Barthes work on the writerly text, which
I assigned to my Novel Hacks students. Writing in the 1970s, Barthes
promotes the idea that the death of the author opens up possibilities for a
more porous, two-way relationship between reading and writing, or
between imaginative texts and critical paratexts. Having students remediate
texts in the ways Ive described makes us think about the contingency of
the literary text prior to being produced, materialized, and consumed in a
particular way. Barthes usefully links the writerly text back to the rela-
tionship that pertained among consumers of music before the era of
recorded music (Work 162). He hopes that being writerly will open
up for us some of the pleasure and direct engagement that arose from the
need to play a score at the old upright piano and thus mark it up with ones
own idiosyncratic emphases, limitations, and imperfections. My students
projects had imperfections aplenty, but I also think they partook of this
spirit of Barthesian play in ways that reflect back on past moments in the
novels development and, perhaps, point forward towards its future.
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