Purpose and Design
The challenge for our profession in regard to electronic texts is one
of theorization and
design: How do we tailor the set of academic practices we are experts
in, practices that
are inextricably linked to the book, to the space of the screen? How
can we best use
these "virtual spaces" for pedagogy? In this paper, we will address
these questions in
relation to a series of experimental projects we have under way in the
Networked
Writing Environment at the University of Florida (the N.W.E. is a
Unix-based system of
12 servers and 186 terminals that are in use by over 2,600 students and
80
instructors). We are attempting to catalyze a reaction between Romantic
poetry and
electronic media to examine the pedagogical potential of the
recontextualization of
subjectivity that these new media make possible.
Victor Hugo once suggested that "Romanticism" was the "liberalism of
literaure," a
movement that unleashed the liberatory potential of writing, freeing
the artist from the
constraints of tradition and encouraging revolutionary political
thinking. Romanticism
marked a paradigm shift for Hugo from a literature emphasizing
objectivity, convention,
and the grandeur of mytho-historical themes to a literature emphasizing
the imaginative
and emotional life of the individual. Subsequent literary critics,
sharing Hugo's
conviction, have considered this Romantic ideology to be central to
Western democratic
society, a constitutive component of modern notions of individuality.
For this reason, we
conceived a literature and composition course, not about the "Romantic
period" per se,
but about the process of reconceptualizing subjectivity and the social
space it entails that
began in that period and is foundational to our conceptions of
literature, culture, and
individuality today. This framework allows us to explore a wide range
of writing,
focusing on how the "romantic" project of re-visioning both self and
nature gets taken up
and reworked in subsequent literary texts. From Wordsworth's wanderings
in search of
himself in the Lake District, we move to similar journeys in Whitman's
"Song of the
Open Road" and Kerouac's On the Road. With Blake's visionary
cartography of
England, we juxtapose Ginsberg's hallucinatory topography of America in
"Howl." And
against the strangely virtual spaces of Romantic "Nature", we consider
the equally
hyperreal terrain of postmodern consumer capitalism in White Noise .
We conceived our course, entitled "Writing About Visionary Selves and
Virtual
Landscapes," as a collaborative effort in which we pool our resources
and deploy our
individual teaching strengths in a complementary manner. The team
teaching effort is part
of reconfiguring notions of self and space that we discuss above. As
Deleuze and
Guittari explain, "Since each of us was several, there was already
quite a crowd." With
more than one teacher, conventional notions of student-teacher
relations are disturbed.
Likewise, to pass on the non-individuated, non-competitive mode of
learning, students
are asked to become team students (several students banding together to
aid each
other) just as Bill and Ron have become team teachers.
In teaching Romanticism in the electronic classroom, our main focus is
to show the
relation between inner landscapes, the outer social sphere, and
"Nature," where authors
often seek spaces to resonate with their visions. The N.W.E. (Networked
Writing
Environment) allows us to experiment with "new" approaches to
learning--online
discussions, e-mail panels, using and creating electronic texts and
virtual spaces--in
order to better achieve this goal. In this sense the Web and the Moo
function both as
scholarly apparatus and pedagogical tools. In both cases, the tools
help reconfigure our
interaction with the literary text because the text is represented in a
new mode--a mode
better characterized as "performative" than as "interactive"--as well
as in a new medium.
We wish to emphasize that our approach is experimental, an attempt to
put theory into
practice in the electronic classroom. Ultimately, we hope that our
students' engagement
with the electronic text will lead them to rethink the production and
representation of
subjectivity and social space in the Romantic period and in our own.
Performance
The assignments in "Visionary Selves and Virtual Landscapes" can be
divided into two
broad categories:
a series of short, argumentative response papers in which students are
asked to
analyze and interpret assigned texts,
five larger creative/experimental electronic performances (explained
below) in
which students attempt to grapple with the issues of textual
instability, subjectivity,
and the construction of space we discuss in class, using the studied
texts as
models.
Prelude: Constructing a "Monstrous" Homepage Identity.
Performance 1: Person, Place, and Thing in Romantic Texts.
Performance 2: The Encounter Between the Human and the Natural Worlds.
Performance 3: Lines of Flight for Revisioning Dominant Paradigms of
Subjectivity.
Performance 4: Representations of the Hyperreal City.
Performance 5: Finale! Virtual Gainesville.
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