As rhetoric or practical criticism: “the examination of diction and syntax, rhythm and repetition, and the various figures of speech”
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/j.ctt24hzc6.9.pdf?acceptTC=true
I can't help but think of David Foster Wallace's use of diction in Infinite Jest
As philosophy or the “potential expression of truth and knowledge”
In my opinion, this is the most common approach to literature, especially in the date-and-age of close reading. "Philosophy" is a word with many meanings; while we may not be referring to the Sophocles variety, one may say that each piece of literature works to express some sort of truth to its reader, no matter how "deep" the truth may be.
As “cultural production”—“for its political role, its exposure of the state of a given society”
http://orwell.ru/library/essays/wiw/english/e_wiw
the idea of writing for "political purpose"
“to explore both the nature of Stein’s art and certain wider questions about linguistic and literary meaning” (170);
This argument can be used in reference to any literary work. It is more present or more effective within the lens of the modernist era?
Organizations ask for loyalty, but they reciprocate that loyalty with shams, counterfeit incentives that neither provide value nor require investment.
Bogost has a LOT of feels...
Games or points isn't the point -- for gamifiers, there's no difference. It's the -ification that's most important. Zicherman makes the point for me: "What gamification does is allow marketers to focus on what they know best -- convincing consumers to take loyalty and purchasing actions -- using a powerful toolkit of engagement gleaned from games."
Don't games, in essence, require points, winning and losing? The reason games fit so perfectly into the domain of education is because they are a quantitative measure.
When people complain that "serious games" is an oxymoron miss the point: it's supposed to be an oxymoron. When people hear "serious games," this contradiction is foregrounded and silently resolved.
LOL just got called out HARD.
Most recently, Serious Games have offered another, more general attempt to expand games' scope
Personally, the idea of "serious games" seems like a bit of an oxymoron; the attraction of games is to take something mundane, such as certain aspects of education, and approach them from a new, progressive way. If we are "gamifying" things just to maintain their "serious" nature, isn't this counter-productive to our efforts?
IVANHOE is not like a "creative writing workshop,"
A tad pretentious; lose the quotes!
Pride and Prejudice
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/16/jane-austen-movies_n_6329370.html
In recent years the scene of humanities instruction grows less like the classroom of the 1930s, when the remarkably successful teaching protocols of the New Criticism were invented.
I learned through the lens of close reading, and it is still a touchstone of my ability to connect to a work. However, games like IVANHOE and the current technological influx into the classroom has made the ability to close read that much more precise. Not only can I look at "just" the text, I can find all the resources and context that surround that text.
Victorians rewrote and reimagined the book. Why are we so hesitant about doing the same thing?
I don't think we're hesitant to "remaster" or "rework"; if anything, I think our culture has been extremely spoiled by the acting of the rewrite. If and when we don't like a character, we simply rewrite them, kill them off, or change their persona. To a certain extent, it seems as if we're more afraid to accept a piece for what it is, or for what the author intended it to be.
Book history attends to the reception and the uses of the artifact: what is done to books as well as what has been done with books.
So this is where our class intersects with marginalia- what are individuals doing with their novels, outside of the realm of straight reading?
But Harry Potter is a tale of marginalia
Harry Potter fan fiction -- a touchstone of marginalia -- has become its own significant form of literature. I would argue that Harry Potter is not a children's novel; the breakout of young adult fiction has bridged the gap between children's books and "adult" novels.
What thus distinguishes tutored from untutored writing—and what distinguishes the adult from the child—is the ability to reproduce one’s own hand without variation over time.
Can't it be argued that children have their own, distinct voice? Even if that voice changes over time, it is still uniquely "their's".
That children wrote in books and that their annotations may survive attest, for some, to an eternal common-place: this is something children did and do, whatever time or social world they live in.
But is this really just an aspect of childhood imagination? There is something to be said for individuals who maintain this aspect of youthfulness and continue annotating into their adult lives. Does this mark them as more creative than their non-annotating counterparts?
The Text is not to be thought of as an object that can be computed. It would be futile to try to separate out materially works from texts. In particular, the tendency must be avoided to say that the work is classic, the text avant-‐garde; it is not a question of drawing up a crude honours list in the name of modernity and declaring certain literary productions 'in' and others 'out' by virtue of their chronological situation: there may be 'text' in a very ancient work, while many products of contemporary literature are in no way texts. The difference is this: the work is a fragment of substance, occupying a part of the space of books (in a library for example), the Text is a methodological f
The dichotomy that exists between a work and a text is that a text can exist within a variety of realms of spaces; there is no finite definition of what or where a text can live.
We know that today post-‐serial music has radicallyaltered the role of the 'interpreter', who is called on to be in some sort the co-‐author of the score, completing it rather than giving it 'expres
The work is normally the object of a consumption; no demagogy is intended here in referring to the so-‐called consumer culture but it has to be recognized that today it is the 'quality' of the work (which supposes finally an appreciation of 'taste') and not the operation of" reading itself which can differentiate between books: structurally, there is no difference between 'cultured reading and casual reading in trains.
Isn't there a positive aspect to people reading at all, despite the caliber of content? Especially in cities like New York, where public transit is the only transit, there is so much opportunity for consumption. Who are we, and we being literary scholars, to judge what kind of information people choose to consume and maintain informed about?
2. In the same way, the Text does not stop at (good) Literature; it cannot be contained in a hierarchy, even in a simple division of genres. What constitutes the Text is, on the contrary (or precisely), its subversive force in respect of the old classifications. How do you classify a writer like Georges Bataille? Novelist, poet, essayist, economist, philosopher, mystic? The answer is so difficult that the literary manuals generally prefer to forget about Bataille who, in fact, wrote texts, perhaps continuously one single text. If the Text poses problems of classification (which is furthermore one of its 'social functions), this is because it always involves a certain experience of limits (to take up an expression from Philippe Sollers).Thibaudet used already to talk -‐-‐but in a very restricted sense -‐-‐of limit-‐works (such as Chateaubriand's Vie de Rancé, which does indeed come through to us today as a 'text'); the Text is that which goes to the limit of the rules of enunciation (rationality, readability, etc.). Nor is this a rhetorical idea, resorted to for some 'heroic' effect: the Text tries to place itself very exactly behind the limit of the doxa (is not general opinion -‐-‐constitutive of our democratic societies and powerfully aided by mass communications -‐-‐defined by its limits, the energy with which it excludes, its censorship?). Taking the word literally, it may be said that the Text is always paradoxical.
As an English major, this is where my personal struggle lays. What makes a text worthy of scholarly attention? If I am reading outside of the boundaries of my studies, is reading "bad" literature the same thing as not reading at all? Actresses like Tina Fey and Lena Dunam are now publishing their own works, outside of the frame of their professional personas. Where do their works stand on the spectrum of the pop culture canon?
so the combined action of Marxism, Freudianism and structuralism demands, in literature, the relativization of the relations of writer, reader and observer
And this is where the intersectionality of Digital Humanities exists; the traditional roles of reader, writer, editor, scholar are now being blurred, using secondary media sources to allow "regular" people to act as critics to the texts in which they correspond
Atufal
http://www.jstor.org/stable/25091001?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
St. Francis
If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men. -St. Francis of Assisi
Upon a still nigher approach, this appearance was modified, and the true character of the vessel was plain—a Spanish merchantman of the first class, carrying negro slaves, amongst other valuable freight, from one colonial port to another.
smelter's
Smelting is a form of extractive metallurgy; its main use is to produce a base metal from its ore. This includes production of silver, iron, copper and other base metals from their ores.
Hecate
Hecate- Greek goddess of the three paths, guardian of the household, protector of everything newly born, and the goddess of witchcraft
Lazarus in Abraham's bosom
Luke 16:24 And he cried out and said, 'Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus so that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool off my tongue, for I am in agony in this flame.'
That was in the lion month of March
March: In like a lion, out like a lamb.
Quito
Quito: Capital of Ecuador
"With fairest flowers, Whilst summer lasts, and I live here, Fidele—"
Melville selects a quote from Act 4, Scene 2 of William Shakespeare’s Cymbeline to present in this epigraph. This specific line is spoken by the character Arviragus in his burial speech for a girl named Imogen. Imogen actually disguised as a boy, Fidele, who is believed to be dead (Dillingham 335).
By preceding the story with this quote, Melville introduces the dominant theme of perception. This scene from Shakespeare depicts an illusion used to disguise reality as the live girl, Imogen, succeeds in pretending to be a dead boy named Fidele (Hattenhauer 73).
http://genius.com/Herman-melville-the-piazza-tales-the-piazza-annotated
Aurora Borealis
What is the significance of astronomy?
Whoever built the house, he builded better than he knew; or else Orion in the zenith flashed down his Damocles' sword to him some starry night, and said, "Build there." For how, otherwise, could it have entered the builder's mind, that, upon the clearing being made, such a purple prospect would be his?—nothing less than Greylock, with all his hills about him, like Charlemagne among his peers.
Personally, I find it bizarre to be mixing such different allusions. I guess this is where annotated versions of something come in handy; instead of looking up each reference manually, someone else has done that leg work for us. It makes the reading go smoother.
WORKS CITED
These platforms also provide an opportunity to highlight what democratic deliberation shares with academic discourse: the general form of conversation.
The participatory ethos of social annotation aligns it with the promise of radical democracy: free expression, common ownership, mutual commitment; liberty, equality, fraternity. The promise stands in marked opposition to those aspects of higher education pedagogy and scholarship that remain, even in democratic societies, hierarchical, exclusive, proprietary, and competitive.
Annotation is of course far older than the web. For as long as there has been writing, there have been readers who follow along and “write back.”
Even though this proceeds the web, the web has amplified the ability to "write back"; the first thing that comes to mind are threads of Facebook and YouTube comments.
The fact that more or less anyone can publish to the web often makes people think that self-publication is its main use.
Wikipedia, anyone?
What’s powerful about Hypothes.is is that in principle it allows *anything* online to be annotated, without special tools beyond a browser plug-in.
Shout out to Hypothes.is for forcing me to buy a new computer that allows plug-ins and Chrome :I
Lurking behind their imaginative essays is an ideal of full comprehension–that we might be able to truly understand one another if we could just track down all the relevant influences and contexts and motives. We can also see how such a vision becomes oddly depersonalizing.
The best way to understand someone on an intellectual level? Read their annotations. It fascinates me to see what words people look up, what cultural references people associate with certain ideas. Not all learning has to be "high culture"; the intersection of popular culture and academia is not as tricky as many scholars like to make it.
When I was a graduate student, one of my favorite moments was visiting the collections at UC Santa Cruz, and looking at Thomas Carlyle’s alternatively-metered edition of Robert Browning’s poems. What has become distinctive now is the extreme rapidity of searching one’s own marginalia, as well the ability to see how others read.
I only buy used copies of books, whether it be from a local bookstore, such as Shakespeare, or online, all hands up for Amazon Prime! There's something special, an intimate experience, that exists in picking up a work and reading someone else's notes in it, especially that of a stranger's. Beginning a dialogue with someone else's ideas is, in my opinion, the best way to open the flood gates of knowledge.
Bequests of personal notes were explicitly includedin wills and even fought over in cases of disputed legacy.
Hemingway, anyone?
Therefore anothermethod of analysis (and the principal one for earlier periods) is to hypoth-esize from finished texts about the methods of note taking from which theywere composed.
There is still a certain fascination with reading the notes and annotations of our favorite authors. Kurt Cobain's journal that he used while song writing is a best seller; there is a digital copy available of Sylvia Plath's annotations of The Great Gatsby. There is a special bond created when you read the ideas and commentary of another author on their favorite texts or even their own texts; it allows the reader to feel as though they are having a more intimate conversation with the author.
but also by our current experience with new tech-nologies and our sense (often more diffuse than articulate) that the com-puter is changing both the way we take notes and the kinds of notes andwriting we produce.7
I'm not sure if this is a positive or negative commentary on modern education, but my notes are less thoughtful, more plentiful, and easier to be made when using a digital device. If I am reading something I find interesting, I can flag it, favorite it, bookmark it, or download it to Microsoft Word and add my own footnotes and annotations. In primary and secondary school, we learned that there was such a thing as too much highlighting; now, my books or documents feel empty if they aren't filled to the brim with my own ideas. A piece is more or less what we make of it; there comes a time when every academic must decide what kind of reader they want to be, outside of the metrics of academic pursuit.
That's the worst accusation: that I am not a serious reader. Not guilty! I love books as much as anybody. But I love reading more. It is the sustained and individual encounter with ideas and stories that is so bewitching. If new formats allow us to have more of those, let us welcome and learn from them.
My biggest academic fear: that I am not a "real" reader. But if I'm informed in multiple aspects of texts, whether they be high or low culture, I am still a reader, right?
The iPhone is a Kindle killer.
iPhone > Kindle > The Nook
Do I love books or do I love reading?
I love books, the physical aspect of carrying something that contains a story. However, I will read anything: bad articles on Bustle, the Sunday NYT, weird subway signs. So which do I prefer?
"The author and narrator control your pace, and it is impractical to skim ahead or thumb back to another section."
But is this a positive attribute? Part of the beauty of the written novel is the ability to read and reread at one's own pace, going back and forth in order to retain the information the reader feels is most important.
"The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out." Fundamentally, I disagree with Benjamin's argument at this point; wisdom exists within the pages of a novel, and unlike the spoon-fed morals given to you in an oral tale, there is a certain level of personal discovery that must be done while reading a novel. It forces its readers to claim truths and wisdoms at their own pace.
Even in the act of storytelling, isn't interpretation a solitary act? To read a novel is to envision the characters and plot through your own unique perspective; hearing a story requires more imagination in response to the teller's vision versus the listener's.
In relation to the idea of digital humanities, social justice has now been taken from the public sphere of open protesting to the "public" interface of the web; anyone has access to these accusations, and news can spread at the speed of light. But how does this change the effectiveness of said accusations? Where does the reliability of what one says online start to lose its authenticity and effect? In regards to our class, where does the novel lose its power when its taken out of the pages of its parent-text?