our colored coachman

I found, when I bought the vineyard, that Uncle Julius had occupied a cabin on the place for many years, and derived a respectable revenue from the product of the neglected grapevines. This, doubtless, accounted for his advice to me not to buy the vineyard, though whether it inspired the goopher story I am unable to state. I believe, however, that the wages I paid him for his services as coachman, for I gave him employment in that capacity, were more than an equivalent for anything he lost by the sale of the vineyard.

“Nex’ spring, w’en de sap ris en Henry’s ha’r commence’ ter sprout, Mars Dugal’ sole ‘im ag’in, down in Robeson County dis time; en he kep’ dat sellin’ business up fer five year er mo’. Henry nebber say nuffin ’bout de goopher ter his noo marsters, ‘caze he know he gwine ter be tuk good keer uv de nex’ winter, w’en Mars Dugal’ buy him back. En Mars Dugal’ made ’nuff money off’n Henry ter buy anudder plantation ober on Beaver Crick.

“Now it happen dat one er de niggers on de nex’ plantation, one er ole Mars Henry Brayboy’s niggers, had runned away de day befo’, en tuk ter de swamp, en ole Mars Dugal’ en some er de yuther nabor w’ite folks had gone out wid dere guns en dere dogs fer ter he’p ’em hunt fer de nigger; en de han’s on our own plantation wuz all so flusterated

Mars Dugal’ foun’ he had made fifteen hund’ed gallon er wine; en one er de niggers hearn him laffin’ wid de oberseah fit ter kill, en sayin’ dem fifteen hund’ed gallon er wine wuz monst’us good intrus’ on de ten dollars he laid out on de vimya’d.

“Now, ef dey’s an’thing a nigger lub, nex’ ter ‘possum, en chick’n, en watermillyums, it’s scuppernon’s. Dey ain’ nuffin dat kin stan’ up side’n de scuppernon’ fer sweetness; sugar ain’t a suckumstance ter scuppernon’. W’en de season is nigh ’bout ober, en de grapes begin ter swivel up des a little wid de wrinkles er ole age,—w’en de skin git sof’ en brown,—den de scuppernon’ make you smack yo’ lip en roll yo’ eye en wush fer mo’; so I reckon it ain’ very ‘stonishin’ dat niggers lub scuppernon’.

As he became more and more absorbed in the narrative, his eyes assumed a dreamy expression, and he seemed to lose sight of his auditors, and to be living over again in monologue his life on the old plantation.

“Lawd bless you, suh, I knows all about it. Dey ain’ na’er a man in dis settlement w’at won’ tell you ole Julius McAdoo ‘uz bawn en raise’ on dis yer same plantation. Is you de Norv’n gemman w’at’s gwine ter buy de ole vimya’d?”

He resumed his seat with somewhat of embarrassment. While he had been standing, I had observed that he was a tall man, and, though slightly bowed by the weight of years, apparently quite vigorous. He was not entirely black, and this fact, together with the quality of his hair, which was about six inches long and very bushy, except on the top of his head, where he was quite bald, suggested a slight strain of other than negro blood. There was a shrewdness in his eyes, too, which was not altogether African, and which, as we afterwards learned from experience, was indicative of a corresponding shrewdness in his character. He went on eating the grapes, but did not seem to enjoy himself quite so well as he had apparently done before he became aware of our presence.

“Don’t let us disturb you,” I said. “There is plenty of room for us all.”

We drove between a pair of decayed gateposts—the gate itself had long since disappeared—and up a straight sandy lane, between two lines of rotting rail fence, partly concealed by jimson-weeds and briers, to the open space where a dwelling-house had once stood, evidently a spacious mansion, if we might judge from the ruined chimneys that were still standing, and the brick pillars on which the sills rested. The house itself, we had been informed, had fallen a victim to the fortunes of war.

though I learned later on that underneath its somnolent exterior the deeper currents of life—love and hatred, joy and despair, ambition and avarice, faith and friendship—flowed not less steadily than in livelier latitudes.

I was engaged at the time in grape-culture in northern Ohio, and, as I liked the business and had given it much study, I decided to look for some other locality suitable for carrying it on.

The manufactured authenticity of his dialect writing suggests that, while it may be informed by the same ear for speech that made him a successful stenographer, it did not conform to any original speech act; while there may be no speaking subject whose voice Chesnutt “transcribes” in his fiction, he nevertheless captures and encodes an image of American Blackness that he did not possess but could represent to white audiences who thought it authentic.

English pronounced as an ignorant old Southern Negro would be supposed to speak it, and at the same time to preserve a sufficient approximation to the correct spelling to make it easy reading. (“ To ” 105)

All writing, but especially one fraught with the political necessity of fidelity to experience that Chesnutt saw in realism, is always already stenographic in nature. 11

In other words, Kealing worries that the demands of the market are turning students into mere writing machines and leaving them without the “basal culture” that will allow them to understand and interpret what they type—they will become a generation of amanuenses, vessels for knowledge and culture without the tools to recognize the richness of the language and history passing through their fingertips and unable to recognize error when they encounter it.

If what makes a good realist is a facility for mimetic representation—that is, imitation—what makes a “bad” or at least minor realist is a facility for mimicking the facility for mimetic representation. The former mimesis takes place as a kind of translation of the world into the linguistic codes of realistic representation while the latter is portrayed as a knowledge of only linguistic codes. 9

What seems bizarre about Simmons’s analysis, although also correct, is that Chesnutt is damned to the status of imitator both by those who want to include him in the realist camp and those who do not.

I am not arguing that The Conjure Woman stories are “more realist” than they are usually given credit for but that the orthographic fidelity they simulate locates the “real” of the literary text in a material register (grammar, spelling, and syntax) rather than the conceptual register (the assumed relation of a fictional narrative to the reality it purports to reproduce).

The rejection of “Rena Walden” may have suggested to Chesnutt that an editor such as Gilder, who was sympathetic to realist literature, was not so interested in the phrase and carriage of everyday life if the days and lives described bore no relation to his or his readers’ own.

The very ways in which we find Chesnutt, in his day and ours, excluded from the realist canon suggests that the limits of the genre have more to do with the relationship between racial politics and epistemic difference than they do with the mimetic fidelity of descriptive language

The reader is left to infer that an essentially “imitative” people in a cultural arrangement that actually encourages the dangerous imitation of unsuitably civilized morals and norms is in a tough spot indeed. 6

Consequently, Jim Crow became not only a legal regime but a mode of thinking that haunted the postbellum nineteenth century’s imagination, one that persists to this day

Distinctions between mimesis, realism, and imitation may at first seem too fine to merit consideration, but their very ability to substitute for each other occasioned not exactly definitional confusion between them but the terms of access through which the logic of racial politics could come to resemble those of literary politics, through which the Howellsian trope of fidelity could also become a prized form of technological functionality.

Yet the suggestion that, through the manipulation of orthographic convention or a narrative verisimilitude inspired by Chesnutt’s own experiences with the color line, fiction might hew too close to transcription automatically ejects the work from the aesthetic realm and into that of reportage, from art to “just telling things.”

His exploitation of the “transcribed” feeling of dialect writing, the sense that it was drawn from a present and actually experienced scene of speaking, suggests that subversive political energies lay dormant in instrumentally transcriptive writing practices such as stenography.

“The Goophered Grapevine” suggests, both in the linguistic codes and the plot elements it deploys, that misdirection, subterfuge, and epistemic legerdemain subtend the aura of simplistic straight talk implied by the use of dialect.

Dialect fiction, an ostensibly mimetic writing form that portrays human speech as the locus of racial authenticity, ironically materializes and substantializes what Chesnutt elsewhere strove to demonstrate was insubstantial. For Chesnutt, then, writing was the sole arena in which the paradoxes of race thinking could take shape; to write race was, in some sense, and perhaps only for Chesnutt, to literally bring race into being.

The connection of writing to stenography and stenography to writing, far from being limited to the singular professional development of Chesnutt (the first major black American novelist), reflects some of the shared anxieties and contradictions of the racial and literary imaginations of the nineteenth century. Stenography, as a writing system that claims to record and preserve the inflections of human speech, and literary realism, a form of writing that claims to register the vicissitudes of human experience, both participate in a form of mimesis that was, by the end of the nineteenth century, the primary site of critical discord surrounding American fiction.

I asked William Whipper, of Pennsylvania, the gentleman alluded to above, whether he thought Mr. Douglass’s power inherited from the Negroid, or from what is called the Caucasian side of his make up? After some reflection, he frankly answered, “I must admit, although sorry to do so, that the Caucasian predominates.” At that time, I almost agreed with him; but, facts narrated in the first part of this work, throw a different light on this interesting question.

Heaven lends me ability, to use my voice, my pen, or my vote, to advocate the great and primary work of the universal and unconditional emancipation of my entire race.

But for the responsibility of conducting a public journal, and the necessity imposed upon me of meeting opposite views from abolitionists in this state, I should in all probability have remained as firm in my disunion views as any other disciple of William Lloyd Garrison.

a slavish adoration

I found them very earnestly opposed to the idea of my starting a paper, and for several reasons. First, the paper was not needed; secondly, it would interfere with my usefulness as a lecturer; thirdly, I was better fitted to speak than to write; fourthly, the paper could not succeed.

On their own motion, without any solicitation from me (Mrs. Henry Richardson, a clever lady, remarkable for her devotion to every good work, taking the lead), they raised a fund sufficient to purchase my freedom, and actually paid it over, and placed the papers 8 of my manumission in my hands, before [291] they would tolerate the idea of my returning to this, my native country. To this commercial transaction I owe my exemption from the democratic operation of the Fugitive Slave Bill of 1850. But for this, I might at any time become a victim of this most cruel and scandalous enactment, and be doomed to end my life, as I began it, a slave. The sum paid for my freedom was one hundred and fifty pounds sterling.

in the language of the LAW, “held, taken, reputed, and adjudged to be a chattel in the hands of my owners and possessors, and their executors, administrators, and assigns, to all intents, constructions, and purposes whatsoever.” (Brev. Digest, 224).

An end was put to the melee, by the captain’s calling the ship’s company to put the salt water mobocrats in irons. At this determined order, the gentlemen of the lash scampered, and for the rest of the voyage conducted themselves very decorously.

JAMES M’CUNE SMITH

If, as has been stated, his intellection is slow, when unexcited, it is most prompt and rapid when he is thoroughly aroused.[17]

twelve thousand dollars of his own hard earned money,

Yet, these gentlemen, although proud of Frederick Douglass, failed to fathom, and bring out to the light of day, the highest qualities of his mind; the force of their own education stood in their own way: they did not delve into the mind of a colored man for capacities which the pride of race led them to believe to be restricted to their own Saxon blood. Bitter and vindictive sarcasm, irresistible mimicry, and a pathetic narrative of his own experiences of slavery, were the intellectual manifestations which they encouraged him to exhibit on the platform or in the lecture desk.

The reader is, therefore, assured, with all due promptitude, that his attention is not invited to a work of ART, but to a work of FACTS—Facts, terrible and almost incredible, it may be yet FACTS, nevertheless

HONORABLE GERRIT SMITH

copying the following portrait of the religion of the south

I, however, finally became a subscriber to it. The paper came, and I read it from week to week with such feelings as it would be quite idle for me to attempt to describe. The paper became my meat and my drink. My soul was set all on fire. Its sympathy for my brethren in bonds—its scathing denunciations of slaveholders—its faithful exposures of slavery—and its powerful attacks upon the upholders of the institution—sent a thrill of joy through my soul, such as I had never felt before!

Mr. Johnson had just been reading the “Lady of the Lake,” and at once suggested that my name be “Douglass.” From that time until now I have been called “Frederick Douglass;” and as I am more widely known by that name than by either of the others, I shall continue to use it as my own.

But I remained firm, and, according to my resolution, on the third day of September, 1838, I left my chains, and succeeded in reaching New York without the slightest interruption of any kind. How I did so,—what means I adopted,—what direction I travelled, and by what mode of conveyance,—I must leave unexplained, for the reasons before mentioned.

Of course, it was impossible to get any white man to volunteer his testimony in my behalf, and against the white young men

wrote several protections, one for each of us.

I kept up my school nearly the whole year I lived with Mr. Freeland; and, beside my Sabbath school, I devoted three evenings in the week, during the winter, to teaching the slaves at home. And I have the happiness to know, that several of those who came to Sabbath school learned how to read; and that one, at least, is now free through my agency.

This battle with Mr. Covey was the turning-point in my career as a slave. It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood.

I would then make the letters which I had been so fortunate as to learn, and ask him to beat that. In this way I got a good many lessons in writing, which it is quite possible I should never have gotten in any other way. During this time, my copy-book was the board fence, brick wall, and pavement; my pen and ink was a lump of chalk. With these, I learned mainly how to write. I then commenced and continued copying the Italics in Webster’s Spelling Book, until I could make them all without looking on the book. By this time, my little Master Thomas had gone to school, and learned how to write, and had written over a number of copy-books. These had been brought home, and shown to some of our near neighbors, and then laid aside. My mistress used to go to class meeting at the Wilk Street meetinghouse every Monday afternoon, and leave me to take care of the house. When left thus, I used to spend the time in writing in the spaces left in Master Thomas’s copy-book, copying what he had written. I continued to do this until I could write a hand very similar to that of Master Thomas. Thus, after a long, tedious effort for years, I finally succeeded in learning how to write.

The idea as to how I might learn to write was suggested to me by being in Durgin and Bailey’s ship-yard, and frequently seeing the ship carpenters, after hewing, and getting a piece of timber ready for use, write on the timber the name of that part of the ship for which it was intended.

a book entitled “The Columbian Orator.”

These words used to trouble them; they would express for me the liveliest sympathy, and console me with the hope that something would occur by which I might be free.

She at first lacked the depravity indispensable to shutting me up in mental darkness. It was at least necessary for her to have some training in the exercise of irresponsible power, to make her equal to the task of treating me as though I were a brute.

In learning to read, I owe almost as much to the bitter opposition of my master, as to the kindly aid of my mistress. I acknowledge the benefit of both.

Though conscious of the difficulty of learning without a teacher, I set out with high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read

My home was charmless; it was not home to me; on parting from it, I could not feel that I was leaving any thing which I could have enjoyed by staying

I had no bed. I must have perished with cold, but that, the coldest nights, I used to steal a bag which was used for carrying corn to the mill. I would crawl into this bag, and there sleep on the cold, damp, clay floor, with my head in and feet out. My feet have been so cracked with the frost, that the pen with which I am writing might be laid in the gashes.

The mere recurrence to those songs, even now, afflicts me; and while I am writing these lines, an expression of feeling has already found its way down my cheek. To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery. I can never get rid of that conception. Those songs still follow me, to deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my sympathies for my brethren in bonds. If any one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd’s plantation, and, on allowance-day, place himself in the deep pine woods, and there let him, in silence, analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul,—and if he is not thus impressed, it will only be because “there is no flesh in his obdurate heart.”

This they would sing, as a chorus, to words which to many would seem unmeaning jargon, but which, nevertheless, were full of meaning to themselves. I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do.

It struck me with awful force. It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass. It was a most terrible spectacle. I wish I could commit to paper the feelings with which I beheld it.

I never saw my mother, to know her as such, more than four or five times in my life; and each of these times was very short in duration, and at night.

I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it.

He was such an impressive orator that numerous persons doubted if he had ever been a slave, so he wrote Narrative Of The Life Of Frederick Douglass.

You, too, publish your declaration of freedom with danger compassing you around. In all the broad lands which the Constitution of the United States overshadows, there is no single spot,—however narrow or desolate,—where a fugitive slave can plant himself and say, “I am safe.” The whole armory of Northern Law has no shield for you. I am free to say that, in your place, I should throw the MS. into the fire.

I was glad to learn, in your story, how early the most neglected of God’s children waken to a sense of their rights, and of the injustice done them. Experience is a keen teacher; and long before you had mastered your A B C, or knew where the “white sails” of the Chesapeake were bound, you began, I see, to gauge the wretchedness of the slave, not by his hunger and want, not by his lashes and toil, but by the cruel and blighting death which gathers over his soul.

his case may be regarded as a very fair specimen of the treatment of slaves in Maryland

There stood one, in physical proportion and stature commanding and exact—in intellect richly endowed—in natural eloquence a prodigy—in soul manifestly “created but a little lower than the angels”—yet a slave, ay, a fugitive slave,—trembling for his safety, hardly daring to believe that on the American soil, a single white person could be found who would befriend him at all hazards, for the love of God and humanity!

his first speech

PREFACE

the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,

How does it feel to be a problem?

Between me and the other world

Now he stood there naked.

Then the Traveler heard a cry of rage from the Officer.

That gave rise to certain technical difficulties with fastening the needles securely, but after several attempts we were successful. We didn’t spare any efforts. And now, as the inscription is made on the body, everyone can see through the glass. Don’t you want to come closer and see the needles for yourself.”

The Traveler wanted to raise various questions, but after looking at the Condemned Man he merely asked, “Does he know his sentence?” “No,” said the Officer. He wished to get on with his explanation right away, but the Traveler interrupted him: “He doesn’t know his own sentence?” “No,” said the Officer once more. He then paused for a moment, as if he was asking the Traveler for a more detailed reason for his question, and said, “It would be useless to give him that information. He experiences it on his own body.”

“He was indeed,” said the Officer, nodding his head with a fixed and thoughtful expression. Then he looked at his hands, examining them. They didn’t seem to him clean enough to handle the diagrams. So he went to the bucket and washed them again. Then he pulled out a small leather folder and said, “Our sentence does not sound severe. The law which a condemned man has violated is inscribed on his body with the harrow. This Condemned Man, for example,” and the Officer pointed to the man, “will have inscribed on his body, ‘Honour your superiors.’”

“However,” the Officer said, interrupting himself, “I’m chattering, and his apparatus stands here in front of us. As you see, it consists of three parts. With the passage of time certain popular names have been developed for each of these parts. The one underneath is called the bed, the upper one is called the inscriber, and here in the middle, this moving part is called the harrow.” “The harrow?” the Traveler asked. He had not been listening with full attention. The sun was excessively strong, trapped in the shadowless valley, and one could hardly collect one’s thoughts. So the Officer appeared to him all the more admirable in his tight tunic weighed down with epaulettes and festooned with braid, ready to go on parade, as he explained the matter so eagerly and, while he was talking, adjusted screws here and there with a screwdriver.

Of course, interest in the execution was not very high, not even in the penal colony itself.

Since Number Five is out of the bathroom now, We think of lukewarm water, hope to get in it

We are things

I shall wait, if you wish: revise the psalm If that should frighten you: sew up belief If that should tear: turn, singularly calm At forehead and at fingers rather wise, Holding the bandage ready for your eyes

Children, confine your lights

children, pray, to pray

mail of ice and insolence:

It was you, it was you who threw away my name!    And this is everything I have for me

I shall create! If not a note, a hole.    If not an overture, a desecration

barbarous and metal little man

treasonable faith

cry of art

Marc Crawford

Settle for sandwiches! settle for stocking caps!    for sudden blood, aborted carnival, the props and niceties of non-loneliness— the rhymes of Leanin

Their country is a Nation on no map

but swallow, straight, the spirals of his flask    and assist him at your zipper

Bowery Boys, Disciples, Whip-Birds

Cottage Grove.

Blackstone bitter bureaus (bureaucracy is footloose)

cold bonbon

cancel, cure and curry

Sores

Thirty

DISCIPLINES

Rangers

disruptorinterruptbusinessasusual

InconnectingtheprecariousnessofnetworklifeandlaborinTransmissiontotherhetoricsandrealitiesof“uberization,”mystudentswerepreparingfortheirfuturemembershipinthe“newdangerousclass”oftheprecariat(Standing)

Whatevertheirdisciplinarytraining,however,precarityintermsoflabor,debt,climatechange,citizenshiphasnowbecomethe“stateofexception”(Agamben)forstudents

Inotherwords,ifwethinkofeverystudentessayasaritualofmembership,weneedtoconsiderthekindofcommunityimaginedbythethreetofivepageessayandthepriceofthismembership.

threetofive(orten)page“typed,”doublespacedessay

other,“scholarly”Scalarpagesbeforet

studentspracticedadeepformofactivereading,repeatedlygaugingandexplainingtotheirpeerstherelevanceofparticulararticlestogrouptopicsandquestions

usedgroupbasedgoogledocs

cognitivecapitalism

studentseagerlyembracedtheopportunitytoescapetheusualmediumforrepresentingstudentlearning

takeKennethBurke’sfamousdictumthatliterature“betreatedasequipmentforliving”asseriouslyaspossible

But if the point of these technologies is to prepare students to critically understand and act in our digitally-mediated world, then it seems that it is also our duty

Social Paper never achieved this utopian visio

nfortunately these models have been largelyignored in the technological practices of higher education, thus directingtheuniversity’s technical, infrastructural, and social capitalto directlysupportcapitalist digital media companies’s broader monopoly on our technologicalimagination andthe globalproduction of digital tools, platforms, and services.

the “invisible discipline,”

And without mass adoption (which is somewhat a result of these limited resources), they are unable to offer interactive access to a networked population, arguably one of the most valuable “features” of social platforms with massive user bases

a genuine, popular, and sustainable alternative to capitalist digital media

The Free Software Foundation, The Electronic Frontier Foundation, The Internet Defense League, Fight for the Future, Platform Coop, and Unlike Us

rogressive, collaborative, student-centered, and publicly-engaged learning in the classroom (Kai-Wai & Kennedy 2013) as critical alternatives to institutional technologies that are often driven by management imperatives rather than educational principles (Stommel 2017; Watters 2014)

a rejection of capitalist digital tools and the important time-saving, collaborative, and networking affordances they offer, may feel equivalent to professional suicide

and the still emerging details of the fake news scandal of the 2016 U.S. election have helped draw public attention to some of these issues, there is still little sign of effective resistance or democratic redirection of these technologies formore fully human aims.

Build OERs with your students. Though students may be beginners with most of the content in your course, they are often more adept than you at understanding what beginning students need in order to understand the material.

How will they afford childcare on top of tuition fees? How will they focus on their homework if they haven’t had a square meal in two days or if they don’t know where they will be sleeping that night? How will their families pay rent if they cut back their work hours in order to attend classes? How much more student loan debt will they take on for each additional semester it takes to complete all of their required classes? How will they obtain the credit card they need to purchase an access code? How will they regularly access their free open textbook if they don’t own an expensive laptop or tablet?

The excitement of and capitalization upon names and naming is for Stein no longer a matter of grammar, sentences, paragraphs, or prose, but of poetry.

“Diagraming sentences” turns out not to be a case of what “I” do, but itself the subject and object of a “doing” of which “I” am the incidental product.

This “edge” of grammar, this “forgetting” of grammar, and this “difference” of “repeat and duplicate” form the beginning of a thought about the ways in which grammar may not quite “meet” or “arrive at” itself, and about the “why” of “making,” about the “thinking” that attends this nonidentity to itself of grammar. What does grammar—the reserve of a writing understood to “make” things like “emotion,” “paragraphs,” and incidentally “me”—itself hold in “reserve”?

paradoxical nature of this “reserve” of exemplary value in Stein?

The concurrent aesthetico-political debate over the legacies of early modernism cannot be separated from these broader crises in the conceptualization of the value-form

four aspects of the imbrication

paragraphs and sentences—roughly aligned, as she describes it, with the affective difference between the emotional and the nonemotional, between the natural and the nonnatural.

self-commodification

The apposition permits a desperately interrogative tone to emerge—“How to read? How to write?”—quite at odds with the forthright sense of Stein’s title and of my own today, if rather more faithful to most readers’ experience of Stein’s work of the period.

Whether it’s penciling notes in the margins of a beloved novel,

makesitgodead

became

andromanticism

usingeverything.

writingasitismade

goingtobethereandwearehere

eginningagainandagain

athingacceptedbecomesaclassic

isanoutlawuntilheisaclassic

time-sense.

thewar

makesacomposition,itconfuses,itshows,itis,itlooks,itlikesitasitis,andthismakeswhatisseenasitisseen

BythisImeansosimplythatanybodyknowsitthatcompositionisthedifferencewhichmakeseachandallofthemthendifferentfromothergenerationsandthisiswhatmakeseverythingdifferentotherwisetheyareallalikeandeverybodyknowsitbecauseeverybodysaysit

Indeed, in Barthesian terms West constructs a writerly album by utilizing the advent of Web 2.0. TLOP is/was made through the simultaneous collapse of the record-industry model and the creation of Web 2.0. Although it’s more than probable that both of these events contain a causality rather than a slight correlation, the heavens aligned and opened up before West, as one could only undergo such a creative undertaking in a world where “content is king.”

Following the Orion reference, "the boatman" is stated outright this time alluding to Charon, the ferryman of Hades who carries souls along Styx. This directly references the sea that the hunter is trapped on: the division between the world of the living and the world of the dead. This also serves as a potential reference to where Kafka acquired the idea for the appearance of the hunter windows would be shut, they would all lie in bed, with sheets thrown over their heads Max Brod, one of Kafka's closest friends and his literary executor who defied Kafka's wishes and published his work rather than burn it studied religions and might've been familiar with the pagan tradition of covering the face of the deceased to prevent the spirit from leaving the body to be a ghost for all eternity. Kafka might've lifted this idea to show how afraid the citizens of Riva would be if the hunter, a wandering spirit, would ask for help. Go back to the page The thought of wanting to help me is a sickness and has to be cured with bed rest. Rest cures were a very common way of treating sicknesses at the time this was written. Kafka at the time of writing this story was just diagnosed with tuberculosis and was going through the preliminary stages of seeking treatment. He would then be subject to rest cures for the years to follow up until the completion of this story in 1922. The fact that this is written at the end could match the timeline and Kafka's failing health even with the rest cures (with his death only two years later). Go back to the page I have lived for centuries. The hunter is now trying to solidify his place among biblical figures - a claim almost equating to himself as someone without sin for living an extremely long life. Biblical scholars have for years equated declining longevity in the bible to the introduction and practice of sin. Go back to the page And now are you intending to remain with us in Riva? "Remain in me, and I will remain in you" (John 15:4). Go back to the page it journeys with the wind which blows in the deepest regions of death. A typical end to Kafka's work. The ending is full of lament, anguish and anxiety. There is no end to the hunter who is to forever remain in purgatory - but aren't the people of Riva living in their own form of purgatory as the cycle of their mundane lives repeat? The accident of the hunter's fall deals less with death but the inability to die. Kafka's life closing soon in a very depressing fashion could lead him to believe that life itself is the true accident of existence. Go back to the page

Julia, th

beir

it being a

it's

by clarifying that Hermione Granger’s skin tone had never once been mentioned.

Just as one can become more of a writer through reading, it seems that an annotation can also become a Text through ceaseless annotations upon it, and an annotator can thus also become an author.

the potential to become a form of entertainment,

there is a total number of 78,787 and 95,683 listed Harry Potter related works respectively.

though Rowling confirmed his homosexuality in interviews and on Twitter, many fans feel that the paratextual confirmation of Dumbledore’s sexuality is a cop-out.

Fan fiction is effectively marginalia, annotations on an original source text that has gained a life and autonomy of its own. I

Milton’s Paradise Lost, for example, could be read as fan fiction of the Bible.

something that is inherently natural

the traditional roles of author and reader.

Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977.

This startling discovery confirms the idea that the repetition in the text is not completely random. Making the same discovery would have been difficult through close reading, since the text is replete with many shorter repetitions, and impossible through more straightforward string searches without preknowledge of its existence.

Ultimately, these analytics and visualizations help us generate new knowledge by facilitating new readings of the text and by affording a self-reflective stance for comparisons, a perspective from which we can begin to ask why we as close readers have found some patterns and yet left others undiscovered.

While it is not within the purview of this discussion to debate whether the categorical systems that structure the archive are any less structured than the database, the notion that we are constantly met with interfaces (such as the card catalog) that reflect real structures with real people (with all of their quirks and fallibilities and imaginative wonderfulness) in real institutions reminds us how material and constructed (how situated) is the context in which the reader accesses and analyzes cultural content with text analysis, data mining, and visualization methodologies.

that depend on differential (close and distant, subjective and objective) reading practices, technologies of self-reflection and collaboration, and the value of plausibility, all of which have always been crucial to literary inquiry.

All parts of the process—from creating quantified information to producing visualizations—are acts of interpretation.

Many of my critics have thought: Clag sticky in English but a more convincing one, Anklaegar accuser in Greek (which alludes to Satan meaning accuser and adversary in Hebrew). I may have drawn inspiration from Paradise Lost. Being foreign, neither English nor Latin in origin of his name, is what makes this character stand out as was the accuser foreign and sudden, with no background, from the garden. Perhaps this was my intention or perhaps not but alas, I cannot remember for I am old in my days. Maybe if my characters could just speak to and remind me… Related

….not. I think our Handsome Sailor is setting up a mutiny, why else would he be so nice? The way he charms all my men on the ship, the way he acts so “sweet” and inn-nnn-nn-o-ccc-eeennnt. I think he’s up to no good. I heard stories, about what happened with that man Delano and the slaves revolting against that poor Cereno lad.*  He thought that soup incident was so funny. Wait till he thinks how funny he is when he walks the plank.

****”You just couldn’t let me go, could you? This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object.” The Dark Knight, Dir. Christopher Nolan. I chose to reference this quote because like Batman and the Joker, Billy and Claggart are forces that (by virtue of being opposite) are by nature destined to clash. In the context of this quote, the Joker is the “unstoppable force” (signifying “evil” like Claggart), Batman being the “immovable object” (signifying “good” like Billy). In that sense, Claggart is the unstoppable force, in which he eventually provokes violence against Billy the immovable object, leading to Claggart’s demise. Related

One of the most interesting moments for me in the Dansker’s narrative is when he cries this utterance, and I was desperate to find the different connotations of the phrase. I really like the idea that Dansker couldn’t quite verbalise what he was saying to Billy, that his language is so caught up in the nautical (cat’s-paw is also a knot often used in maritime settings), that he can’t quite breach into the wider English language. Related

With each wax and wane of the sun and sky the tension builds. I’m not the only one on the ship to notice it, and neither am I the only one to ignore it. But these young ones, these children – babies! They don’t ignore because they know the world like I do. They ignore the problem to save their wet hides, like a stowaway among the onions.

How I long for the days with Nelson, when the most thinkin’ I’d do would be in combat; when this scar on my face meant something more than “This old timer stood for something once”.

ideo gameplay (and this was especially true in an arcade of the 1980s) is necessarily a hybrid experience, bodily as well as mental.

MacDonald’s

From a different perspective, McGann and Johanna Drucker’s Ivanhoe project is a practical experi-ment developed to use dynamic digital simula-tions in a gamelike environment to explore the ongoing reception histories of literary works (see Rockwell). I

He advocates a “quantum poetics” in which texts are seen not as “discrete phenomena” but as non-self-identical events that include the position and engagement of the scholar (Radiant Textuality228–31)

The author’s avatar visiting an educational site in Second Life

Flying avatars are fun, as I’d be the first to admit. But the overall experience of Second Lifeduring any given session is much less totally immersive, self-contained, and disembodied than the uninitiated might have been led to be-lieve.

Players will be rewarded to the degree that their critical interpretations have been made explicit within an interactive community of other players through the creation of well-documented commentary on their individual contributions, and critical assessment of other players' work.

Because we all bring that world with us into the classroom as (so to speak) the cultural air we breathe, New Critical models of instruction now regularly specialize and restrict both the materials and the arena of that general education the Humanities educator has always so carefully cherished. Because the Humanities have never been about specialization but about the training and education of broadly informed citizens, we are being called to imagine new instructional methods and procedures. IVANHOE is being developed to help answer that call.

Interpreters are expected to keep a journal in which their interpretive moves are justified and explained in relation to the originary work and/or the moves made by the other agents.

Performative interpretations of all kinds—translation, for example—have much in common with IVANHOE.