Cool extension of the good/old model of Iser: not only is a new text produced by each reader/reading, but neither reader nor text is a stable unit outside of the encounter of reader/text. Similarly, in the above reference to Hayles, one can't isolate the cultural forms of Web 2.0 media from the subjectivities that experience them, since the two sides constitute each other anew, constantly.

I don't know why I find this so hilarious. Can someone tell me?! Nominees for thought bubble addition to scene?

What did we once think the future would look like? How does the future look now? Why is the fantasy of "disembodiment" in virtual reality naive? How does the author describe the interface between one's body and the visual phenomena onscreen in 2ndLife?

Britten from beyond the grave (not to mention Forster): I love it!

This claim makes me realize how game-like, in a way, the marginal space of hypothes.is is: the gratification of sharing ideas with peers or being praised or replied to or disagreed with, etc.

Strong claim to the broader significance of the game, its implications for thinking about how the humanities is changing (or should change) in the 21st C.

Great design feature: as a litcrit professor, very important to keep the reflective aspect front and center even as we're immersed in the play. For similar reasons, Brecht thought that theater-goers should smoke cigars, like boxing fans, since the smoking created some distance from the "game" and hence space for critical reflection rather than mere absorption.

Obvious links to the way recording a novel underscores its status as a "score," a means of generating performances, and with Barthes's musical metaphor for "playing" a text.

I'll be curious to see what you students think, but I think the WordPress plugin would be cooler if each user could play any role in any move.

I like this. To take a "lame" or "out of fashion" text and make it cool again by reading/playing it in a radically new way. In one of his essays, Benjamin talks about the "revolutionary energies of the outmoded," and this game would seem a way of generating such energies.

Doing things with novels: get it, folks? There is nothing new under the sun.

Useful link to fanfiction in our own moment and of a piece with Rubery's analysis on one hand and Barthes's on the other, allowing for a "readerly" approach that "rewrites" the text with each reading.

The concept of the "liquid text" moves in this direction, as well as Barthes idea of the "play" within the text (like a door loose on its hinges).

Here's a divergent game.

"Zombie play": I love it. And as the parent of a Pre-K and 1st grader in the era of Common Core + high-stakes testing, it's amazing how accurate this account is, even for the youngest students.

Here's a zombie game.

Again, a keyword from literary aesthetics--ambiguity--creeps in the back door.

Yay failure! Losers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your games!!

I'm not the first to observe this, but "play" in this account sounds exactly like the "aesthetic" in Immanuel Kant's philosophy.

Sound familiar?! Interesting to see this emphasis on the "social text" projected backwards, so that the most "classic" and canonized of American books appears as unending process.

Melville a plagiarist? Say it ain't so!

Fascinating link with Blair's anecdote of early modern humanists' notes being fought over by heirs. Here the "failed" (not-yet-recovered) writer's papers have no value.

Wow: we should keep this in mind when we do a data visualization project on Melville's rediscovery in the 1920s!

All the same, his criticism of the girls appears to be valid. Is it not a reasonable assumption then that the novel was constructed as a means of turning the reader’s criticism of social opportunism back upon himself ? This is not mentioned specifically in the text, but it happens all the time. Thus, instead of society, the reader finds himself to be the object of criticism. (775)

What's the trap that Thackeray springs on readers? What happens if you identify with one of the protagonists? What happens if you refuse this identification and seek identification with a different character, or with the narrator? Why does this dynamic matter to Iser's argument?

The author has not yet withdrawn ‘‘to pare his fingernails,’’ but he has already entered into the shadows and holds his scissors at the ready.

What's modern about Vanity Fair? How would you describe the moment it represents, in comparison to what comes before and afterwards in the novel's development as a genre?

From the start the novel as a ‘genre’ was virtually free from traditional constraints and so the novelists of the eighteenth century considered themselves not merely as the creators of their works but also as the law-makers.2* (764)

creators v. law-makers: this makes the novel seem more game-like in ways that look forward to our gamification of BILLY BUDD.

For now the reader himself has to discover the true situation, which becomes clearer and clearer to him as he gets to know the characters in their fetters of illusion. (771)

Sound familiar? How does Iser's reading of reading shed light on Melville's Benito Cereno?

In this way, we get involved because we react to the viewpoints advanced by the narrator. If the narrator is an independent character, clearly separated from the inventor of the story, the tale of the social aspirations of the two girls Becky and Amelia takes on a greater degree of objectivity, and indeed one gains the impression that this social reality is not a mere narration but actually exists. The narrator can then be regarded as a sort of mediator between the reader and the events, with the implication that it is only through him that the social reality can be rendered communicable in the first place. (767)

Weird argument that the reality of "realism" is signaled by its non-narratability. It's not "just a story" purely because it is nonsensical and only forms a pattern because of the intervention of a narrator (as independent character).

If the sense of the narrative can only be completed through the cooperation of the reader (which is allowed for in the text), then the borderline between fiction and reality becomes increasingly hazy, for the reader can scarcely regard his own participation as fictional. (771)

What is real about "realist fiction" for Iser? Or better, how is the sense of "reality" produced by the interaction between the "writerly" and "readerly" layers of narrative?

768: How is the reader's position different in Vanity Fair and an earlier novel like Jane Eyre? Where do the reader's sympathies and identifications lie in each case? Why does this matter to Iser's argument?

766: position of "author" ramifies into many guises of narrator ("master of the performance," "reporter of the story," etc.); likewise the novel positions the reader variably, as (low) consumer of spectacle, as (high) analyst of spectacle, as (ambivalent) consumer-made-miserable by comparing him/herself to the debased images of fair-goers in the novel.

764-5: Iser opens with two major arguments relevant to our course: a) the novel genre grows out of a distinctive relationship between author and reader, in which the very form seems driven by the desire to create intimacy between an "implied" author and an abstract reader. b) the structure of the novel's narrative is gamelike, with the author less the scribe who captures experience than the "law-maker" who determines how experience will be structured.

The theory of the Text can coincide only with the practice of writing.

This is one point of origin (along with the book S/Z by Barthes) of the theory of the "writerly" text that we've discussed. So an ambience in which a group is writing intensively on texts together, as we are doing now, is exactly what Barthes is talking about, even if the material basis for inscribing texts in this way (or this fluidly) did not yet exist.

The Text is very much a score of this new kind.

Now you know that I've cribbed this idea of text as "score" from Barthes.

And you can see as well that producing an audiobook is precisely rendering the "work" as an object of "play" in RBs sense.

The Text ... decants the work ... from its consumption and gathers it up as play, activity, production, practice.

A beautiful image: the pleasurable spilling of the "work" into a messy space where it can be made to perform in new ways. This could be the motto of our course.

It is not that the Author may not "come back" in the Text, in his text, but he then does so as a "guest." If he is a novelist, he is inscribed in the novel like one of his characters...

I love this, especially for the way it anticipates our coming "gamification" of Billy Budd, in which we will bring Melville into his own text in just this way.

The work is caught up in a process of filiation

This is the money passage for us. "Work" describes a way of thinking about literature bound up in the figure of the "great" author as the "father" of the text (and yes, the sexist language is deliberate since we're talking about patriarchal values around "work"). This attitude is part of what Benjamin chafes against: the author of a printed novel is alone and apart, unlike the storyteller and his/her auditors. "Text" ushers in a more fluid situation re: authorship and a more active readership. The Web 2.0 technologies we've been playing with (and are doing so now) materialize this rather lofty theory from the 70s in a dramatic way.

oued

A streambed that only runs with water occasionally, as in a monsoon season.

That object is now the text

In plain English (not French): we used to naively think we read stable "works" just as we used to think things moved in X direction or Y velocity; now we have to read "texts" in ways that are like the physics of Einstein or Heisenberg, seeing the "text" as a relativistic, fluid phenomenon that changes as it is written/read/compared and has a webby, indistinct relationship to all other texts.

Kind of mind-blowing, that notes could be an intellectual "inheritance" in as literal a way as cold hard currency. The French sociologist of culture, Pierre Bourdieu, argues that "cultural capital" is transmissible across generations, and this is the most vivid example I've ever seen.

Reading about the vibrant "how to" literature on note-taking, I can't help but think about blogs like ProfHacker in the Chronicle of Higher Ed and Lifehacker for regular civilians, which work similarly with a similar style.

Which should make us consider in a critical light the ease of copy and paste here (as I just did), where one grabs the author's words instantly and thus doesn't get to/have to repeat them in manuscript form.

Analogous to RAM in computing: short-term memory that either gets trashed or saved to long-term storage medium.

Wow: how quickly things have changed. I had one in graduate school...

Shades of Benjamin: social computing kills traditional notetaking on paper but lends a "strange beauty" to the latter.

I love the way this argument puts the brakes on a) progressive ways of thinking about history--that we now know how to do X or Y better/faster/smarter because of tech; and b) naive celebrations of technology as radically "new" (so Evernote or Pocket is not new but a different modality of the very old commonplace book).

Subtle argument about the mix of privacy and publicness in notetaking: even when the notes themselves are private, the habit of notetaking, the mode of notetaking, the kinds of things that get notated, are part of a deeply social process of education and acculturation.

Reminds me of Liu's point about Web 2.0's dissemination of the author-function, or the way it dissolves the distinction between authors and readers (while keeping coders as a remarkably distinct/powerful/scarce function).

Great point and in line with the drift of our course: X cultural technology is not radically new but instantiates a thought-provoking contrast/comparsions with past technologies and practices.

Schacht might lean harder on this, since "democratic practice" is (ironically) very far from the norm for traditional assignments, with the closed loop of student==>professor==>student and the regime of grades.

I want to push back here, since I think the difficulty of reading books is still a strong element in culture. Maybe not in such ergonomic terms, but we still think of TV and surfing the web as "easy" or "light" in comparison to "heavy reading" or "serious reading."

Interesting point: no discussion of the "decline of reading" or "death of the novel" at this juncture.

Note that Mom is actually texting under the table while pretending to do needlepoint.

Great point. Not to mention Homer!

Amazing illustration: good find! But who are all those people? Are those the names of important public figures now lost to memory (or my memory, at least)? Funny to think that our podcast queues are basically exactly what this image images.

This is a really clever rhetorical move by the author: the anxious discussion about the book in the l.19thC yields surprising echoes of (and valuable perspective on) the kinds of arguments that we read in the "Dickens Four Ways" piece.

See, look how horribly distracting reading in print is! She hasn't even read the first sentence, and she's all lost in a Proustian haze about the smell of the binding...

I would add that it's in the public domain, which is a real magnet for my e-reading. I almost always want to buy a new-ish book in print if I think it's any good, but the $0.00 price of classics makes them perfect for throwing on the e-reader for me, especially if it's not "serious" (read: teaching/research) reading for me.

The distinction between professional and amateur readers brings us

to the second reason that digital audio technology has the potential

to change the way we think about reading practices.

Strong contrast between a-book and other forms of media: I would argue that it's much easier for yahoos like us to compete with professional voice actors than with professional musicians, not to say professional directors/actors/editors in cinema! Isn't there something inherently democratic about reading/listening?

It should be said that a ‘talking article’ may have been the most effective way to make the case for digital audio presented here.

Whoa there, Matt. I'd rather shoot myself than read 99% of academic articles in an a-book format, even ones written as lucidly as this one. Nor would I like to take in most experimental work in this fashion: I agree with the drift of the article that there's something about the Victorian period's comfort with oralization that makes it a good fit for the a-book.

Only by vocalising these expressions through the practice of reading aloud are we assured of appreciating how central voice is as a source of meaning in the Victorian novel.

Productive force of reading aloud: it doesn't merely produce a new version, it feeds back into one's reading of the printed text.

In 2004, for instance, the BBC became the first British broadcaster to make its radio programmes available to the public for free download via digital formats. The radio has been of profound importance overthe last century in sustaining a listening culture, though it is only with the advent of digital playback that this content can now reach audiences beyond its fixed time slots.

Very subtle comparison of different technologies, reading/listening practices, and historical moments here. With almost 10 years of retrospect on this argument, we can see how prescient Rubery is, especially thinking about the success of podcasts like SERIAL, which are almost novel-like in their extensiveness, long narrative arcs, and serial installments.

To take an extreme case,

Tolstoy’s War and Peace requires 45 cassettes when spoken by Walter

Zimmerman (1982) or 50 compact discs when told by Neville Jason

(2006). These cumbersome formats showed little improvement over

Edison’s wax cylinders in terms of convenience – it may be easier to

bring back the live orator in such cases than to swap discs that many

times.

This reminds me of listening to the unabridged version of Tolkein's The Hobbit in the back of the family station wagon in the early 80s! It was an awful lot of cassettes...

members.16 If there is a

sense in which no one ever reads a Dickens plot for the first time, it

is because that story has been heard to some extent before it has been

read. A Christmas Carol is only the most obvious example of such a twice- heard tale.

Wow: this comment takes us all the way back to the traditional storytelling mode that Benjamin contrasts with the printed novel (as we'll see next week). For Benjamin, traditional storytelling has little use for the idea of originality or authorship and hence locates both teller and hearer as reversible positions: one listens closely, because one might be a teller next. With Victorian lit, Dickens is still Dickens when he's oralized; nonetheless, the text has something of a "twice told" and unoriginal aspect in this format.

To put it another way, there was a vast readership that would

have heard rather than read these narratives. Although this may be the

era during which Great Britain became a ‘reading nation’, we should

not forget the extent to which it remains a ‘listening nation’ to this very

day.12

Link to the piece by Berube et al. on "community reading": in both cases, the authors want to push us readers to question our assumptions about the "right" or "normal" or "proper" way to read, uh, I mean experience literature.

My intent will

be to trace a number of continuities between today’s reading practices

and the presumably outdated forms of reading aloud favoured by

the Victorians. As the title of this piece indicates, one unexpected

consequence of the new digital audio has been to bring back old

ways of reading, specifically the practice of reading aloud associated

in the popular imagination with the Victorian family.

Rubery emphasizes usefully the rhythm of continuity and difference along two axes: a) the relationship between past auralizations of Dickens and present ones and b) the relationship between Dickens's work as printed object and as oral performance.

Ahem.

I love the cheekiness of this opening for the way it calls attention to throatclearing, an element of spoken discourse that infiltrates into this written document.

I want to hear more about the tech side of things here. Is the face to face interaction of the Whitehead event and the writing/reading at the nursing home the "special sauce" here? What about the virtual communities that grow up around literature in spaces like Twitter, Facebook, and (well) hypothes.is?

I'm curious about what the authors think about genre: are all genres and modes good at this, or is this fundamentally an argument about the novel?

What's the boundary between the "literary" mode of civility and the boisterous modes of exchange that happen elsewhere on the web (say, among Trump and his legions of Twitter followers)? The norms of the rational public sphere here seem like something that is often honored in the breech.

Yet reading was not always so solitary...

Reminiscent of Liu's discussion of the interrelation of the margins of the text and the margins of society.

I'm reminded of Ian Watt's moving account of how difficult it was to read the novel for non-elite readers in the 18thC, the cost in terms of desperately needed sleep, candles, lamp oil, books themselves, and the opportunity cost of other, free forms of entertainment.

Note the implicit challenge to the inherited model of solitary reading of novels, as in Benjamin's "The Storyteller": the communal setting for the event, and the communal reading leading up to it, renders the novel as a space that convenes everyone as a writer, just as for Benjamin traditional storytelling convenes everyone as a potential teller of the tale.

Gorgeous ending: props to MK for including pedagogy (a missed opportunity in the essay is to discuss how DH elevates the stature of pedagogy, making teaching/scholarship more closely aligned endeavors) and for emphasizing the public-facing aspect of DH, a particularly important facet in a political moment of defunding of education and culture.

Astute reading of how the form of Twitter maps onto the densely networked structure of the DH field/movement itself. Might also consider the flipside of the second point, however: the networked culture of DH speaks to the collapse of the academic job market in the humanities, but its also gains some of its high profile from the support from upper-level admins who are chasing the "next big thing."

Edison's invention as proto-dictaphone, not proto-walkman.

Crucial point that has lots of ramifications. Two occur to me with extra force: a) spaces like wikis are especially radical here, since they don't really have a main text or "board" to which comments can be marginal; and b) coupled with the earlier comment about post-68 criticism ("it was all subversion") makes us think that the "board" has been reimagined such that "it was all margins" with no board.

Shades of Ranciere's work on the pedagogue/igoramus relationship.

Another bit of "phatic" play.

Methodology: challenging issue of how to recover the aural aspects of literature for the present. How many authors saved "prompt copies" from the era before recordings?

Clever opening that calls attention to what theorist Roman Jakobson calls the "phatic" function of language: basically the "channel" that the message is using to convey itself. The glottal "ahem" foregrounds the aural dimension of language and plays with the slippage between writing and speech that is a central concern of the essay.

Props for shifting from the political/theoretical argument to "ok: here's how you do it if you're a yahoo like me." The reclamation project needs builders of onramps in the worst way!

For me, at least, this moment describes the way "technological obsolescence" touches even "culture": it's not just craft workers who are put out of work by machines; it's also actors who obsolesce as technologies change.

Format at "block quote" thing.

Evidence? I would be wary of sweeping claims to "firsts" here.

Nice: here's the bit on Lippmann and Dewey I was hoping for. I think you identify a real faultline in JDPs thinking, too: on the one hand, like Kenneth Burke and others on the US Left, he wants an "Ivy Lee of the left"; on the other, he wants to preserve a Habermasian idea of a "critical public sphere" in which a wide democratic audience can participate in rational discussion about matters of general importance.

Good point. You might cite Hunter's own Stuart Ewen here and mention as well the debates between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey re: the ir/rationality of "the public" which unfolded in the 20s-30s.

Bernays

I'm losing your critical perspective here: do you move with the grain of Lee et al., arguing that PR was rather scientific and oriented towards communicating to the public, or with the grain of the muckrakers, arguing that only the "fourth estate" of the press can keep capital honest?

I find myself wanting a broader statement of argument. Something like "muckraking and PR emerged at roughly the same time. Although they seem opposite, and exist at opposite ideological poles, they are related in X and Y ways."

libel? liability?

A bit more intro would be useful here, especially to explain to readers why JDPs trilogy is just a good place to trace this broader phenomenon.

need a more precise analysis here, since Sherman claims to be "absent" from her work and Cahun to be "carrying around many faces." So arguably Sherman and Cahun are not exactly telling "their" story but telling stories about the confines of traditional gender ideologies.

Not original, but it bears repeating. It reminds me of Walter Lippmann's argument of yore that the 20thC world has gotten too complex and interconnected for a given citizen to comprehend it. So he wants there to be a technocratic elite that digests the world for the rest of us. Zuckerman points out how the 21stC is doubling down on the fragmentation, instead, creating strange individualized filters to create a (false) sense of order that is idiosyncratic to each consumer of media.

I'm resisting the "original sin" motif here. It seems to me that the original sin here occurred in the l.19thC with the rise of ad-supported "quality" magazines. By the time LIFE rolls out in 1937 for a nickel, the tradition of selling media in vast quantities at a loss to recoup it via ad dollars is very deeply entrenched. Sure, the surveillance thing is new, or at least more intensive, but Gallup worked for media companies in the 20s and 30s to mine data from subscribers, as well...