Is reading a thing of the past?
Literature is changing before our eyes. Our parents and grandparents used to read books and magazines, but by and large we don't read as many books and magazines in 2021 as we did before the advent of personal networked computers. Now we mainly experience literature mediated through our phones and devices, not through printed books. Is this a good thing, a bad thing, an inevitable thing, a complicated thing, or maybe not a thing at all? For all of recorded history, old people like me have chastised young people like you, "These days the kids don't know how to read or write." Maybe the kids are just taking a different route (electronic) to literature, and their parents and teachers are learning how to deal with it. As a sidenote, it's interesting to remember that the age of mass literacy in America has been fairly brief. Until the middle of the 19th century, about 170 years ago, very few people read for leisure, and many people never learned how to read. Maybe that's where we're returning.
The Electronic Literature Organization is exactly what it sounds like. Check out all of their information. Some of it, alas, no longer works because the technology is changing so fast. This, perhaps, is a problem.You don't need a special machine or software to be able to read a book page, you just need a bit of reflected light. Even pages printed 500 years ago are as legible as the day they were printed. An entire genre of electronic literature, the Flash Poem, was killed off when Flash was no longer supported by Adobe. Goodbye forever.
In this unit you are going to write a persuasive argumentative essay with a research component that takes a position on the debate outlined above. The paper must be between 5-7 double-spaced pages and formatted in correct MLA style with a separate Works Cited page. The final is due no later than 3:00 pm on Tuesday, November 16.
Module Five: Schedule
Tues, Oct 26: What is research? Why do we
research? Discussion board entry and responses.
Thurs, Oct 28: What is a scholarly source? Why
does it matter? (see blog and Populi for details)
Tues, Nov 2: MLA format, a painless
introduction (see blog and Populi for details)
Thurs, Nov 4: Draft of research essay due by end
of class (upload to Populi)
Tues, Nov 9: One on one conferences (Sign-up on
Tues., Nov 2)
Thurs, Nov 11: Workshop (continued)
Tuesday, Nov. 16: FINAL DUE
We are spending more time on this assignment so your final version will be something you'll be proud to put into your DCAD Writing Portfolio. Some of the questions that you might address are the "coming together" of literature and video gaming. Are video games our culture's new novels? Are they something entirely different? How about a meme? Are they like modern-day haiku? Why do young people think reading is boring? What specifically about reading printed books and magazines is boring? Do you disagree with these new trends and prefer to think of literature in its classic sense? There are so many other questions I could have posed in this part of the assignment, but I want you to explore them on your own and with your classmates.
To support your non-obvious position or argument, you will need to incorporate the voices of at least five other scholars into your writing. I like to think of this as a sort of weaving.
There's no shortage of scholarly work on this subject. Here is a link to pages and pages of search results on Google Scholar. And here is a link to search results from Jstor.
Of course, printed books will not disappear from our culture, but they will take on a different status. Already, we see publishers using digital platforms to promote, market, and distribute literary works by poets, novelists, and essayists. This, however, is not exactly what is meant by digital or electronic literature. Digital or Electronic literature must take advantage of the multi-media tools at nearly everyone's disposal. You don't even need a subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud.
The printed "book" changed the world back in the 1440s, but it took about fifty years for printed books to be disseminated widely. Maybe we're at about the same point with the "computer" and the digital literature it makes possible?
No comments:
Post a Comment