THE ELECTRONIC REVOLUTION AND THE TEACHING OF LITERATURE Barbara Stevenson

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Introduction

In his 1993 The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts , Richard A. Lanham suggests that literature professors' obsession with the debate over teaching the Western canon and multiculturalism has blinded them to the electronic revolution which renders such debates moot. More recently, in the 1998 Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace , Latin professor and technology guru James J. O'Donnell agrees with Lanham that the emerging electronic literacy alters the academic literary landscape: The technologies now in hand break down barriers, blur boundaries, and facilitate connections (150). But does this new technology actually transform the teaching of literature?

It is true that many English professors engage this new medium. Alan Liu of the English Department at Santa Barbara maintains the Voice of the Shuttle (VOS), the most important humanities database on the web. A cursory survey of VOS reveals an impressive number of websites devoted to literature, along with exciting projects aimed at assisting teachers in incorporating the web into the classroom. For example, George Landow, the well-known theorist of hypertext, publishes an online student project, The Victorian Web , proof that he pedagogically practices what he preaches.

Nevertheless, a professor perusing online sources to find assistance on using the internet in the literature classroom will be disappointed to find that the online journals Teaching Literature with Computers and Computers & Texts are now defunct. A survey of print sources is equally disappointing; there may be an occasional article in periodicals like Computers and the Humanities . In contrast, the conjunction of technology and pedagogy is more extensively discussed by academics in English who focus upon composition, rhetoric, or theory. Online journals, such as Kairos: A Journal for Teachers of Writing in Webbed Environments, and journals offline, such as Computers and Composition, attest to the importance of technology to these teachers. A gap occurs in the field of literature: despite extensive online literature databases, e-texts, and theoretical publications, only a smattering relate to the literature classroom. As Wendy Shaw notes, studies of the internet, teaching, and literature are often subsumed

under the broader category of humanities in publications; Shaw's dissertation is the first formal study to explore exclusively the academic usage of technology by those in the discipline of English literature. Her 1999 survey of UK English literature professors demonstrated that that while 97.5 use computers and/or the internet for research purposes, only 38 percent use the technology for teaching purposes. Articles and syllabi on VOS indicate that those literature professors who do use the web for teaching favor class listservs to continue discussions outside of the classroom (the listserv and e-bulletin board are becoming crucial as more literature classes go completely online), multimedia for student presentations in class, and websites where students publish their research (like Landow's Victorian Web).

But, to return to my opening question, do these electronic tools alter the substance of a professor's lecture or approach to a literary text, or are these tools peripheral to course content? I have found that hypertext theory and the web do, in fact, change my teaching of literatureeven in a traditional classroom where the only technology is a piece of chalk and a blackboard. The electronic revolution has altered my teaching of the relationship between literature and its textual presentation. Authors taught in English literature survey classes would never have imagined that they would be immortalized in such vessels as a Penguin paperback classic or a Norton Anthology. Indeed the medium through which our students are introduced to literature is usually not the medium the author employed when creating the literary work. Technology and hypertext theory provide students with a glimpse back to the original creation and reception of a text, thereby providing them with a history of literacy.

Literature and Literacy in the Middle Ages

Before the internet, I would begin an early English literature survey course with background information on Beowulf: scops and the oral creation of poetry, the nature of Old English language, etc. Our translated text was the focus of our discussions and was our Beowulf experience. The translation so dominated the class's attention that on essays and tests students would refer to the scop as the author who published Beowulf, oblivious to the distinctions among a scop creating an oral poem, a scribe writing down a manuscript version, and a modern translator publishing an edition of the poem. Since the computer, the background information on oral composition and manuscript production has become foregrounded into the experience of the literary work itself. Instead of the one Beowulf that is translated in our text, the students have become aware of many Beowulf s. There is the oral poem they can hear read over the internet from the University of Virginia or Georgetown either in the classroom should there be the appropriate technology, or in the computer lab, or on their home computer. The Electronic Beowulf makes them aware of the importance of the Cotton Ms. Vitellius A. xv Beowulf we can examine from printed pages should a

computer not be available in class. And, of course, there is still the translated text we use. Students also share other Beowulf experiences from comic books to movies. I often require that the students locate one or more of these Beowulf s for a written assignment so that they can see that Beowulf is a poem that remains in flux. As Landow states, electronic literacy reinforces the deconstructionist view that there is no author and no fixed text (Hyper/Text/Theory 1).

Although much time and many cultural changes occur from the Anglo-Saxons to Geoffrey Chaucer's era, the role of the manuscript is a constant. Even when written down on vellum, the text was read aloud to an audienceperhaps members of the court, laymen in church, or a reader all alone. As Elizabeth Eisenstein documents in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, silent reading does not occur until after the invention of the printing press. But medieval authors like Chaucer had to consider more than the sound of poetry. The Middle Ages was a period of transition between oral cultures with no writing systems and our print culture (Ong 96-103). Chaucer had to consider those in his audience who could read and write and could afford to purchase a manuscript copy. Shortly after Chaucer's death in 1400 the Ellesmere manuscript was completed for a wealthy patron. The Ellesmere provides clues as to how a fifteenth-century audience read the Canterbury Tales .

To recapture this fifteenth-century perspective, I have students study online images of the Ellesmere when we are reading selections of the Canterbury Tales in the English literature survey class. With its illuminations of the pilgrims, the Ellesmere is a prime example of what Jay David Bolter calls medieval multimedia (86); that is, the text, its writing style, the rubrics, and the illuminations are all synthesized into one coherent whole. As hypertext theorists like Bolter point out, understanding this synthesis is difficult for us raised in print culture, where images are usually superfluous (72-3). As proof, I point to students the absence of pictures in their anthologies and paperbacks. Academic books with images used to come with such an exorbitant price that they were rare luxuries, especially as textbooks. But this situation has changed with recent inventions; a university that can afford to purchase computers and online access can then provide its students with many beautiful manuscript images for free. In addition, many academic books with pictures often extract the illuminations from the text, as though the picture of a pilgrim like the Wife of Bath was a painting in and of itself, not part of a manuscript. In the past I would share with students a book like Roger Sherman Loomis's A Mirror of Chaucer's World, which replicated the pilgrim miniatures in black-and-white and in isolation from the text (81-101). With the computer, students can now study these images in color and in context. Digitalized images, such as Luminarium's reproduction of parts of the Ellesmere, allow students to view the Wife of Bath on its original page and also to zoom in to enlarge the picture so that it takes up the entire monitor screen for close examination.

I have students examine manuscript images, such as those of the Wife of Bath from the Ellesmere. Calling attention to points raised by literacy theorists like Bolter, Landow, and Ong, I ask students to write a short assignment on the image of the Wife. Students call attention between the portrait and General Prologue descriptionred clothing, oversized hat, and spurs, for instance. In the image of her beside the opening of her tale, students note that the Wife on horseback connects her tale to the General Prologue and its description of pilgrims on the way to Canterbury. She is facing toward her tale, as if those words are coming from her mouth. A colorful flower border frames the page much as the opening of the Canterbury Tales begins with the frame story of the pilgrimage. These examinations help students understand how manuscript culture is different from their print culture, how images form an integral part as does sound. A research paper by student Meg Roland on this portrait appears in the online database, Luminarium, devoted to early English literature. In short, hypermedia can help our students understand different kinds of literacies and in particular earlier receptions of literature.

Literature and Literacy in the Modern Era

In an English literature class that surveys the change between medieval and renaissance literature, it is important to highlight the impact of the printing press. Facsimiles, available through Early English Books Online from the era of incunabula to 1700, illustrate the gradual transition from a manuscript literacy to a print one. (Early English Books Online is a licensed database, not a free one found on the web, so I will refer to a facsimile available on the internet.) As a page from Holinshed's 1580 history of Henry V shows, the decorated capital letter and border marking the beginning of the text and the gothic-like fonts are remnants from the days of the medieval manuscript. As time continues, these, too, disappear. As students note, it took time for the printers to adapt literature to the new medium; at first they tried to replicate manuscript pages as faithfully as possible on the printed page, but eventually adapted to the new medium more effectively.

As my students observe, the printing press breaks the bond between image and word. Gone are the colorful illuminations so that the page is dominated by dense print. The word assumes all importance, and the new features in print are devoted to clarifying the word, such as line numbers.

As we progress through Shakespeare and the rise of the novel, I lecture on Ong's and others' observations that with the printing press and other cultural

changes, literacy dramatically increases. But it is interesting to note that Elizabethan drama, which stands as the supreme literary achievement of the time, was so popular in part because it did not depend upon a literate audience. Viewers did not have to read the plays as we do in class; they could see them performed. Technology attempts to replicate live theater (with varying degrees of success) through videotaped performances and through online resources like The Virtual Globe Theater, which provides the user with the sensation of walking through Shakespeare's theater. Of course, technological presentations are different from live theater, but they do capture sounds and gestures that the printed textbook fails to.

The rise of the genre of the novel results from the invention of the printing press. Students note the dominance of women in this genre among its readers and writers. Of course, previous eras produce important women writers: Marie de France presumably read her lais to the court of King Henry II, much like Chaucer would do for the court of Richard II two centuries later; the devout Julian of Norwich wrote of her religious visions as did the Pearl poet; and Mary Wroth circulated sonnets as did Shakespeare.

Nevertheless, from the beginning of the novelif one assumes the traditional stance that the first English novel is Samuel Richardson's Clarissait becomes clear that women are the target audience. This new genre, accessible to young women in the safe privacy of their own home, becomes a socialization tool to teach them how to behave according to the mores of the time. Clarissa warns of the dangers to young women who leave their house with men without the approval of parents. But these private readings could also be sarcastic and subversive instead of instructive. In Northhanger Abbey Jane Austen satirizes the effects romance novels have upon women and the pompous posturing of men who pretend that novels are beneath them.

It is commonplace among theorists to note that linear, sequential thinking dominates print literacy, as illustrated by novels, in contrast to the small chunks of narratives found in medieval literature. In short, whereas oral literacy seems to encourage memory skills, manuscript culture encourages an aesthetic synthesis of word and image and print encourages logical, sequential, linear thinking. Thus, a Jane Austen novel has one sustained storyline throughout, in contrast to the episodic plots found in medieval literature.

Even in the era of print, authors do not always adapt well to textbook anthologies and paperbacks. The classic case is William Blake, who tried to resurrect the illuminated manuscript while producing his poetry. Few textbook editions have included reproductions of Blake's work because of the expensive

printing costs involved. Cost is no longer an issue since students can now download some of the poems we discuss in class from the Blake Web. For one assignment I have students download a poem from Songs of Innocence and Experience and analyze the differences between the web replica of the original and the poem's presentation in our text. Students observe that Blake was not only a poet but also an artist who synthesized different media in his masterpieces, a dimension missing in their text. They note that in The Lamb Blake tries to yoke together the contrary states of the soul in a way that is missing in just the words seen on the printed page of our textbook: Blake unifies the immediate emotional response of the image of the innocent boy and the lamb with the logical thought required to read the poem. The plate also has distinct comparisons with the Ellesmere manuscript. Students observe that the words form a small chunkno densely printed text here; nature, an important subject for a Romantic like Blake, forms a border that frames the poem much like the border used in medieval manuscripts; and the drawing of the little boy speaking with the lamb obviously reinforces the content of the poem.

Literature and Literacy in the Postmodern Era

No matter what period may be the focus of a literature coursethe Middle Ages, for instanceI still try to address how literacy is changing in our own time by having class members examine, and sometimes produce, their own webpage or multimedia presentation. We debate the validity of George Landow's claim that we are witnessing a new kind of literacy, an age of the electronic manuscript, a phrase Landow coined in Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. With this technology comes a new literacy in which image and word are integrated, much like images and words in a medieval manuscript.

Landow's own work in the Victorian Web exemplifies his claims. Like an illuminated manuscript, it has images, borders, and short text. The section on gender shows an image of a Victorian woman who embodies the theme, for to students woman remains a marked category while man serves as the universal norm (i.e., the expression women writers is common while men writers is quite rare). The top border appears on every page unifying the Victorian Web, just like a floral border functioned in many medieval illuminated manuscripts. The text is a brief bulleted list, as has become typical of web writing. Dense, sustained writing is better suited for the printed book, than for an illuminated manuscript or web page.

I have encouraged, and at times required, students to produce their own multimedia presentation or webpage. Then I ask the students to evaluate the worth of the assignment. Here are the responses from one such class: Only one was negative. He said that if he were interested in technology, he would major in computer science. Early literature serves as an escape from undesirable elements of contemporary life. This Luddite response might disappoint such theorists as Landow. However, clearly for some of our students and possibly for professors, literature from another era functions as an escape from disturbing trends in the presentin this case the omnipresence of technology. Others appreciated how the multimedia mode forced them to be concise and focused. It will not do to cram a research paper onto a webpage. If print literacy encourages expansion, web literacy encourages concision. Others felt that the assignment gave them a greater appreciation of medieval literature and manuscripts. For instance, the genre of the medieval bestiary is very much rooted in a visual literacy (the picture of the lamb on the stained glass church window and in the illuminated bestiary represents Christ, as it does later for Blake's lamb).

The webeven if not directly in the classroomhas allowed me to do a much better job of presenting the history of a given text than previously. Literary criticism has undergone a shift from a formalist approach like New Criticism that examined the text independent of historical variables to approaches like New Historicism that take the originating conditions into account in the formation of a text. Likewise, the increase in technology has encouraged movement from studying the Norton Anthology or Penguin paperback in isolation to including relevant outside factors in the history and interpretation of literature. Works Cited Blake Web < http://cla.calpoly.edu/~smarx/Blake/blakeweb.html > Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991. The Electronic Beowulf < http://www.uky.edu/~kiernan/eBeowulf/main.htm > (This site contains examples of and information on the CD-ROM.) Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change . 2 vols. New York: Cambridge UP, 1979. Holinshed, Raphael. Henrie the http://dewey.lib.upenn.edu/SCETI /> Fift . (1580) SCETI <

Landow, George P, ed. Hyper/Text/Theory . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. . Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992. < http://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/ > . The Victorian Web < http://victorianweb.org/ > Lanham, Richard A. The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. < http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/texts/lanham.sample > Liu, Alan, webmaster. Voice of the Shuttle. < http://vos.ucsb.edu /> Loomis, Roger Sherman. A Mirror of Chaucer's World. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1965. O'Donnell, James. Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace . Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998. Old English Pages < http://www.georgetown.edu/cball/oe/old_english.html Old English at the University of Virginia < http://www.engl.virginia.edu/OE /> Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Metheun, 1982. Roland, Meg. A Visual/Textual Reading of the Ellesmere Wife of Bath.' Luminarium < http://www.luminarium.org/ > Shaw, Wendy. The Use of the Internet by Academics in the Discipline of English Literature: Research in Progress. Computers & Texts. No. 18-19 (Spring 2000): 8-9. < http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ctitext2/publish/comtxt/ct1819/08shaw.pdf > . Summary of Research in Progress: the use of the Internet by academics in the discipline of English Literature. Digital Resources for the Humanities Conference . September 1999. < http://www.cch.kcl.ac.uk/legacy/tmp/drh/ > VRGlobe Theater http://virtual.clemson.edu/caah/shakespr/VRGLOBE/index.htm > _______________________ Barbara Stevenson is Professor of English at Kennesaw State University. She is the author of numerous articles on medieval literature and the editor (with Cynthia Ho) of Crossing the Bridge: Comparative Essays on Medieval European and Heian Japanese Women Writers (Palgrave, 2000). <

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