Description:
Literature we love to hate has this in common: fan mail and hate mail. Before Twitter, YouTube, or Instagram, readers have expressed their opinions about what they see, and don’t see, in literary texts that are supposed to represent U.S. culture. But what is the impact of the average reader's response on how we understand literature in a culture, especially when underrepresented groups have a medium to voice their voice in the digital age, especially when it seems that no one reads books anymore but everyone has an opinion and the means to share it? This course will sample a range literature that fans love to hate from the 1930s to the 1990s through the reader responses still present in archival manuscript letters, databases of digitized texts, and archived blog posts as a way of introducing students to the everyday cultures of critical reading and the histories of marginalized voices who have participated in literary culture through reader responses. We will consider how we share those reactions and save these reactions, and what we learn about ourselves from reading other people’s mail. We will start with hate mail for Nancy Cunard’s controversial Negro: An Anthology (1934) and move on to letters calling Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936) “un-American, anti-Semitic, anti-Negro, Reactionary, pro-Ku Klux Klan, pro-Nazi, and Fascist” powerful critiques that led to profound edits in the script for the 1939 Academy-Award-Winning movie. We will consider the popular, confessional poems of Anne Sexton from the 1960s to the 1970s when her contemporaneous audience, often comprised of housewives or readers suffering from clinical depression, responded with surprising confessions of their own. Much of our reading will be focused on a specific group of readers who read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) in the summer of 2009 online, and who keep the book alive and engaging through posts about how to read -and not read -the text.
This course is essentially about how “the other” –whether from the perspective of ableism, class, gender, or race --reads themselves into U.S. Literary Culture. By examining representations of these authors and books as they are represented in university collections at the Harry Ransom Center and online, we will pay particular attention to issues of representation and authority in literary study. We will engage in paper archives, institutional databases, and online archives and consider issues surrounding research, editing, information organization, and presentation both historically and in the digital age. Why do the haters hate and the lovers love? And should we care? How does the way in which we save and access reader responses impact our perceptions about what is “literary” and who has the power to decide what being literary means in a given time period?
Texts/Reading:
Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest: A Novel. Back Bay 10th anniversary pbk. ed, Back Bay Books, 2006. [Excerpts published in literary magazines]
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts,Archives and Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library. “Negro anthology” made by Nancy Cunard. The New
York Public Library Digital Collections. 1934.[Works by Louis Armstrong, W. E. B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Arthur Schomburg]
Sexton, Anne. The Complete Poems: Anne Sexton. First Mariner Books Edition, Mariner Books, 1999. [Poems: “Double Image” “Ringing the Bells” “You, Dr. Martin” “For John, Who Begs Me Not To Enquire” “Self in 1958” plus recordings of her readings]
DeLillo, Don. “The Angel Esmeralda” in The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories. Reprint edition, Scribner, 2012.
Mitchell, Margaret, and Pat Conroy. Gone with the Wind. Reissue edition, Pocket Books, 2008.
[excerpts removed from Gone with the Wind, the film]; Gone With the Wind. Victor Fleming, 1939. Perf. Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable, Leslie Howard, Olivia de Havilland. Youtube.
Course Requirements:
Writing (50%) Writing includes evaluation of reader response, creation of reader response, and analyses of primary sources in the context of reader responses. Beyond the minor weekly writing assignments (200 words) assessed as part of the discussion grade (see below), there are three major writing assignments:
Analysis of reader response presentation online (3-5 pages, 750-1250 words) 10%; Analysis of reader response presentation in a manuscript collection with peer reviews(5-7 pgs, 1250-1750 words)15%;Final paper on a reader response collection of the student’s choosing (7-10 pgs, 1750-2500 words)25%.
Oral Presentation (10%) Two oral presentations on aspects of the course material are required of each student. At least one presentation is part of a group. Part of the grade is awarded for the quality of reader response supporting the presentation.
Discussion (20%) Most sessions are devoted to discussion. Discussion includes minor weekly writing assignments. Students will demonstrate a familiarity and/or an understanding of all the readings required for the week by responding to a writing prompt. Except when indicated, there are required readings each week.
University Lecture Series (5%) Students will attend at least one talk (from the University Lecture Series) during the semester. They will write a short written response on any aspect of the content of the lecture that interests them as well as critically evaluate the question/answer session at the end of the talk. They will include in their written response a reflection on how the audience responses shape their general impression of the whole talk. What kinds of questions did the audience ask? What was emphasized about the talk with these questions? How, if saved, might those questions become relevant for a future understanding of the talk?
Participation (10%) This is a seminar-style course, so attendance and participation in class are critical to individual success in this course and to the success of the course as a whole. Students should come to class prepared to participate in small group and class discussions, completing all required readings prior to class, and submitting discussion questions on time.
Additional Information:
Information Literacy: Multiple sessions with staff at the Harry Ransom Center will be conducted to introduce archival selection, organization, and access practices. Students will also learn how to cite archival and online primary sources with staff at the Perry-Castañeda Library.
Gems: Multiple visits to the Harry Ransom Center to examine collections relevant to all the course readings.
Flags: This course has a Writing Flag anda Cultural Diversity flag.
Instructor Biography:
I am an Associate Professor in the Department of English. My primary areas of research are textual studies, sound studies, and infrastructure studies as these concerns impact academic research, research libraries, and the creation of research tools and resources in the digital humanities (DH). I have published widely in DH and have won several grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Institute for Museum and Library Services, and the Mellon Foundation. I was the Primary Investigator of the 2017 PopUp Institute DH@UT: Building a Digital Humanities Ecosystem for Innovative Research in the Liberal Arts, which brought together faculty from the College of Liberal Arts; cultural heritage institutions on campus such as the Harry Ransom Center, the Benson Latin American Collection, and the Briscoe Center for American History; and the School of Information. I have also been the lead in developing UT’s first Digital Humanities undergraduate certificate and the dual MA/MSIS between the iSchool and the English Department as well as acting on the leadership team for the Bridging Barriers Good Systems project supported by the Office of the Vice President of Research. Some of my digital projects include High Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship (HiPSTAS) through which she seeks to develop a virtual research environment in whichscholars and cultural heritage professionals can better access and analyze spoken word audio collections of interest to humanists with machine learning and visualization. I have only recently moved from the School of Information to the English Department and I am greatly enjoying teaching my UGS course Fan Mail, Haters, and the Literary in What We Love to Hate, which I will repeat in Spring 2020. I am writing this proposal in order to further develop the course for Plan II to include more research in the Harry Ransom Center with primarydocuments.