JEFF ALLRED

Novel HacksNew Approaches to Teaching the Novel Genre

I majored in American Studies at the high point of the “canon wars” of theearly 1990s, and so I came into the field amid heavy crossfire regarding thevalidity of popular culture as a subject for academic study. I note with pleas-ure that discussions of the fundamental worth of popular culture have fadedin the sense that “pop” content of all kinds now occupies a central positionin our pedagogical and critical work. What remains more problematic, espe-cially for our pedagogy, is the status of popular modes of cultural consump-tion and reading. To conceive of cultural artifacts in a neo-Arnoldian veinas a repository of “sweetness and light” to be defended against hostile“Philistines” and “populace” seems absurd to the vast majority of humaniststoday; however, there are vibrant, urgent debates around reading practicesthat pit residual humanistic traditions of deep focus, intensive reading, crit-ical distance, and a hermeneutics of difficulty against emergent practices thatdraw their energies from surfaces, fast-moving modes of attention, andimmersiveness (Arnold 51, 99–104). Here, the conservative arguments (andI use the term in a non-pejorative sense) merit serious scrutiny, as we askwhether “Google” really “makes us stupid,” whether the ubiquity of socialnetwork interfaces, smartphones, and immersive forms of multimedia con-tent makes us “alone together,” and, most crucially to our pedagogicalwork, whether students’ capacities for intensive focus and critical orienta-tion will survive amid competing claims for their (our?) attention lurking atthe margins of the window, a mere click away.1

As my metaphor suggests, a central way to conceive of these broadchanges is the shift of reading from print-based to screen-based media.2 Thisis not a transfer of a neutral “content” from one container to another, facil-itating faster, easier, and more ubiquitous access to texts that retain theiressential character. Rather, screen-based media constitute a matrix fromwhich new forms spring—blogs, tweets, and feeds, for example—and olderones are “remediated,” a process in which old content is transformed in andthrough a new medium (Bolter and Grusin 5). As I began thinking throughthe implications of this shift for my teaching, research, and reading, I devel-oped a new undergraduate course designed to engage the tenuous relation-ship between tradition and innovation in the shift from print to screen, onein which students would learn to make their own reading, and the technolo-gies that enable it, an object of contemplation and criticism. The course iscalled “Novel Hacks,” and it braids together three strands that allow us tothink about our own emergent reading practices in richer and more subtleterms than those of conservative censure or ahistorical celebration: a) a briefsketch of the history of the printed book and the novel genre that became,

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1 “Makes us stupid” refer-ences an influential arti-cle by Nicholas Carr, andthe “alone together” thetitle of Sherry Turkle’srecent humanist dissentagainst absorptive cultur-al technologies.

2 For a broad historiciza-tion of this shift, seeChartier, “Languages.”For a more theoreticalanalysis comparing textsin print and on thescreen, see Drucker.

Transformations:The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy| Volume XXIV Number 1&2http://web.njcu.edu/sites/transformations published semi-annually by New Jersey City University

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by the mid-nineteenth century, the dominant literary genre associated withit; b) a few prominent theories of the relationship between texts and theirmaterial supports, especially networked screens; and c) collaborative projectsin which students must “hack” a novel using web-based tools to “make itnew” in some meaningful way. I will address some of the problems thatemerged from such a broad framing of the course. My primary focus will beon the group projects, which were the most productive and successful coursecomponents. In retrospect, what stands out to me most sharply is the waythat combining classic texts and emerging digital technologies ofwriting/recording/disseminating texts clarified for students the historicalrelationships of each to the others. Through the projects, they became awareof the disruptive newness that attended the emergence of now-classic formsand of the roots of today’s modes of screen-based reading in past practices.

The novel is a particularly interesting site to have students examine thisbroad shift for several reasons that exist in productive tension with one anoth-er. First, the novel has enjoyed a long reign as our most prestigious literaryform, and having students play with novels, using digital media to renovateclassic texts in various ways, helps to dispel some of the problems that emergewhen students kowtow to “high” cultural forms: the stilted language thatresults from writing up to a mystified cultural artifact, the reliance on cribs likeSparknotes, and the anxiety of being a less-than-ideal reader of a text thatseems from a student’s perspective to issue from a lofty space. Second, even aquick and sketchy examination of recent work on the “rise of the novel”helps students to put this very aura of prestige into question, as they learn thatthe genre grew into its current respectability only very slowly, and only byshedding its roots as a new entertainment medium in the early eighteenthcentury (Warner xi). As the novel continues its slow process of ceding groundto the emergent media platforms of the twentieth and twenty-first cen-turies—primarily the cinema, television, and video games—students are oftenshocked and intrigued to learn of its checkered past as a corrupter of youth,scrambler of minds, and deranger of proper sexuality. Finally, reading novels onscreens, and hacking them for screen-based reading, sharpens and heightensthe oppositions and values often assigned to printed books and screens asmaterial supports for reading: on the one hand, the fixity, durability, and self-contained aspect of the book; on the other hand, the fluidity, ephemerality, andlinked intertexuality of words on the screen. I wanted to join my students inthinking about what it means to read the “deepest” genre on the “shallowest”surface, to do the most focused and intensive kind of reading within the mostdistracting and extensive spaces of reading, to engage a genre associated withlong, solitary stretches of time via technologies that insist aggressively on short,interruptive bursts of socializing within and without the main text.

In what follows, I will advance two arguments regarding the relationbetween the novel genre and the ongoing migration of reading from printto screen. First, novel reading might become more and differently social. E-readers like the Kindle (2007-present) have encouraged the widespreadadoption of more social modes of reading novels (and other long-form prose

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narratives), allowing readers to share highlighted passages and marginal com-ments with their social networks via Facebook and Twitter.3 The open-source tools we use in the classroom are predicated on a further departurefrom the conventions of print reading, hailing readers as co-writers or co-producers of the text in more subtle and wide-ranging ways that are preclud-ed by the relatively closed, “digital rights management” ethos of the Kindle,Nook, iPad, etc. Reading in this manner materializes in fresh and dramaticfashion past utopian theories of the “writerly text” or the writer as “produc-er” or “technician” (Barthes, S/Z 4; Benjamin, “The Author as Producer”222–5; Dos Passos 79). It also allows dimensions of reading that are ofteninvisible or obscure in reading printed books to appear in sharper relief. The“voices” of a text belonging to narrators and characters, for example, whichare virtual and often somewhat submerged during silent, solitary reading,become literal and fascinatingly problematic when producing an audiobook.Secondly, many aspects of emergent networked reading practices are not rad-ically new but developed out of nineteenth-century antecedents, such asreading aloud for family and friends in the home or the exchange of mar-ginalia in printed novels. There are surprising commonalities or points ofcontact between past reading practices and our own.

The central value of hacking novels, creating sharable editions ratherthan writing critical analyses, is not that is makes students better readers, oreven better readers of reading practices, though I think it does both. Rather,it shifts our orientation to the processes and products of student work—areorientation that is gradually spreading throughout the discipline under theaegis of “digital humanities.“ Rather than engaging in a process of solitaryreading and markup leading to a strenuous rewriting of the primary text thatis addressed to a single professor, in the Novel Hacks class, students collabo-ratively build an object addressed to peers in the classroom and, potentiallyat least, a wider public audience via the Web. This reorientation is ongoing:Jerome McGann began calling for such a transformation in the 1990s, insist-ing that the next generation of literary critics would be “at least as involvedin making things as with writing text” (19). More pithily, Mark Sample hasrecently described his pedagogy as “making things and sharing them.” Thisethic of (re)making cultural artifacts in the classroom strongly parallels, andcan draw inspiration from, developments in popular culture, where one findscountless examples of audiences convening to inscribe, remix, and commentupon a wide range of media forms in ways I will describe.

The “Decline of Storytelling” and the Rise of Networked Reading

A useful jumping-off place for thinking about the relationship betweennovels, reading, and the history of the material text is Walter Benjamin’scompact history of the novel, “The Storyteller,” a text my students read atthe beginning of the course. The most innovative aspect of Benjamin’sargument is its framing of the novel, not as a distinctive narrative mode in

3 For an overview of thisfunctionality on theKindle, see the “ShareNotes and Highlights”page on Amazon’s KindleUser Support site: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201242030(accessed September 26,2013).

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an evolutionary sequence of literary forms, but as a function of changingrelationships between storytellers and their auditors with the advent ofprinted books. This materialist focus on novels as printed objects, and thecontrast between print culture and a largely lapsed tradition of oral narra-tive, allowed students to think through the assumptions embedded in novelreading that are so deeply internalized that we fail to recognize them mostof the time: the isolation that separates authors from the mass of readers andeach reader from the others; the aura that elevates the author (especially of“literary” fiction) over the mass of consumers; and the distinctive closureof novels that, unlike oral tradition, not hail readers as embellishers orretellers—narrators in their own right—but simply end.

From our present-day perspective, Benjamin’s argument fails to antic-ipate that the sociality he associates with traditional storytelling persists inmodern times. I was pleased to see students’ objections or revisions of theargument on this score. Many students shared ways that their isolatedreading feeds back into social, oral/aural settings: some discussed theirbook clubs, others the blogs they visit and comment on, and the ubiqui-tous Facebook loomed large as a source of ideas for novels to read and dis-cussions of them. Another student pointed out, very much in the spirit ofBenjamin’s analysis, that some authors are changing their writing practicesto exploit new writing spaces and thus have different relationships withreaders: she cited her enjoyment of “twitterature,” an umbrella term todescribe prose narratives that thread together many tweets with a hashtagto comprise a long-form story (“Twitterature”).

I pointed out to students that Benjamin was writing his essay in the1930s, an era in which media like radio and cinema were disrupting tra-ditional literary practices in ways that parallel our own moment. Thus hisargument that storytelling was giving way to “information,” and that thenovel was the last gasp of conveying experience, as opposed to a disartic-ulated jumble of facts in newspapers or radio reports, should be read as anattempt to think about how literary forms evolve in and through media.In what ways, I asked, does our moment bear out Benjamin’s thesis of amodern readership awash in information but lacking in real exchange ofexperiences? In what ways might we be witnessing a return, even withdeep differences, of some of the sociality of traditional storytelling thatBenjamin so values?

To get at these questions, I asked students to reflect on differences intheir reading practices when they are reading on screens or in print.Several students described the pleasures and the problems of distraction inscreen-based reading: the visual and aural cues that signal new informationcoming in, from texts to emails to push notifications, for example. Anotherstudent claimed, a bit puckishly, that he didn’t read anything anymore, inthe sense that reading on the screen pulls him out from a given text intoothers, so that any given reading session takes in an improvised weave oftexts rather than the kind of solitary, stable object Benjamin imagines. Butthe most vibrant discussion stemmed from the question of isolation. A

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minority of students moved with the grain of Benjamin’s critique,expressing a nostalgia for a prior moment when “serious” reading wasmore widespread, or noting irritation with the superficiality of web cul-ture. But most students expressed enthusiasm for screen-based reading andespecially for its capacity to let them share their reading experience andcommentary, be it on blogs or via social network interfaces or even (inone student’s provocative example) product reviews.

I will now engage some of the issues raised via Benjamin in morepractical ways by focusing on two of the group projects I assigned to my“Novel Hacks” seminar, to show how emergent technologies and readingpractices are best understood through the lens of the long history of thematerial text, and, conversely, how the history of the material text must beunderstood in light of ongoing changes in how we read. The first groupproject involved the production of a public domain audiobook eventuallydeposited online and made available for general use.4 In the second proj-ect. students produced a “marked up” version or revision of a novel tobring out some aspect for a peer audience of advanced undergraduateEnglish majors. For both projects, I gave students broad latitude to choosetexts and shape the product, offering suggestions as to software, secondaryreadings, and primary texts, but making no specific demands beyond a setof incremental deadlines. I will discuss the pros and cons of this self-direct-ed approach in detail in the last section of the essay; for now, I note onlythat I will provide more structure and less freedom in future attempts. Eachgroup had 6-7 students and had about a month to research its respectivetopic in consultation with me, divvy up the tasks, and produce its object.Each group shared the requirements of defining basic roles: researcherswho gathered and shared secondary materials, producers of the basic con-tent of each project (e.g., the audiobook’s reader-performers), editors whocleaned up, compiled, and shared the final product, and teachers who led athirty-minute lesson/presentation to the class as a whole. Each group metwith me at the end of the second and third weeks to track progress andtroubleshoot. At the conclusion of the project, every student was responsi-ble for a 500-word reflection on the project as a whole and his or her rolewithin it.

Both of these projects used free, off the shelf resources. I am not a dig-ital humanist by training, and my college has neither a DH institute normuch in the way of space and support for digital pedagogy. Moreover, mystudents overwhelmingly come from working-class backgrounds, areworking their way through school, and have long commutes to campus,so I had to design projects that could be achieved with razor-thin budgetsof both time and money and without face-to-face collaboration outsideof class. To frame these constraints more positively, open-source technolo-gies can be free in multiple senses: they have been produced with donatedtime and money; they allow for a freer relation between reader, author,and text; and products created with them can be freely shared with thepublic with a few precautions. Both projects were fun to explore and

4 The audiobook can beaccessed via jallred.net/teachingprojects.

5 Several chapters fromAudiobooks, Literature, andSound Studies, edited byMatthew Rubery, engagethis history. For a criticalreflection on the rise ofbooks on tape in the1970s and 80s, see SvenBirkerts, The GutenbergElegies 141–50.

thought-provoking for students and provided a pedagogical jolt that posi-tioned students and myself in an unconventional relationship to canonicaltexts. Both provided me with abundant examples of what works and whatdoesn’t in these kinds of projects, and I will reflect on these issues in theconclusion.

Novel Hack #1: Narration, Recitation, and the Audiobook

Listening to recorded texts has its origins in Edison’s vision for thephonogram as a literary delivery system in the 1870s, and developsthrough the radio dramas of the 1930s, literary recordings on LPs in thepostwar period, and especially the rise of books on tape in the 1970s.5Recorded performances of all kinds of literary texts—and especially nov-els—are more popular than ever, and the commercial mainstream hastransitioned seamlessly from tapes and CDs to digital audio files distrib-uted over the internet by audible.com and similar vendors.

In composing this assignment for students, however, I was inspired notby commercial recordings but by a subcultural form known as the “dis-tributed audiobook,” recordings produced by a loosely affiliated networkof amateurs, and compiled and offered for download by sites like lib-rivox.org. The distributed audio book is an innovative and dynamic formof recorded literature and has fascinating resonances with the long historyof novel reading. Nonprofessional performers work collaboratively, mostoften alternating by chapters, so that a long novel might have dozens ofreaders. Unlike commercially produced counterparts, volunteers donatetheir time and energy to cultivate a parcel of the cultural commons, rean-imating texts that, in many cases, have gone out of print and/or are notconsidered viable by profit-oriented audiobook producers.

The distributed audiobook throws a wrench into the works of the novelgenre by replacing its narrating voice, the dominant narrative presence thatinstructs, delights, seduces, and informs us from a privileged and ofteninscrutable position, with a protean voice, as the narrative is passed from ama-teur to amateur. Consuming a novel in this format becomes a journey sharedwith an assortment of voices and bodies, as one hears the “same” textual voiceput on different ages, ethnicities, genders, volumes, qualities of recordingequipment, degrees of privacy (the occasional crying baby or moaning stereomay intrude from other rooms), and readers’ different levels of competencyand/or cultural capital. Listening to novels in this way radicalizes the “het-eroglossia” of the novel genre (Bakhtin 259-300), and tugs even the governingnarrative voice into the centrifugal and democratizing vortex of the genre’ssocial energies. Listening to a distributed audiobook also makes the narrativemore visible as a construction. Unlike in a professional recording by a sea-soned performer, the quality Roland Barthes described as the “grain of thevoice” is not sanded out (“The Grain of the Voice” 271). The remaining res-

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6 This and all followingquotations from studentsare drawn from briefreflections on the projectsubmitted for a grade.Out of respect for stu-dents’ privacy, I leave thesources anonymous.

onant roughness is an active signifying presence in the distributed audiobookgenerally, and in those produced by students in the Novel Hacks class.

I asked a group of six students to produce an audiobook of a public-domain novel. They chose both the text and the style of performance col-laboratively. They chose Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr.Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, since several group members were familiar with thenovel and all members agreed that it would make for a dramatic spokentext and was of manageable length. Rather than use DIY software likeAudacity, they booked time at our college’s radio station to record theirperformances using professional-grade equipment, at the urging of a groupmember with his own radio show and a willingness to help peers. Studentsalso discussed some aesthetic issues: whether to add a soundtrack withbackground music and/or sound effects; whether to divide the text bycharacter (as in a radio play) or by chapter (with each reader doing all thevoices in a given chapter); whether to agree on a uniform style or alloweach narrator to stylize her chapter as she saw fit. In the end, they chose asimple and straightforward approach, as do most narrators on texts hostedat librivox.org, with each narrator reading one chapter in whatever style hedeems comfortable. In making this choice, members cited time constraintsabove all: they were understandably wary of approaches that would requirehours of rehearsal, multiple meet-ups, and complex post-production work.

In their comments on the project, several students noted the technicalchallenges of being a co-producer, rather than a reader, of a novel. The stu-dent who was assigned to post-production commented that she becameaware of the fuzziness of distinguishing between edit-worthy “mistakes”and more subtle infelicities that could be left in, especially insofar as “Ifound myself becoming more forgiving of my own mistakes” than those ofpeers.6 Students also noted issues of readerly competence and affect: onestudent noted, “I came across a few words I had never seen in my life norhad I known how to pronounce them out loud,” and another lamentedthat even her best-prepared peer “struggled with pronunciation of outdatedwords, and everyone managed to either switch words to constructions wewere familiar with, or changed words to do the same.” She thus acknowl-edged that a compelling performance of the text was bedeviled by the per-formers’ lack of mastery at certain points and that the desire to produce aneffective oral performance might justify changes in what is ordinarily con-ceived of as a fixed, stable printed object. Her comment also gestures to waysthat I could have structured the assignment to challenge students to bettermastery of the oral performance: asking them to keep logs, for example, ofpronunciations they looked up, unfamiliar words they learned, foreignphrases or names they researched. After experiencing the final product, stu-dents considered the differences between a spoken text and a text consumedvia traditional silent reading. One student regretted his failure to convincethe group to use the radio play approach, complete with sound effects anda soundtrack, which would have been “a lot more fun” and would haveenlivened the text with more vivid voices. Another noted that her experi-

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ence producing an audiobook might feed back into her silent reading prac-tice, since “I enjoyed reading with emotion, rather than the internal monot-onous tone of my voice that I now notice when I read to myself.” Hercomments derive from Matthew Rubery’s work on audiobooks, an articlethe group read together and presented to peers. In a discussion of the audio-book and Victorian literary culture, Rubery argues that such struggles with“voice characterization” link today’s readers/listeners to an earlier momentin cultural history when people were accustomed to evaluate their own aswell as professionals’ skill performing “varied vocal registers to represent dif-ferent characters in the narrative,” an act that “can be challenging for nar-rators reading stories outside the range of their own biography” and thussummons up issues of cultural difference and competence (“Play It Again,Sam Weller” 67). The comments of students on their own perfomancesreveal how voicing “classic” texts in new ways might recapture some of the“grain of the voice” that Barthes mourns, or open up a new axis alongwhich to think about Bakhtin’s “heteroglossia.”

To produce an audiobook points to both past and future. On the onehand, it remediates prior cultural technologies. It imports a nineteenth-cen-tury form into a twenty-first-century material support, the portable digitalaudio player. It distributes the reading through time and spaces in ways thatproduce a strange combination of intimacy (the whispered voice of astranger in one’s ear[bud] during the morning commute) and estrange-ment (the substitution of a panoply of others’ voices for one’s own virtualinner voice) (Bolter and Grusin 2–18). Chris Phillips has described thecapacity of digital audio recording technology “to defamiliarize andenhance aural reading as a way of learning and conveying critical knowl-edge” (55). In his courses on nineteenth-century US poetry, students self-produce recitations of poems using simple USB microphones and the open-source audio editing application Audacity; their products range widely,from the simplest recitations that focus on issues of voice characterizationto more intensive remediations of texts that mix multiple tracks, employingecho, sound effects, musical accompaniment, and the like (56-9).Comparing this complex set of remediations to my class’s more modestfirst attempts, I agree with the student who speculated that mixing voicesand sound in a “radio play” format would be both more fun and, perhaps,allow for more points of contact with the history of the novel. In a futureiteration of the course, I may assign students to examine and work fromremediated novels from prior periods, such as the amazing adaptations ofclassic novels for radio by Orson Welles and John Houseman’s “MercuryTheater of the Air” in the 1930s United States. I would also work on moreand better ways to publicize the project: for all practical purposes, the proj-ect was private to the course, shared via Blackboard with course partici-pants, although I have since posted it on my own website. In the future, Iwould consult with librivox.org to publish the final product there andmake it freely available and brainstorm with students on ways to attract lis-teners in the interests of sharing our work more widely.

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Producing distributed audiobooks also connects current reading prac-tices to those from the nineteenth century. Listening to books rather thanreading them attunes our ears to the differences between our own andVictorian-era reading practices, when reading aloud was more integratedinto domestic life. Famous authors’ readings were a major form of enter-tainment (Andrews 109–25). Public readings by famous authors were a con-spicuous feature of the literary culture of the period, and Rubery and othershave argued that authors used these occasions to comment implicitly ontheir own texts through performative choices. Public readings thereforewere not so much passive reproductions of a master text as new editions ortextual variants (Rubery, “Play It Again, Sam Weller” 68; Bernstein). DIY

audiobooks, such as those the students produced, shift the personality of theauthor and the uniformity of the narrative “voice” to the background andemphasize the text as script or score, in which the smooth interface linkingauthor, narrator, and voice actor is grittier and more discontinuous. Themost dramatic effect of reading/speaking/hearing novels in this way is tomake students aware of a critical distance between listeners, performers,texts, and authors, a distance that deauthorizes notions of canonicity andtextual purity and emphasizes plurality, variety, textual corruption, and dif-ferent possibilities for dissemination.

Novel Hack #2: Through the Looking-Glass 2.0 and the Digressive Edition

The second “novel hack” my students attempted was the creation of amarked up novel, again using a public-domain text and free, open-sourcetools. Whereas creating an audiobook uses emergent technologies andpractices to help readers recover some aspects of a lapsed sociality in lit-erature, marking up a novel uses them to expand the margins of novelsand populate this new space with a company of reader/writers in waysthat change the dynamics of novel reading. To publish an annotated orotherwise marked-up edition of a novel, even in a simple DIY format, is toclaim a textual authority that has traditionally rested with a tiny culturalelite; reader and writers (or, better, the reading and writing functions, sincemost subjects perform both roles in this environment) are brought intomuch closer proximity. In the digital environment, the entire atmospherethat defined the novel genre for Benjamin is transformed: rather than theisolated reader scarcely warming her detached self in front of a hermetic,isolated and isolating text, we have a writer/reader inscribing herself with-in and without the margins of a text on several distinct levels amid thevisible-audible hum of other readers doing the same, often in real time.

My students used digress.it, since 2009 one of several WordPress pluginsand themes that tweak the basic contours of blogs—a primary “post” bythe blog author or authors and a series of secondary “comments” that fol-low the post—to allow for more subtle relationships between primary

7 Kathleen Fitzpatrick hasexhaustively examinedthe potential of WordPress-based tools to facilitatescholarly communicationsand publication, particu-larly in her book, PlannedObsolescence, which dis-cusses CommentPress,another WordPress pluginthat is similar to digress.it.(209–20).

text and commentary. The main change is that comments can be append-ed to a particular paragraph rather than to the entire text of the post, andthat comments appear in the margins next to the paragraph they com-ment upon rather than appearing at the end. The result is a more dynamicrelationship between primary and secondary texts, author and reader,body and margin. This reading/writing space shifts the work of literarycriticism from the strenuous rewriting of imaginative texts that, as “closereading,” has been at the center of the humanities for almost a century, tothe co-writing of such texts. Within an environment like digress.it, criticalinscriptions are appended to the text, almost like leaves on the tree of theoriginal text, a metaphor that is intensified when multiple critical voicesare inscribing the same “primary” text. In less formal and more institu-tional terms, digress.it (and similar tools) allow for a cheaper, faster, andmore spontaneous mode of critique than traditional publishing outlets.7The democratic impulse behind the design is manifest in designer EddieTejeda’s description of the project, where users are encouraged to “turndocuments into conversations” and “collectively dissect public documentslike political speeches…or government transcripts” (digress.it). Tools likedigress.it thus offer the wider distribution of a traditionally rarified subjectposition—the public critic of texts and/or producer of authoritativeannotated editions of classic texts. This emphasis on spontaneity andsociality draws from and parallels aspects of “user generated content” withwhich most students are familiar: from extremely nuanced analyses ofserial fictions like Breaking Bad or Lost on blogs, wikis, and discussionforums, to collective annotation of presidential debates via Twitter to thesophisticated annotations of rap lyrics, poems, and many other kinds oftexts among the hundreds of thousands of users of the site Rap Genius.In each case, an authoritative primary text is inscribed with copious com-mentary by authors with no special credentials or institutional platforms.

One wide use of digress.it in a literary critical context is the NewYork Public Library’s Candide 2.0, a “marked up” version of Voltaire’sclassic released in conjunction with an exhibition on the novel at thelibrary in 2009-10. Perhaps the most sophisticated aspect of the project isits careful construction of the text to foreground the interplay between itscontent and form. First, the editor’s preface emphasizes the way Voltaire’stext was “marked up” from the start, appearing as it did amid intense con-troversy regarding the relationship between writers’ civil liberties and thestate’s interest in controlling the flow of ideas. As the editor puts it, thetext invited both private marginalia and public comment, both authorizedtexts and pirated or otherwise unsanctioned editions:

Almost immediately upon its publication in 1759, Candide wastranslated, pirated, and responded to in pamphlets, unauthorizedsequels, and adaptations for stage. […] Although police tried toseize the book as it was sold underground and it was placed onthe Vatican’s list of forbidden books in 1762, the controversymade it all the more attractive to readers to get their hands on it.

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Readers responded actively to Voltaire’s tale: they wrote about it,sometimes in the margins of their own copies they bought underthe table, but often in public forms of repudiation for its religiousirreverence, defenses of Leibniz and Rousseau, and imaginings ofwhat would happen after Candide and his companions were leftto cultivate their garden in the Orient. (Boone)

Thus Candide 2.0 is not a radical departure from its printed progenitor, buta continuation of a tradition of paratextual commentary that was part ofthe text from its very origins. Second, the project uses the metaphor of thegarden to govern the markup procedure. Voltaire’s text culminates in theinjunction that we must “cultivate our garden,” and this trope, with itsimplications of a harmonious interplay between rational culture and anar-chic nature, permeates the text. The “garden” of Candide 2.0 was executedby restricting access to the text to a handful of experts (including theexhibit editor Alice Boone, a graduate student; several tenured professors;an independent scholar; a novelist; and a playwright) who “seeded” thetext with comments prior to public access. The text was then opened upto public comment for over two months, before being closed on April 25,2010 (it remains available as a read-only text as of this writing).

This procedure, allows for a mixture of authoritative and highly struc-tured commentary from experts with a more democratic mode of partic-ipation from lay readers, whose contributions were constrained by thetemporal limits of a) being excluded from commentary until the expertshad created some critical scaffolding and b) the closure of commentingafter a set interval. The result is a “finished” text where readers will notethe tension between the seemingly effortless erudition of the “gardeners”and the more “unruly” or “anarchic” reading style of some lay readers(Wittmann 290–2; Petrucci 356–7). In one example, in the eighth para-graph of chapter one, Nicholas Cronk, a “seeder,” provides a learned glosson Voltaire’s satire on “arguments from design” in the text: that Voltaireuses Pangloss to point out the absurd claims that, for example, “the nosehas been formed to bear spectacles—thus we have spectacles” or “Pigswere made to be eaten—therefore we eat pork all the year round.” Threelay readers link to this comment, jumping from Cronk’s comment thatPangloss obviously didn’t bother to ask why God didn’t design the worldfor Muslims or Jews to a discussion of the history and rationale of kosherlaws. This kind of digressiveness is clearly part of the pleasure of becominga reader-writer in an environment like digress.it, and it points to the deepdifferences between reading in a dynamic digital space and reading print.Even from the standpoint of the reader of the closed text, who does notinscribe it in any public way, there is the question of how to read it: doesone interrupt Voltaire with the 226 comments appended to the variouschapter and paragraphs? Or read Voltaire, and then read the commentary?One might also track the output of any of the sixty-six commentators,since digress.it allows one to sift out the comments of a single contributorinto a separate page. More radically interruptive strategies emerge from

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the links that many commenters post, ranging from materials from therelated exhibit on Voltaire posted by curator Alice Boone to the manylinks to personal blogs and sites by lay readers: as with all browser-basedreading, one’s attention to the “primary” text is constantly diverted andrerouted around an infinite web of textuality..

With the example of Candide 2.0 in mind, I wanted to see whatwould happen with a more “unruly” marking-up process. A second groupof six students from my class chose a novel in the public domain and, usingdigress.it, marked up all or part of it as they saw fit. The group assignedfour members to do the actual annotations, one to teach a lesson to thewhole class (which focused on different modes of screen-based annotationof texts), and one to clean up and prepare the final product. As the groupwas assembling its project, the entire class examined Candide 2.0 as amodel. All read historical and theoretical texts by Roger Chartier, JoannaDrucker, and Christian Vanderdorpe that compare the often subtle waysthat print and screen-based media structure reading and writing throughlayout and other, often invisible, elements of textual presentation. Thegroup chose Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass to annotate. Mysense is that Looking-Glass was attractive for its manageable length and itsfamiliarity to all group members, as well as to the class as a whole. As inthe first group project, I did not build the text into the syllabus, and thusrequire all students to read and study it, a decision that I regret, since stu-dents’ lack of prior mastery of the novel hampered their ability to thinkthrough and implement a coherent edition of it. In a preliminary organi-zational meeting with group members, I urged them to think about howto “make it new” for an audience of peers and suggested ways to focustheir markup by choosing a theme to limit and focus the scope of theannotations. Although I left them free to choose, I gave two examples ofpossible approaches: glosses on the political references and caricatures inthe text, or the history of visualizations of the text in popular culture.

The result starkly contrasted to the Voltaire project. Whereas Candide2.0 has deep roots in scholarly practice and the history of annotated textsfrom literary and religious canons, Looking-Glass 2.0 is rooted in whatLawrence Lessig calls the “remix culture” that today’s students share: onein which texts are woven out of prior texts, often mixing different mediapromiscuously using digital tools (68–9). The first and most striking dif-ference has to do with the notion that the text is a unified whole con-tained within a book. The students marked up only the first chapter; it wasevident from the comments that some students neglected to read theentire novel, an act that could be read as laziness or evidence of time pres-sure. On a practical level, I might have done more to enforce a fuller mas-tery of the text and more complete markup in the form of incrementaldeadlines. The students’ own “hack” of my assignment might also be readas a function of the digital writing space, and of readers whose practiceshave been formed in and through that space, allowing readers to enjoy atext with little regard to the relationship between parts and the whole.

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They mixed spontaneous personal responses (a comment that “clearlyAlice hasn’t been to NYC” in response to a pastoral description of a snow-fall), more nuanced critical comments (a discussion of the recurrent use ofblack and white to signal shifts in valuation), decontextualized links toother texts (an indie band’s song based on the novel, a Wikipedia articleon the novel), and so on.

I was disappointed that the markup lacked a coherent focus and didnot address the text as a whole, but in retrospect, this frustration fails toaccount for the ways in which the notions of “focus” and “the text” areevolving and perhaps becoming vestigial. The history of reading is full ofmoments in which readers, practices, and platforms are out of sync, andmany of our most highly esteemed forms—the novel among them—emerged as disruptions of prior value systems. My students’ reading prac-tices can be understood as the inheritor of a centuries-long shift from“intensive” to “extensive” reading: that is, from repeated reading of a fewsanctified texts, often including manuscript copying, verbalization, andmemorization, to one-time reading of parts of many different texts, oftenin the service of information seeking and/or the composition of newtexts (Chartier and Cavallo 24–9). Readers like my students are habituatedto infinitely, effortlessly extensive reading. Many of my students’ com-ments can be read as stemming from the forces that are wearing downhabits of “intensive” reading: one comment consisted of an image of anAlice-themed chess set via Google Images; another likens the mirror-image printing of the poem “Jabberwocky” to the “redrum/murder” ref-erences in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. But one exchange suggestssomething nearly opposite is going on. One student, tongue firmly incheek, said of the mirror-image “Jabberwocky,” “I find myself wanting topress the ‘like’ button :/” Another replied that the urge to “like” madehim think of a “potentially negative consequence” of this kind of anno-tation: that the “critique” of a text could become “diluted” by a mass offacile reactions just as “Facebook ‘liking’ pigeonholes users into an ‘eitheror’ choice” rather than a more nuanced mode of reflection. This exchangesuggests a way in which an assignment like Looking Glass 2.0 uses the fric-tion between older texts and modes of reading with new texts and modesof reading to give students a critical purchase on their own habits of read-ing and cultural consumption.

Perhaps the most profound change in novel reading in this new envi-ronment is the new visibility of “the reader” of reader-response theory orthe mass readership of sociological approaches to literature. Increasingly, toread a text on a screen is to read with and against others in ways that beginto undermine the dominant model (which began to solidify in the latethirteenth century) of silent, solitary reading (Saenger 136–7). Thisdynamic is most conspicuous in a WordPress-based environment likedigress.it, where a community of readers forms around the text, dialogueswith each other, and sees new comments emerge in real time. In this envi-ronment, the intimacy often assumed to structure novel reading—the

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8 The One City, One Bookmovement is an interest-ing example, wherebyreaders self-organize in agiven city to read and dis-cuss a given book at agiven time, usually mixingsocial networking modesof communication andphysical meet-ups. For anexample, see the eventsorganized by the SanFrancisco Public Libraryat http://sfpl.org/index.php?pg=2000352501 andthe Twitter feed associatedwith the group at http://twitter.com/onecityone-book (both accessed April4, 2013).

9 In addition to Carr andTurkle, see Birkerts.

genteel author addressing a “dear reader” in Dickens, or the isolated read-er warming his hands at the “flame” of the novel’s plot in Benjamin—gives way to a complex feedback mechanism in which one’s reception ofthe text is mingled with that of others. And so we have an emergent neo-salon culture via Twitter, in which novels can be read by scores, hundreds,or thousands of readers sharing a common hashtag and commenting on atext in ways that are both dispersed in space and time and yet somehowtogether.8 E-readers and tablets both reflect and shape more social modesof reading. Nicholas Carr, Sherry Turkle, Sven Birkerts, and others suggestthat our job as humanists will be to preserve quiet space for intensivemodes of reading and the medium of print that has historically sustainedit.9 But I suspect that Allan Liu is right to argue that “the literary” isundergoing fundamental change and that humanists are best served think-ing about how to function within this new ecology of “knowledge work”that subsumes our practices within a broader and noisier sphere of activity,often organized by corporations in ways that cut against our critical andpedagogical purposes (1–10).

Conclusions and Resolutions

My first foray into a pedagogy of “making things and sharing them” hadits pitfalls. I made both strategic and tactical errors: the course was toobroadly framed, attempting to take on big chunks of secondary literaturein the vast fields of the history of the novel and the history of the book,as well as work on more recent developments in cyberculture and onlinewriting practices and spaces. Moreover, the group projects were notaligned closely enough with the broad units of the course, so that eachproject felt like a sidebar in the syllabus to me, and I’m sure to the studentsas well. I wish I had devoted more time to walking students through pos-sible tools and interfaces, laid out a clearer set of expectation for the finalproject, and, organized projects around texts that the entire class wouldstudy more closely over a longer timeframe. There was, however, a silverlining even in these mistakes, in that students used the slack to reveal a lotI hadn’t known about their habitual reading, researching, and writingpractices, and they made the projects their own in ways that illuminatedboth the problems and potential latent in the crossroads where popularmodes of reading and traditional literary pedagogy meet. N. KatherineHayles has recently argued against the notion of a widespread “crisis inreading” popularized in the wake of a 2004 report by the NationalEndowment for the Humanities. Instead, she asserts that we are livingthrough a gradual shift in reading that moves from “deep attention” to“hyper attention,” enabled by the interactivity of screen-based texts thatbegins to erode the boundaries between reading and computer gaming(187). For Hayles, if there is a crisis afoot, it is a crisis in literary pedagogy,which needs to engage not just the content of popular culture, but theforms, platforms, and practices that enable it. Doing so makes us reexam-

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ine some of our basic assumptions about what we mean when we talkabout reading, writing, analysis, and attention.

Once again, cultural emergences resonate with cultural residues, sinceHayles’ promotion of the playful spirit of gaming as a model for pedagogypoints back several decades to Barthes’ work on the “writerly” text, whichI assigned to my “Novel Hacks” students. Writing in the 1970s, Barthespromotes the idea that the death of the author opens up possibilities for amore porous, two-way relationship between reading and writing, orbetween imaginative texts and critical paratexts. Having students remediatetexts in the ways I’ve described makes us think about the contingency ofthe literary text prior to being produced, materialized, and consumed in aparticular way. Barthes usefully links the “writerly” text back to the rela-tionship that pertained among consumers of music before the era ofrecorded music (“Work” 162). He hopes that being “writerly” will openup for us some of the pleasure and direct engagement that arose from theneed to play a score at the old upright piano and thus mark it up with one’sown idiosyncratic emphases, limitations, and imperfections. My students’projects had imperfections aplenty, but I also think they partook of thisspirit of Barthesian play in ways that reflect back on past moments in thenovel’s development and, perhaps, point forward towards its future.

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