Someday, I will post actual content.

Today is not that day.

 • In today’s Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, there’s an article about graphic novels created by Kaplan Inc. to help students with their SAT and ACT exams.

• I would probably be blogging more if my life wasn’t utter chaos and if I hadn’t reconnected with my Playstation 2 and, in particular, Def Jam: Vendetta and Def Jam: Fight for New York.  And I made a new friend:

It’s made out of Nerf.  I can throw it at things.  I think I’m in love.

…

Clearly, I’m not having the productive summer that I thought I would have.  I am hoping to finish this big long classic film post soonish, and to get some post-MoCCA reviews up.

• The new Savage Critic and you should, like, totally check it out and stuff.

• The other night, I got an e-mail saying I got into a class for the fall that was previously closed–lazy as always, I registered late.  It isn’t a particularly exciting class, but it is one that I need to graduate with my MA.  However, as I still work full time, I can really only spare the time to give two courses the attention they deserve, which leaves me with a bit of a quandry.

 So, here are the choices.  Two graduate courses enter.  One leaves.

 Topics in Literature as Genre: Modernism and Gender

This course will focus on modernism and gender in film and literature of the 1910s and ’20s. Secondary sources will include Cinema and Modernism by David Trotter (Blackwell, 2007) and The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s, by Liz Conor (Indiana, 2004). Sections of the course will focus on the films of D.W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin, the literature of James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, and women in relation to various aspects of popular and consumer culture during the decade. Besides these sources, we will utilize selected primary writings and additional web sites and resources. The expected visit of London filmmaker Georgina Starr and showing of her film Theda based on the career of screen vamp Theda Bara will fit right into our work. Students will write individual short essays, produce a class presentation, and write a major research paper. There will be a great variety of topics to chose from.

Topics in Postmodern Literature: New Media Literature

Literature has been directly engaged with technological change and its mediation of language for at least the duration of the modernist period-from telegraph, radio, magazine, newspaper and book typesetting, to the fax, T.V., personal computer, desktop publishing, networking, and digital multi-media production. In this course, I will be interested for us to consider the poetics of electronic literature (i.e. the text-oriented subset of new media) from experiential, aesthetic, theoretical, and historical perspectives. Some initial questions that may inform our study are:

• How do art makers integrate technological concepts and their social implications into art? (database, interactivity, algorhythm, open source, modularity)
• How does the saturation of the social world and the terms of specific media devices (cable T.V., video-game, mobile phone) inform literature?
• What are the important concepts, genre conventions, and “APIs” organizing the varied kinds of work within electronic literature: hypertext, net.art, e-poetry, vispo, blogs, wikis, podcasts?
• What reconfigurations to prior genre conventions and understanding of text objects can we observe? How does the “remediation” of classic genres transpire? Do multi-, hybrid- and inter- media overwhelm genre thinking?
• How can the tools of literary study be adapted to their reading? Where do new media leave the material book?
• Does the advent of “new media” constitute a paradigm shift, a fresh chapter, or only the illusion of literary change? To what degree is new technology enabling, determining, or limiting?
• What do we gain by considering new media from the perspective of electronic literature, rather than such disciplinary categories as performance, experimental music, or computer science?
• How is the writer and the activity of writing reconceptualized? (FLARF, singular genius vs. collaborative writing) How is the reader and the activity of reading/consuming reconceptualized? (navigate, launch, operate)

The semester will be choreographed to acquaint you with current digital practices, leading you toward becoming a fluent reader/viewer/user, while buttressing these engagements with research into the development of new media as a textual art, and the history of human/computer interaction. Our study themes will oscillate between close encounters with new media artifacts and more distanced reflections on theoretical and historical issues–supported by assigned critical readings, student-led panel presentations, collaborative online work, and student-curated exhibitions. We will communally work through a number of emerging new media “classics” and “foundational” critical texts with the aim of enabling students to develop a conceptual framework for producing review-quality critical writing about new media and introducing it into their teaching. In addition to electronic exhibits and reserve texts, we will work with such titles as: The New Media Reader (eds. Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort), New Media Poetics (Morris and Swiss), and The Language of New Media (Manovich).

I’m torn.  On the one hand, the first course?  Right up my alley in terms of time period, content, and media.  On the other, the second course is an interesting field, one I think may be highly relevant in the future of humanities academia.