Victorian Popular Fiction Association 8th Annual Conference

“Victorian Popular Genres”

14-15 July, 2016

Round Table on Teaching Popular Fiction

Hosted by Anna Brecke

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Teaching Popular as a Genre

The call for papers for this year’s VPFA conference included this phrase: “teaching popular as a genre.” There is often a division between our scholarship and our teaching practice when it comes to Victorian popular genres. We may find ourselves hard-pressed to bring the non-canonical authors we research and seek to recuperate as vital components of Victorian Studies into our classrooms. This roundtable is intended to explore this disconnect as well as foster general conversation around the teaching of Victorian popular genres. The readings in this pack are geared towards asking us to consider what place the popular has in the classroom and what strategies we might employ to increase the inclusion of popular texts in the courses we teach. Included are Jennifer Phegley’s recent piece, “Blogging Braddon in the Online Classroom”, about her approach to teaching an all-Braddon seminar; and two pieces on teaching popular genres in other fields, taken from Transformations’ recent special issue on teaching the popular. Also included as an optional text is M. E. Braddon’s short story “Herself”, which I recently included on a survey class on short fiction. As you read, you might consider the following topics and questions:

1) What are the benefits to both students and the field of Victorian Studies of including popular fiction in the curriculum?

2) Would Everett’s strategy for teaching early twentieth-century popular fiction apply to teaching Victorian popular fiction? Or, is an alternate strategy necessary for teaching popular genres?

3) How would you / have you approached popular fiction in your own teaching. Or, what experiences have you had as a student with popular texts?

4) Are we still fighting for the legitimacy of popular texts?

5) How are the increasing availability of popular texts through digitization and the inclusion of digital assignments affecting pedagogical approaches to Victorian Studies?

6) How would you teach Braddon’s “Herself”?

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An illustration for M.E. Braddon’s Dead-Sea Fruit. Belgravia 4 (February 1868): frontispiece.-The Victorian Web

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From The Mary Elizabeth Braddon Association 9 March, 2016

BLOGGING BRADDON IN THE ONLINE CLASSROOMJENNIFER PHEGLEY

In the fall of 2015 I taught a course on Mary Elizabeth Braddon and the Origins of Detective Fiction. It was my first single-author course and I was a bit nervous about choosing a writer who would be unfamiliar to my students, but I hoped that the focus on detection would attract those who had never heard of Braddon. The course would juxtapose early detective narratives with Braddon’s novels and explore the ways in which her sensation fiction laid the groundwork for Arthur Conan Doyle’s iconic Sherlock Holmes stories. This was a “blended” course in more ways than one: it included advanced undergraduates as well as graduate students and it met both face-to-face and online. With weekly opportunities for spontaneous in-class discussions and more in-depth virtual interactions via discussion boards, wikis, and blogs, the course aimed to foster a highly engaged classroom experience.1

I began the class with background readings on Braddon’s life, work, and critical reception as well as on sensation novels, stage melodramas, Newgate novels, and detective fiction. We defined these genres with the understanding that the distinctions we were making did not always hold true as the forms were constantly evolving. The idea of generic fluidity allowed us to think about sensation and detection on a continuum. With this in mind, we examined early examples of writing about detectives to determine how they may have influenced Braddon’s characters and plots. The London Metropolitan Police Detective Division was established in1842 and in 1856 it was instituted across England, spurring a nation-wide interest in sleuthing. We started exploring Victorian attitudes toward detectives with some selections from Household Words, including Charles Dickens’s “A Detective Police Party” (July 27, 1850) and “Three ‘Detective’ Anecdotes” (September 14, 1850) and Wilkie Collins’s “The Diary of Anne Rodway” (July19 and July 26, 1856). We also read selections from the fascinating fictional memoir Recollections of a Policeman by Thomas Waters (aka William Howard Russell) (1859) as well as stories from The Female Detective (1864) by Andrew Forrester (aka James Redding Ware) and Revelations of a Lady Detective by William Stephens Hayward (1864).

In large part, these narratives worked to make detectives palatable to the public. As one student argued in a discussion board post, Dickens takes care to humanize the new detective police force and distance these officers from the older Bow Street Runners who were considered corrupt bounty hunters rewarded for capturing criminals. In contrast, Dickens depicts the officers “sitting around a comfortable table, with drinks and cigars, while he listens to their stories from a sofa. This setting evokes a familiar image to the Victorian public, one of middle class men discussing matters after dinner.” Yet, detectives were still seen as a threat. Another student noted that: “Despite better training and their practice of preventive patrol, London’s police force

1 The distinctions among these online forums are important if subtle. Early in the semester I used the discussion board to pose specific questions about the readings that students discussed in groups. After the introductory period, we turned to wikis so that students could pose their own questions and more easily include images and video clips from their research in the Illustrated Police News and from popular media depictions of criminals and detectives. Finally, we shifted to blogs, which were the focus of most of the online portion of the course. Using the blogs allowed students to write brief, but in-depth essays on topics of their choice.

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created an intrusive presence in the Victorians’ personal lives, and they were not comfortable with the invasion.”

While most of these detectives nabbed their criminals, sometimes they were unable or unwilling to do so. In fact, students found it interesting that so many culprits were let off if they were considered to have learned their lesson or in order to protect their family’s reputation. We found that women detectives were more likely to be shown discreetly letting criminals off the hook. While this humanized them as characters, it also reinforced the stereotype that women were ill-suited to the profession. Women were also plagued by disapproving friends and family, barred from some public spaces, and challenged by physical impediments, such as large crinoline skirts, that prevented them from sneaking around. The class determined that female sleuths had some advantages, however. These included easier access to private spaces, the ability to gain trust and to thereby find out crucial information via gossip, and a kind of invisibility that allowed them to eavesdrop in public places. Whether male or female, these new detectives were a source of never-ending interest to readers and they appeared regularly in the news at midcentury, just as sensation fiction was developing and Braddon’s career as a writer was taking off.

Our inquiry into these early depictions of detectives provided the context for exploring the Illustrated Police News (included in Gale’s the 19th Century British Newspaper Database) in order to identify one compelling article about detection to report on in our class wiki. I asked students to considered how gender, class, age, and race were at play in conceptions of criminality and to examine the ways in which their examples were similar to or different from our ideas about crime and detection today. In a follow-up wiki assignment, they wrote about depictions of nineteenth-century detection in twenty-first century media, analyzing television series such as Sherlock, Penny Dreadful, and Ripper Street, as well as popular fiction series, comic books, and films. These short research assignments worked well to generate discussion about the intersections between Victorian culture and our own and set the stage for our exploration of how Braddon’s characters embodied or challenged contemporary attitudes.

By this time students were aware that decades before Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote his first Sherlock Holmes story, Braddon, Dickens, and others were exploring the complexities of crime solving. Braddon’s murderers, forgerers, arsonists, and con artists were often seemingly respectable middle-class men and women who defied Victorian stereotypes of the criminal. Her detectives could be bumbling and intrusive meddlers or remarkably clever interpreters of evidence and behavior. They were sometimes paid professionals, but were just as likely to be amateurs driven by personal motivations. Among Braddon’s professional detectives are Joseph Peters, the mute policemen in The Trail of the Serpent (1860) and John Faunce, the retired inspector featured in Rough Justice (1898). Braddon’s amateur detectives include hapless barrister Robert Audley, who is obsessed with his friend George Talboys’s disappearance in Lady Audley’s Secret (1861), and Eleanor Vane, who seeks to avenge her father’s death in Eleanor’s Victory (1863). In this course, we examined each of these detectives, along with the criminals they pursued, in order to trace Braddon’s contribution to the development of detective fiction.

Given the recent popularity of using academic blogs to publicize and get feedback on one’s research, and the increasing number of collective blogs seeking submissions from

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professors and graduate students alike, I decided in this class to teach blogging as a legitimate, scholarly form of writing and to encourage students to submit their work for publication on a Victorian studies site such as those hosted by the Mary Elizabeth Braddon Association, the Journal of Victorian Culture online, and the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals. To this end, I devoted plenty of class time to analyzing academic blogging as a merging of public and professional discourse. We reviewed advice for writing blogs from professional organizations and individual bloggers, read blog entries from Victorian websites, and discussed the ways in which a personal voice could be used in conjunction with scholarly research. I encouraged students to transform the standard research paper into a more interesting and accessible form of writing by developing an academic argument supported by textual details and research but written in a natural, accessible way.2 Several of these blog entries have been published on this site and indicate the range of subjects students engaged with including the periodical publication context of Braddon’s novels, the changing critical reception of her work over the decades, and the influence of real-life criminal cases as inspiration for her plots.3

The class blog became a key form of communication in the course and one that counted for the majority of students’ grades. The format encouraged students to take risks, to think in creative ways, and to practice constructing coherent arguments about Braddon’s work on a weekly basis. Often the entries succeeded and generated many responses; other times they fell flat. Either way, students learned something about how to construct a better entry and worked hard to engage their peers. Given that Braddon was a new figure to all but one or two of my class of twelve, their ability to quickly grasp the scope of her work and to make convincing claims about it was truly remarkable. The single-author course certainly helped with this as students were steeped in Braddon’s life and works. But they were also able to bring their previous knowledge of the detective genre to the table. Braddon’s writing was, in a sense, already familiar to them, but she also challenged their assumptions. They identified elements that they expected in her detective fiction such as following a series of clues to the inevitable apprehension of the criminal or an ending in which virtue was rewarded and villainy punished. They also encountered things they did not anticipate, including a deaf detective who uses his disability to deceive and triumph, an assertive woman sleuth obsessed with avenging her father’s death, and a pervasive understanding of the forces that could, seemingly, drive anyone to criminality.

Students were impressed with the range of professional and amateur detectives Braddon created as well as with her interest in the lives of struggling working-class characters, particularly in The Trail of the Serpent. They were fascinated by her subtle sympathy for those who deceived or swindled others to gain wealth or status in a system in which the odds were stacked against them: Lucy Graham in Lady Audley’s Secret, Lancelot Darrell in Eleanor’s Victory, or even the murderous philanthropist Oliver Greswold in Rough Justice. As one student concluded in her blog, “I would consider Braddon’s complex characters . . . a testament to her ability to shake up the expectation of criminality. It shows readers that people are not all-good or all-bad, that no physical indicator or criminality exists, and that even those who have some good

2 See my blog assignment for the course in the Appendix.3 See “Queen’s Gambit: M.E. Braddon, Inspector F., and the Sixpenny Magazine” by Mary Monnin; “Rough Reviews: The Evolution of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Critical Reception” by Amy Steffan; “Rough Justice: From Victorian Police Narrative to 1920s Hard Boiled Detective Fiction” by Anna Toms; and “I Love You Mary Elizabeth Braddon” by Michael Wexler. As you’ll see from these blog entries, students were allowed a range of possible ways to engage with Braddon from the purely academic to the highly whimsical.

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in them can be criminals given the right circumstances.” If an understanding of Braddon’s complex world-view is the only thing students took away from the class, I’d call it a success. But exploring Braddon’s detectives through blogging produced many more insights, sophisticated arguments, and original contributions to scholarly conversations than I’ve seen in more traditional paper assignments. Reading the class blog was always entertaining and I usually learned something new in the process.

APPENDIX: BRADDON BLOG ASSIGNMENT

Blogs (50%): Starting week 5, we will meet in person on Tuesdays and virtually through the Blackboard Blog on Thursdays and Fridays. Each of you will write a total of 5 blog posts (due Thursdays at 7 p.m. on your assigned dates) and a minimum of 15 blog responses or 3 per week during weeks when you do not write a blog (due Fridays at 7 p.m.). The blogs are an opportunity to demonstrate your engagement with the readings and to spark interesting exchanges with your peers about the subject matter. You are expected to review all blog entries and responses as a part of your weekly reading assignment. You will write 2 assigned blogs and 3 open topic blogs (10% each). Blog entries should range between 500-750 words, but the quality is more important than the word count.

In the two assigned blog entries, you should:

Write a review of a scholarly article. I will provide a list of articles and you will sign up for one. Explain the key arguments of the article and explore the questions it raises. Your entry should consider how the article influences your understanding of the assigned reading and pose further questions for discussion.

Write an analysis of the Periodical Context of Braddon’s Fiction. You will sign up for one novel and develop your topic in relation to it, examining a single serial part of a novel in its original publication context, exploring reviews of the novel published in newspapers or magazines, or identifying and analyzing articles from Victorian periodicals about Braddon herself. Here are a few specific examples to guide you:

Lady Audley’s Secret was serialized in three different magazines, two of which can be accessed through the British Periodicals Database (The Sixpenny Journal and the London Journal) and one that can be found on Google Books (Robin Goodfellow). Likewise, Eleanor’s Victory was serialized in Once a Week, which is also found in the BP database. Read about these magazines in the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism (in the C19 database) so that you have a sense of their editorial goals, audience, and history. Then, analyze the contents of a single issue of the magazine in which the novel was serialized and see if you can identify any connections to the novel. What interests you about the contents of the magazine? How might those contexts have appealed to the readers of the novel? How might the articles, poems, and short stories surrounding the serial part influenced readers’ interpretations of the novel?

Alternatively, you could conduct a keyword search for Braddon or one of the novels or a theme or issue relevant to our reading within a periodical database such as British Periodicals, 19th Century British Newspapers, the Illustrated London News, or the London Times Explain your chosen article, pose a series of questions about it, or provide an argument about how it provides insights into our course reading.In the three open topic blog entries you could do any of the following:

Analyze specific passages from the day’s reading.Pose questions that arise for you or that you think will interest others.Reflect upon the themes, characters, or plot points of the novel.

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Make connections with other texts we’ve read in the course.Build on comments made by classmates in their blog entries.Explore the historical and cultural contexts of detection, crime, and sensation.Research and write about some aspect of Braddon’s life, authorial identity, readership, or publishing history.Blog Responses (10%)

You are encouraged to respond to your peers’ blog posts every week but you must respond in weeks when you are not writing your own entries. Overall, you should have a minimum of 15 substantial responses, or 3 per week during weeks when you are not writing a blog entry. Your responses should engage whatever issues your peers have raised and try to advance the discussion, incorporating textual evidence to support your views. Your blog participation will be graded at the end of the semester.

Publishable Academic Blog Entry (20%): Our ultimate goal is to write and submit a publishable entry to a relevant scholarly blog. Drawing on your work throughout the semester, write a final blog entry of 1,500 words illuminating some topic related to Braddon and the history of detective fiction. Here are some examples of communally constructed academic blogs to which that you could submit your work:

Mary Elizabeth Braddon Association: http://maryelizabethbraddon.com/category/news/Research Society for Victorian Periodicals: http://rs4vp.org/research-blogs/Journal of Victorian Culture Online: http://blogs.tandf.co.uk/jvc/Each blog entry should present a thoughtful and compelling argument or set of arguments set forth in an engaging manner. It should build on ongoing scholarly research and incorporate relevant images to engage your readers. You should strive to provide:

Some background or historical context for your chosen subject.A brief acknowledgement of scholarly conversations surrounding the topic.Close readings of relevant texts.A clear purpose that illuminates something new or interesting about the subject.You are encouraged to revise and expand upon a previous blog entry, but you will be expected to conduct additional research that will substantially improve your understanding of the subject and allow you to make a strong argument. Remember that this is intended to be read by an academic audience and should demonstrate an original idea that will spark conversations.

The Blog will be built in stages as follows:

Proposal with Annotated Bibliography. Open with a 1-2 paragraph description of your proposed topic supported by a 3-4 item annotated bibliography. The bibliography will feature MLA-style bibliographic citations of your sources as well as a brief (100-250 word) analysis of how you might use each source. You may include both primary (nineteenth century) documents not assigned in class as well as contemporary scholarly articles or books. Due Tuesday 12/8 at 7 p.m.List of Images. Compile a list of 3-4 images that you could use to enhance your blog. I recommend using Wikimedia Commons or one of the many new open source library image databases to find copyright free images. Explain the relevance of each illustration to your blog in a few sentences. Due Thursday 12/10 at 7 p.m.Draft and Peer Response. You will post a first draft of your blog for the class by Monday 12/14 at 7 p.m. In class on Tuesday 5/15 from 5:45-7:45 (our final exam time) we will conduct a peer response workshop.Publication-Ready Blog Due Friday 12/18 at 7 p.m.

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Excerpts from Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy special issue on Teaching Popular Culture Vol. 24. No 1-2 (Spring 2013/Summer 2013 & Fall 2013/ Winter 2014).

TEACHING THE PULPSJUSTIN EVERETT

In their heyday, by some estimates, there may have been as many as 30 million readers of pulp magazines (Earle 77). With titles like Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, Doc Savage, and Spicy Detective, the pulps were viewed not only as intellectually degenerate, but also culturally dangerous. Only recently has the intellectual community begun to recognize the impact of the pulps on twentieth-century popular culture…. The longstanding rejection of the pulps as legitimate objects of study creates significant challenges when they are brought into the literature classroom. Literary Studies' primary means of textual analysis, commonly called "close reading," favors in-depth analysis of shorter passages and presumes that the text is unique, complex, and nuanced, and by design excludes the popular text from analysis. Instead, pulps are characterized by different kinds of complexity. Characters may be very similar and stories are generally not meant to question the status quo (there are exceptions), but to reinforce the reader's place in the social hierarchy. The plots can be maddeningly complex but ultimately serve to reinforce the values of working men and women. In the classroom the challenge rests in helping students learn to lay aside the methods and assumptions inherent in close reading and adopt an approach founded in the pulps and their readers. The problem is that these methods have been poorly preserved, unlike close reading, which has been transmitted through elite culture. Literary criticism, whether in the "little" magazines themselves or the college classroom, provided the primary means of transmission. What few hints about the reading habits of pulp readers exist must be gleaned primarily from the letter columns of the magazines themselves, since these magazines were rarely written about in "respectable" publications except to malign them as "trash." However, a reasonable facsimile of their reading practices can be reconstructed through a method of rhetorical reading and help students understand who pulp readers were in historical context….

I would like to offer four rhetorical principles for framing discussions of the pulps as replacements for the language of close reading. These are Aristotle's three rhetorical proofs -- ethos, logos, and pathos. The final, and perhaps most elusive, principle is kairos. Because pulp fiction cannot be easily read, understood, and appreciated through close reading, this rhetorical model for reading the pulps affords students a better understanding of their importance and place in interwar and postwar America. This approach focuses on describing cultural contexts as a frame and interpreting four basic rhetorical positions within that framework: ethos for understanding the position of the writer, editor, magazine, and pulp industry; logos for the message of the text; pathos for the working-class reader; and kairos for the appropriateness of this text in this time for this particular audience.

In classical rhetoric ethos referred to the character and reputation of the speaker. Where the pulps are concerned ethos is particularly problematic because of the relative unimportance, and even interchangeability, of most pulp writers. While some writers produced texts under their own names, others wrote under either single or multiple pseudonyms. Men wrote as women and

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women wrote as men. Sometimes multiple writers wrote under the same pen name. In some instances the identity of authors remains unknown to this day. While certain authors attracted followings based upon their unique approaches to their material, many more were essentially interchangeable due to the standard formula followed in many of the stories. A useful exercise for students at this point is to have them read similar stories—one by a reputable author and one by a less known author Students can research the authors and discuss the ethos a particular name brings to their reading.… A second and generally more stable source of ethos was the editor. Farnsworth Wright and John W Campbell are each given due credit for the transformation of their respective magazines, Weird Tales and Astounding Stories. The editors were the most direct points of contact with their magazines and interacted directly with the readers in the letter columns…. The greater source of the magazine's ethos, however, was the magazine itself. The stories, letter columns, cover art, internal illustrations, and ads all work together to create the character of the magazine. Together these elements help students to understand the overall message the magazine is communicating to its readers….

Kairos is an elusive term sometimes defined as "appropriateness"…. In my own classes I sometimes describe kairos as "the right words in the right place at the right time." This term is particularly appropriate for framing discussions of pulps because of its focus on text, place, and time…. The text—whether the individual story, ad, cover, magazine or genre—must be understood, interpreted, and written about not in reference to high canonical literature, but in reference to its own context and unique place in twentieth-century popular culture. The pulp text also refers to its place in culture, which consists of both its (disrespected) place in the hierarchy of literary production and its physical place in newsstands, drug stores, and railway stations. Finally, focusing on a text's historical moment—or continuum of moments—allows the student to view it in relation to its own literary history and surrounding cultural context and to consider its value as a gateway to literacy and as a source of inspiration for millions of readers. Students can learn to appreciate its value with a hint of nostalgia as a cultural artifact and reminder of our past. Through a contextualized study of pulps as historical artifacts instead of as isolated excerpts in literary anthologies, students can learn to appreciate the influence that the pulps have continued to have on popular culture, including the path they paved for comics, paperbacks, movies, television shows, and more.

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NOVEL HACKS: NEW APPROACHES TO TEACHING THE NOVEL GENREJEFF ALLRED

I majored in American Studies at the high point of the “canon wars” of the early 1990s, and so I came into the field amid heavy crossfire regarding the validity of popular culture as a subject for academic study. I note with pleasure that discussions of the fundamental worth of popular culture have faded in the sense that “pop” content of all kinds now occupies a central position in our pedagogical and critical work. What remains more problematic, especially for our pedagogy, is the status of popular modes of cultural consumption and reading. To conceive of cultural artifacts in a neo-Arnoldian vein as a repository of “sweetness and light” to be defended against hostile “Philistines” and “populace” seems absurd to the vast majority of humanists today; however, there are vibrant, urgent debates around reading practices that pit residual humanistic traditions of deep focus, intensive reading, critical distance, and a hermeneutics of difficulty against emergent practices that draw their energies from surfaces, fast-moving modes of attention, and immersiveness (Arnold 51, 99–104). Here, the conservative arguments (and I use the term in a non-pejorative sense) merit serious scrutiny, as we ask whether “Google” really “makes us stupid,” whether the ubiquity of social network interfaces, smartphones, and immersive forms of multimedia con-tent makes us “alone together,” and, most crucially to our pedagogical work, whether students' capacities for intensive focus and critical orientation will survive amid competing claims for their (our?) attention lurking at the margins of the window, a mere click away.

As my metaphor suggests, a central way to conceive of these broad changes is the shift of reading from print-based to screen-based media. This is not a transfer of a neutral “content” from one container to another, facilitating faster, easier, and more ubiquitous access to texts that retain their essential character. Rather, screen-based media constitute a matrix from which new forms spring—blogs, tweets, and feeds, for example—and older ones are “remediated,” a process in which old content is transformed in and through a new medium (Bolter and Grusin 5). As I began thinking through the implications of this shift for my teaching, research, and reading, I developed a new undergraduate course designed to engage the tenuous relation-ship between tradition and innovation in the shift from print to screen, one in which students would learn to make their own reading, and the technologies that enable it, an object of contemplation and criticism. The course is called “Novel Hacks,” and it braids together three strands that allow us to think about our own emergent reading practices in richer and more subtle terms than those of conservative censure or ahistorical celebration: a) a brief sketch of the history of the printed book and the novel genre that became, by the mid-nineteenth century, the dominant literary genre associated with it; b) a few prominent theories of the relationship between texts and their material supports, especially networked screens; and c) collaborative projects in which students must “hack” a novel using web-based tools to “make it new” in some meaningful way. I will address some of the problems that emerged from such a broad framing of the course. My primary focus will be on the group projects, which were the most productive and successful course components. In retrospect, what stands out to me most sharply is the way that combining classic texts and emerging digital technologies of writing/recording/disseminating texts clarified for students the historical relationships of each to the others. Through the projects, they became aware of the disruptive newness that attended the emergence of now-classic forms and of the roots of today's modes of screen-based reading in past practices.

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The novel is a particularly interesting site to have students examine this broad shift for several reasons that exist in productive tension with one another. First, the novel has enjoyed a long reign as our most prestigious literary form, and having students play with novels, using digital media to renovate classic texts in various ways, helps to dispel some of the problems that emerge when students kowtow to “high” cultural forms: the stilted language that results from writing up to a mystified cultural artifact, the reliance on cribs like Sparknotes, and the anxiety of being a less-than-ideal reader of a text that seems from a student's perspective to issue from a lofty space. Second, even a quick 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 that the genre grew into its current respectability only very slowly, and only by shedding its roots as a new entertainment medium in the early eighteenth century (Warner xi). As the novel continues its slow process of ceding ground to the emergent media platforms of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—primarily the cinema, television, and video games—students are often shocked and intrigued to learn of its checkered past as a corrupter of youth, scrambler of minds, and deranger of proper sexuality . Finally , reading novels on screens, and hacking them for screen-based reading, sharpens and heightens the oppositions and values often assigned to printed books and screens as material supports for reading: on the one hand, the fixity , durability , and self-contained aspect of the book; on the other hand, the fluidity , ephemerality , and linked intertexuality of words on the screen. I wanted to join my students in thinking 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 most distracting and extensive spaces of reading, to engage a genre associated with long, solitary stretches of time via technologies that insist aggressively on short, interruptive bursts of socializing within and without the main text.

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