American Texts / Digital Contexts

Kenneth M. Price Andrews 333-C; 2-0293

Engl 4/898-001 Off hrs: MWF mornings

Fall 2001 kprice@unlnotes.unl.edu

COURSE GOALS:

At the broadest level, this class will address a fundamental cultural shift in the media of communications‑‑the shift away from the printed page toward the electronic screen‑‑and will explore the implications of that transformation for the character and organization of learning, the representation and reproduction of knowledge, and the participation by students in building their own structures of meaning. These changes, reshaping all the humanities, have a special impact on the study of literature. Electronic technology calls into question the very form and status of the text as the object and medium of expression.

Our focus will be on nineteenth-century American texts, largely because these texts tend to be out of copyright and because some of the more ambitious digital projects have centered on nineteenth-century writers. We will consider how the digital revolution is changing teaching and research in this particular field. We will consider both printed texts and electronic resources because we are in a time of transition and redundancy, a circumstance that is itself worthy of study. We will consider texts in manuscript, print, and digital forms so that we think of no single vehicle as innocent, natural, or transparent.

Texts

Walt Whitman, Poetry and Prose (The Library of America)

Charles Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales (Mentor-Penguin)

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom=s Cabin (Norton Critical Edition)

Mark Twain, Pudd=nhead Wilson (NAL)

REQUIREMENTS

Markup project 20%

Research paper due last day of class 50%

Final exam 20%

Class participation 10%

GRADING

Your markup project will be judged on the accuracy of your transcription and on the depth and validity of your markup. You will also be graded on a short narrative that you will write to accompany the project. In the narrative you should say what you=ve learned and discuss the potential of this approach for other projects. I am not looking for enthusiastic but uncritical celebrations of the potential of electronic technology. I look instead for probing, thoughtful, inquiries that explore how texts are affected by the medium in which they are carried, and how markup alters how we think about texts and the questions we can ask.

The research paper should be ten to fifteen pages in length. It should be a sustained inquiry into how media affect meaning, as applied to one of these authors. Since we are giving special emphasis to electronic texts in this course, I want you to write a paper that couldn=t have been written without electronic texts. Preface your paper with a short statement—meta-commentary, if you=d like--about the paper and the process itself. In this prefatory statement, which does not need to be integrated with the paper as a whole, I want you to carefully assess the electronic tool you have used, or, if you use more than one media, carefully assess whatever combination of manuscript, print, and electronic texts you use.

8/28 Introduction

8/30 Walter Benjamin, AThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,@ Jerome McGann, “The Rationale of Hypertext”

9/4 John Unsworth, “Electronic Scholarship@; Jerome McGann, “Rethinking Textuality@

9/6 Espen J. Aarseth, “Ergodic Literature@ (ch. 1 of Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature); Alan Morrison, et al., Markup: The Key to Reusability (ch. 4 of Creating and Documenting Electronic Texts)

9/11 Price, "Dollars and Sense in Collaborative Digital Scholarship" Whitman, "Ashes of Roses"; “Noiseless Patient Spider, all versions

9/13 Whitman, “This Compost” and “I Sing the Body Electric” ms (Duke) vs. print

9/18 Whitman, "Sleepers" (print and ms forms)

9/20 Introduction to structured markup (you are required to read only the linked page) (with Brett Barney)

9/25 Discussion of Whitman encoding guidelines (with Brett Barney)

9/27 Hands-on training in markup (with Brett Barney)

10/2 Stowe, Uncle Tom=s Cabin

10/4 John D=Arms class presentation

10/9 Stowe; plus critical article to be named later

10/11 Twain, Huck Finn; mark up project due and a brief narrative account of the experience (1-2 pages)

10/16 Huck Finn

10/18 critique Huck Finn online resources

10/23 Fall Break

10/25 Twain, Pudd=nhead Wilson

10/30 Twain, Pudd=nhead Wilson

11/1 Andy Jewell on Twain research and online tools

11/6 Twain, “The Sandwich Islands”; “The Sandwich Islands: Concluding Views”

11/8 Dickinson, “Emily Dickinson Writing a Poem” [user name: dickinson; password; ink_on_disc]; Smith, “Because the Plunge from the Front Overrturned Us"

11/13 Ed Folsom and Ken Price, Dickinson, Slavery, and the San Domingo Moment

11/15 Group analysis of the Dickinson Electronic Archives overall: structure, purpose, etc.

11/20 Transcription: Dickinson, AA spider sewed at night@; AWild Nights@

11/22 Thanksgiving

11/27 Chesnutt, AGoophered Grapevine@; APo= Sandy@

11/29 Chesnutt, ADave=s Neckliss”; “The Marked Tree”

12/4 Chesnutt, Reviews of the Conjure Woman; essays: “The Free Colored People of North Carolina”; “Obliterating the Color Line”; “The White and the Black”

12/6 “Resolutions Concerning Recent Southern Outrages”; Assessment of Chesnutt site

12/11 Unsworth, “Second-Generation Digital Resources in the Humanities@

12/13 Review

12/14 Seminar papers due in my box by 5:00 p.m.