Overview

Schedule

Assignments

Projects

Readings Due: Storyteller. Prefatory pages and 1-42. Silko, “Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective.” Langen, “Storyteller as Hopi Basket.”

Study Questions:

• What does Silko indicate about relationships between telling and community, writing and community: how do these differ? is there a tension? How does Silko communicate the differences, tensions, similarities? Find specific passages, expressions, and specific means.
• How does Silko use the form of print on the page? Look at all the types and try to figure out how each layout reinforces the content of the piece.
• See how many ideas concerning language and its relationship to people and to change you can find and connect these with specific passages in the book.

Readings Due: Storyteller 43-98, 110-70. Allen, “Kochinnenako in Academe.”

Study Questions:

• Try to describe each type of telling of the Yellow Woman story.
  • Describe the page layout
  • How does the style of telling relate to the layout
  • Does the version tell something distinct from others
  • What audience would suit this telling best?
• “Lullaby” is in prose as is “Storyteller” and some other pieces. Does the form have the same meaning with different content?
• What is Paula Gunn Allen’s purpose in her essay? See how many purposes you can figure out, explicit, implied, and, perhaps, unconscious.

Computer Lab Session

Readings Due: Storyteller 197-265. Toelken, “Life and Death in the Coyote Tales.”

Study Questions:

In addition to finishing our discussion of Yellow Woman tales, we will take up Witchery and Coyote tales. Consider:

• How is witchcraft represented in Silko’s different tales?
  • How does “Tony’s Story” (123) relate to “Long time ago” (130)?
  • What contribution does Silko's use of the page make to how we understand these two witchery stories and others?
  • What relationships do these tales imply regarding relationships between Anglo culture and witchcraft?
• What is a “coyote”?
• Be able to summarize Toelken’s main points. Make notes especially what the essay says about relationships between ways of telling tales and communities.

Readings Due: Explore apparatus of your bible and read introductory material. Read Genesis 1-24; Exodus 1-4.23, 13.17-15.25, 19-21, 24-25.9, 31.18-35.19; Deuteronomy 29-31. Holdrege, selections from Veda and Torah.

• Voice to Text productions: groups will have an opportunity to explain their goals and the class will discuss what the exercise demonstrated.
• the Hillel presentation. Bring in some notes re. what you learned.

Readings Due: Review the readings assigned for last Tuesday and be ready to discuss these questions:

• In Holdrege’s discussions of Oral and Written Torah, do you see issues that resemble those important to Silko, Paula Gunn Allen, and others that we read on American Indian traditions? What similarities and differences do you see? Specify the evidence for these similarities and differences, noting relevant quotations and pages; be able to explain.
• How is the voice or vocality important to Torah and to American Indian traditions? What differences do you see in how voice relates to text? List as many aspects as you can that make Torah distinctive as a form of writing. Distinguish between those that are material and those that are interpretive or aspects of use.
• As you read the assigned passages in Genesis, Exodus, and Deuteronomy, note any parts that seem repetitive of previous parts. What might cause such repetitions? What ways might interpreters of the text account for them?
• Note any scenes of oral performance, of writing, and of transmission of oral performance into writing. Make notes of how such scenes are given significance.
• Consider ways that any of these scenes became emblematic of kinds of writing or meanings of writing later in Western culture.

Readings Due: “Scroll of the Law” and “Ezra”. In your bible, Jeremiah 1-2, 18-20.6, 26-31, 36-40.5, 52; Ezra 1-6; Nehemiah 1-2, 7-10.

Study questions:

• Make a list of the figures (or characters and authors) who perform orally and/or write both in Silko’s Storyteller and in the assigned Biblical selections. For each, write down the qualities or features of those utterances or writings that are aspects of their oral or written medium.
  
• Consider any advantages (or disadvantages) of orality or writing as they are presented in these texts: for example, do they have more authority because of their medium or more durability or more adaptability?

Readings Due: "Psalms" in the Encyclopedia Britannica, Online. Find it on the Library site by going to the Library homepage, then to "Research," then "Encyclopedias," then "Encyclopedia Britannica." If you are working from home, you will need to set up a proxy, if you haven't already, to use the Library's subscription databases (see http://www.library.ucsb.edu/proxy/faq.html).
De Hamel, Scribes and Illuminators.
Psalms, focusing on 6 ("Oh Lord, do not rebuke me in your anger"), 37/38 ("Oh Lord, do not rebuke me in your anger"), 50/51 ("Have mercy on me, O God") (penitential psalms that appear in Books of Hours), as well as 1, 52 ("Why do you boast, oh might one"), 68 ("Let God rise up, let his enemies be scattered"), 80 ("Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel"), 95 ("Oh come, let us sing to the Lord"), and 150 ("Praise the Lord!"). (Note that after Psalm 9, numbering may differ by 1 between bibles; see the annotation at Psalm 9 in our Oxford text.)

Explore the St. Albans Psalter here. Pay special attention to the discussion of the "Initials" under "Essays" in the "Table of Contents," as well as surfing through the images as you like.

Study Questions:

• What difference might it make in the maker’s and in the reader’s experiences of the psalms that they were made in the way described by Christopher de Hamel?
• What would be the differences between the reading the psalms as we do in a printed Bible, reading them in a medieval illuminated codex, and encountering them as part of a liturgy?
• Consider the relations between the representations in the “historiated” initials and the text that the initial begins, as described in the essay on “Initials” in the St Albans Psalter. How might these complex relationships affect a reader’s experience and interpretation?
• Who is the “author” of the psalms in the St Albans Psalter? How so?

Readings Due: Psalms continued (see list for April 25).

Find White's essay on the Bridwell Book of Hours at this site from Southern Methodist University.

Camille, selections from Image on the Edge. Leclercq, selections from The Love of Learning.

Study Questions:

• Books of Hours differ somewhat from earlier psalters such as the one from St Albans. What differences do you notice?
• Thinking about you have read in the White essay and the Camille chapters, what part does patronage play in how a book is made and what it signifies? How might you differentiate between a patron and other sorts of readers? How might the role of the patron affect the roles of the author and the illustrator?
• How does the method of reading described by Leclerq affect the meaning of a text?
• What differences does tradition make in how a book is composed? Compare this situation to that we saw represented in Silko’s work and also to how tradition is handled via the concepts of Written Torah and Oral Torah.

Readings Due: Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, Forward and Introduction, Part One, through ch. 38, and organization of book. McGrady, “What is a Patron? Benefactors and Authorship in Harley 4431. . . . ” Parkes, "The Influence of the concepts of Compilatio and Ordinatio . . . ."

Study Questions:

• How does Christine de Pisan alter the concept of “the author”? Consider both the information and ideas you find in Deborah McGrady’s essay in the class Reader as well as the complex way that Christine positions herself and her project in the beginning of The Book of the City of Ladies.
• What is the significance of the library, both considered as the collection of books one owns or has access to in a specific location and considered more loosely as an array of books available to one’s social or cultural group? What does Christine indicate in her initial chapters? Compare her explicit and implicit ideas to other “collections” we have encountered to date in the course.
• How does a text control the experience of readers, their methods of reading, their attitudes, and their knowledge? In addition to considering Christine’s book, take into account Parkes’s discussion of compilatio and ordinatio.

Readings Due: Christine, City of Ladies, Part Two, ch. 36, 47-50 (Compare Griselda’s story to Chaucer’s “Clerk’s Tale” if you’ve read the Canterbury Tales), 53-55, (68), 69, 3.1-2,9-10, 19. Boccaccio, Famous Women, Chs. I, “Eve, Our First Mother”; II, “Semiramis, Queen of the Assyrians”; XXXVIII, “Circe, Daughter of the Sun”; Ch. XLII, “Dido or Elisa, Queen of Carthage.”

Study Questions:

• On pp. 127-28, Parkes quotes Bonaventure on the various roles of the scribe, compiler, commentator, and author. Here’s my translation of the Latin:

  The way of making books is fourfold. Someone writes the words of others, neither adding nor changing anything; and this one merely is called a scribe (scriptor). Someone writes adding other statements, but not by him, and this one is called a compiler (compilator). Another writes both the words of others and his, but, however, the others are the principal ones and his added as clarification; and this one is called a commentator (commentator), not an author (auctor). Another writes his words and those of others, but his are principal, others added for confirmation and he merits being called an author (auctor).

  How did the physical process of making books contribute to these distinctions? Would any of them apply today and in what situations and how would we name the roles?
• Christine knew De claris mulieribus, On Famous Women, written by Giovanni Boccaccio in the last period of his writing, 1355-75, and she recast some of his stories in her Book of the City of Ladies. First, consider Boccaccio’s stories in relation to any earlier versions that you know, including the story of the creation of Eve and the fall from Paradise in Genesis. What specific aspects of the stories does he choose to develop and what moral values underlie and are reinforced by his stories? What ideas about gender and sex? Second, compare his versions to Christine’s, considering the same questions.
• What is the relation, then, in each or both of these cases between the writer and tradition? In each case, the writers are essentially compiling stories, gathering them together: in the senses that Bonaventura defined the terms, would you consider Boccaccio and Christine compilers, commentators, or authors? See the discussion on mouvance at the Wessex Parallel Web Texts site for another perspective and useful term.
• In what instances or through what devices do Boccaccio and/or Christine convey his/her own perspective or voice? From what does each (or both) derive his or her authority to speak?

Readings Due: Richard Steele and Joseph Addison. Selections of The Tatler and The Spectator.

Jon P. Klancher, “Cultural Conflict, Ideology, and the Reading Habit in the 1790s.” Benjamin Franklin, "Epitaph," Autobiography (actually, you'll find this on the first to second pages of the Michael Warner article in your Reader, assigned for Thursday).

Study Questions:

• In The Spectator, how does the text create its (fictional) “author”? Consider especially issue #1. What purposes does this “author” serve in making the journal desirable by the public?
• How does The Spectator define its readers?
• What role do readers as consumers, or the buying public, play in the world of print as it developed in the 18th century? See both Jon Klancher’s essay and the selections from The Tatler and The Spectator. How does class enter into this new commercialism?

Readings Due: Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, Part I (pp. 1-53)

David D. Hall, “Introduction: Part 1. Some Contexts and Questions, Part 2. The Europeans’ Encounter with the Native Americans.” The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World.

Study Questions:

• What was involved in BF (or others) learning to be a printer? Consider the personnel as well as the equipment involved as well as any other skills or resources.
• What were some ways that printing influences his reading and self-education (autodidacticism)?
• What encouragements and what obstacles to printers and to authors were offered by the political, social, and geographic situations of the Colonies? What were the impacts on American Indians of the printing press (see Hall's chapter)?
• List all the different ways in which Franklin appears to be an “author,” noting pages that are relevant. Consider the differences (and similarities) between “authorial” generation of a text and “traditional.”

Readings Due: Franklin's Autobiography, pp. 54-62, 73-94, bottom of 124 to end.

Michael Warner, “Franklin: The Representational Politics of the Man of Letters.”

Also, Warde, "The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should Be Invisible"; Reese, "Poetics and Technology: Towards a Typography of the 1980's."

Study Questions:

• What does Michael Warner seem to mean by “the involution of republicanism and print” (p. 73)? In what ways does this idea make sense to you or not? What evidence would you bring to bear?
• How did Franklin make use of printing to promote his political ideas? What connections do you see between business opportunities and abilities and the development of printing as a resource for spreading ideas?
• Warner refers to a “print ideology of the public sphere . . . [which] valorized the general above the personal” (p. 76): what connections do you perceive between print and the “public” or “the general”? How would print differ from oral or manuscript technologies in this respect?
• Warner discusses “social authority” on p. 82, connecting it with print. How does authority differ in oral and print cultures? What about manuscript? Consider Warner’s discussion and also Franklin’s own discussion of the preachers, Hemphill and Whitefield, and Franklin’s use of print to promote certain political projects.
• Consider the aesthetics of print as discussed by Warde and differently by Reese. Can you relate these issues of aesethetics to the political and social dimensions of print? You might compare and contrast this situation to that of the manuscript.

Readings Due: Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel.”

Readings Due: Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, Introductory Chapter.

Caitlin Fisher, Those Waves of Girls. You can find a review of Those Waves in Shift Magazine.

Terence Harpold, “The Contingencies of the Hypertext Link.”

Study Questions:

• Identify three themes that are prominent in Those Waves of Girls. How does Fisher bring out these themes? How does she relate them to each other? What does she do to shape the readers’ attitudes towards these themes? How is her ability to control the readers’ attitudes limited by the hypertext form of her presentation?
• Aarseth discusses the “textual machinery” of cybertexts: what are the differences in the textual machinery of cybertext, print texts, manuscript codices, manuscript scrolls, and oral composition and performance? Can game (versus narrative) play the same part in any of these machineries? Or, how much is the “textual machinery” determined by the material dimensions of the text or performance?
• Terence Harpold asks us to consider the hypertext link not “as purely a directional or associative structure” but also as “the divisions between the threads in a hypertext,” which suggest the role of “chance” and the element of “indeterminacy,” hidden by “the fetish model of the link,” which emphasizes how we use the link and bring out the “pleasures” that come from using the link in a purposive manner (134). Compare your experience of specific links in Those Waves of Girls to your experience of links in a non-fictional hypertext and also to links that take you to many destinations on the Web. Do you experience the links in the same ways, as vehicle for connection or as gap? Does chance seem to play a larger role in some than others? How does context come into play in these different instances?
• Readers often make meaning by recognizing two things that are juxtaposed as being metonymically related, being somehow equivalent in their meaning, so that the reader can understand one by means of the other or one can somehow substitute for the other, either or both indicating in a metaphorical manner a more abstract meaning. We have thought about this way of making meaning for oral composition and performance and for manuscripts with illustrations and historiated initials. How does metonymy have similar functions in the reader’s experience of hypertext? How does hypertext introduce different functions or different experiences of metonymy? Use Those Waves of Girls as your main example for thinking about this issue.
• What is/are the functions of the author for hypertext? Consider this question in relation to the issues of “navigation” that Harpold raises and also in relation to Aarseth’s discussion of the “work” that the reader of “cybertext” does and “the investment of personal improvisation” required to “get to know” a cybertext. Once again, use Those Waves of Girls as your test case.

Jeremy Douglass visits to discuss IF.

Readings Due:

Overview

What is Interactive Fiction? Dennis Jerz.

Interactive Fiction: Instructions. Dennis Jerz.

Texts

Instructions

If you choose to read online, please be patient while the Java applet or web form loads. It may take up to a couple minutes. When using the Java applet, text may return slowly. When using web forms, occassionally more text will need to scroll onto the screen - if you don't see a >_ prompt, keep pressing "Do It" button until you get another prompt, then type your next command in the bar.

If, rather than reading online, you choose to download the texts, you will have a faster and more full-featured reading experience. In order to read on your machine, however, you will need to install software called an "interpreter." Interpreters vary based on computer and on type of text, however two recommended interpreters for these readings are Zinc (if you have Java, any OS) or one chosen for your operating system.

Aisle. Sam Barlow. 1999.

Recommended reading time: 20 minutes.
While most IF involves anywhere from several dozen to several thousand typed "moves" before the narrative ends, this "slice-of-life" narrative is highly unusual in that interaction only lasts a single "move" before the story begins again.
Read online
...or download
...walkthroughs

Galatea. Emily Short, 2000.

Recommended reading time: 40 minutes.
While most IF involve complex sets of object and locations and simple characters, this work involves a single encounter with a very complex encounter. Of particular interest is the way the characters keep track of conversational topics and mental states, cause the same typed move to have different results in different emotional circumstances.
Read online
...or read online
...or download
...author's page
...walkthroughs

The Space Under the Window. Andrew Plotkin. 1997.

Recommended reading time: 20 minutes.
While almost all IF involve a more-or-less standard set of imperative commands such as THROW LAMP or EXAMINE DOOR, this work uses a completely different approach - the command line can be used to echo back words from the passage, reconfiguring the text in unexpected ways.
Read online
...or download