viz.

Video Credit: Youtube.com

I recently encountered Annenberg Media’s program series, entitled “Invitation to World Literature,” and was pleased to find a television show dealing with literary texts. This presentation of the Odyssey (one episode within a series ranging from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the 1,001 Nights) is surprisingly rare on television—a medium relatively resistant to literature (if we discount the tested format for 19^th c. novels and the "mini-series"). While much of the literature studied in colleges never ends up on television, Salman Rushdie has recently explained to the UK Telegraph that the writing in contemporary television far exceeds that in film (where literary themes are currently in vogue). As an instructor and consumer of English literature, I wondered— how might television possibly adapt or introduce a literary 'canon'?

Contest winning re-designed book cover by Philipp Dornbierer for The Fox Is Black

Elizabeth's post this week (about the Great Gatsby game) reminded me of a design contest I stumbled upon recently.  TheFoxIsBlack.com, a blog about web and graphic design, has begun a series of monthly competitions inviting participants to redesign the covers of classic literature.  Last month was The Great Gatsby (winner pictured above), and this month it's The Lord of the Flies. (The deadline is February 25th, so there's still time for you designers out there to get a shot at the $100 Amazon gift card).

Image Credit:  Screenshot from The Grub Street Project

While I wrote in my last blog here that I would use this week’s blog to discuss my upcoming conference paper for MMLA, I was led astray this weekend by an excellent panel I attended at CSECS that I thought the viz. audience might enjoy.  (Sorry, Gossip Girl fans.  Tune in next week!)

After deciding to attend the panel entitled “Mapping Culture:  Topographies of London,” I was delighted to discover it featured not only a paper on Boswell’s enchanting London Journal, but also an excellent discussion about using mapping strategies to teach and research eighteenth-century texts.  What united the various papers on the panel, which discussed such disparate texts as John Gay’s “Trivia,” the Mohock Club, Boswell’s aforementioned Journal, and Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, was that each paper was based on material provided by The Grub Street Project, a website that unites topographical data with literary texts like Pope’s Dunciad.

Image Credit: Screen Shot from the National Library of Ireland

While conducting research on W.B. Yeats I encountered this fascinating online exhibition from the National Library of Ireland that raised interesting questions for me about the relationship between visual rhetoric and literary archives.  Like many other graduate students teaching rhetoric while writing a dissertation on literature, I often wonder about the interconnections between the two fields and what ideas crossover and what do not.  Yeats, in many ways, seems like the perfect place to start to blur lines between the rhetorical, the literary, the visual and the auditory.  Navigating this website, I was struck by the extent to which the virtual museum brings together these fields and makes visible Yeats’s complicatedly interdisciplinary and multi-sensory career.

Those of you interested in comics and/or graphic novels and Irish literature should find the The Irish Comics Wiki to be a useful resource. From the wiki:

There are lots of Irish comics creators out there, from people starting out to wizened veterans. I’m hoping that people can share information, for the betterment of Irish comics. Also, I‘m sure there are people with some knowledge about the history of Irish comics and underground press. It would be great to bring that to light.

I’m not very familiar with the Irish comics scene, but the site links to some great-looking comics. The panel to the right comes from The Ulster Cycle, a web comic based on Irish mythology by Patrick Brown (who also appears to be the creator of the wiki).

via Caricatures Ireland

I just saw a talk given by Katherine Hayles here at UT. Hayles is arguing that literary criticism is missing something when it ignores the material aspects of a text. She calls for a new form of literary criticism that she terms media-specific analysis. This form of criticism views the material aspects of a text as contributing as much to the meaning of a text as the text itself. She showed two examples of electronic texts that make visual arguments at the same time that they make textual arguments.