viz. - TILTS

The Hidden Perils of Q&As. (Junot Diaz TILTS.jpg)

Jenn Shapland — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 19:02:00 +0000

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The Hidden Perils of Q&As. (Franzen and Morrison Time Covers.jpg)

Jenn Shapland — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 18:56:00 +0000

This image was uploaded with the post The Hidden Perils of Q&As..

The Hidden Perils of Q&As. (Junot Diaz.jpg)

Jenn Shapland — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 18:56:00 +0000

This image was uploaded with the post The Hidden Perils of Q&As..

The Hidden Perils of Q&As.

Jenn Shapland — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 18:45:00 +0000

Image from TILTS.

If you attend enough talks and readings, you start to get pretty familiar with the basic elements of the Q&A session: the rambling question; the non question; the irrelevant question; the already-answered question; the indecipherable question; the adoring fan question; the tiny soapbox disguised as a question. If you’re cynical like me, you’ve realized by now that most questions are asking something very different from what they claim to ask. Q&As with contemporary writers always contain at least one version of the following: What’s your writing process like?/How often do you write?/Where do you write?/What do you wear whilst writing?/What snacks do you eat?/How productive are you?/Do you wear socks? You get the picture.

This type of question amounts to one thing, in my mind: a budding writer is desperate for the secret key to writing success. “Tell me, how do you do it?” It tends to come off, in my experience, as either a) amateurish, b) flirtatious, c) stalkeresque, or d) some hideous combination of the three. Why is it so much more pressing to find out how a writer writes than it is to hear about what or why she writes?

I think, in part, this stems from a desire to visualize the writer as he or she creates content that speaks to us. Perhaps it’s as innocent as seeking a material connection with a person to whom you feel connected on the page. Fielding an unwieldy question about universality during his TILTS Q&A on race Tuesday morning, Junot Díaz hit upon the following: when a person talks about a writer’s universality or universal reach, what he really means is not that a writer is able to speak for all of human experience, but rather that he speaks to the particular experiences of "at least two people," the writer and the reader.

Which means that the person in the back with her hand raised is really just shopping for images. She wants to get a better image in her mind of how the writer looks when he’s crafting language that speaks to her; she wants to know how she might (at best) offer the same kind of connection to others, (at worst) look like she’s doing so. Do you use a pen or a computer? Does it make a difference what time of day you write? Where'd you get those shoes? How many drafts? What price bananas?

Díaz, who described writers and scholars who work explicitly on race and white supremacy in the contemporary moment as “salmon in a fuckin’ desert” (i.e. they can’t even find the stream to swim up), referred to novelist Jonathan Franzen’s prominence as an example of the continuing marginalization of race in contemporary culture. The writerly image maintains its hold over the imagination, but the conversation has yet again stalled in an unending debate around the “Great American Novel,” a category that implies some kind of universal (read: white, male, heteronormative) American experience while denying the plural particulars of any actual experience. References to the GAN perpetuate the same image of the writer that a person who asks about writing process is looking to buy. At the root of this question is the assumption that writing, like many other so-called American dreams, is for sale not to the most talented or to the hardest worker or to the person with something to say, but to the one who has the secret password, the right look, or the right technique.

Images from Time Magazine covers archive.

I find the consumerization of creative practice to be an extremely sad thing. And Díaz really impressed me with his answer to this question, and the answers he gave to the follow-up chorus of questions around the room that amounted to how can we write (or teach) like you for the audience that matters to us—that is, how can we speak to the particularities of black or female or gay or transgender experience in a meaningful way—when the most recent writer on the cover of Time isn’t Toni Morrison, like it was in 1998, but is instead none other than J. Franzen himself (who, I should mention, I’ve never read, which makes it a lot easier to speak not to his work but to the cult of image he represents in literary culture) with the words “Great American Novel” plastered under his face, claiming that his furrowed brow speaks for “the way we live now”?

See what I mean about the question that disguises its intentions? The implications of Díaz's answer would take awhile for me to get into, but, basically, he suggested that therapy, self-care, and taking the time to process your own experiences are the most important means for channelling what you care about into writing. Which is a great answer, and one of the best I’ve heard, and certainly one that requires more work than having a rigorous writing schedule, say, or using a particular brand of notebook. It suggests that the way to write or teach the things that matter most to you isn't a matter of time or talent or equipment. Rather, his answer implies that by delving into the personal and analyzing the things that have affected you, you will find the best way to communicate your experience.

What Pride and Prejudice Tells Us About The Future of the Book

Rachel Schneider — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 22:02:15 +0000

Image Credit: The Independent

While Caroline Bingley enumerates the accomplishments of elegant females in Pride and Prejudice, Mr. Darcy makes one significant addition: “to all this she must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading.” This pivotal scene, in which Darcy hints at the attraction to Elizabeth Bennet that blindsides her later, may charm audiences in part because Jane Austen, like her readers, cares about the written word. Austen parodied the sentimental and the gothic novels respectively in Love and Freindship and Northanger Abbey, defended the novel as a genre in Northanger Abbey, and showed her characters equally interested in reading. Fanny Price rhapsodizes as she joins a circulating library and becomes “a chooser of books” in Mansfield Park, Anne Elliot discusses poetry and prose with Captain Benwick in Persuasion, and Sanditon’s proto-villain Sir Edward Denham fancies himself “quite in the line of the Lovelaces.” Yet reading practices today are not the same as they were ten years ago, let alone as they were when Pride and Prejudice was first published on 28 January 1813.

I’d like to take the opportunity of this 200th anniversary to examine how we read Pride and Prejudice in the twenty-first century, and how changes in the reading practices surrounding the book help us answer the questions we have about the future of reading and the book as a physical object.

Image Credit: Digital Writing and Research Lab

Several possible answers arose for me while listening to the DWRL’s Zeugma Podcast. In the recent Reading episode, group members Eric Detweiler, Lisa Gulesserian, Hala Herbly, and Michael Roberts think through the relationship between technology and reading by discussing “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” interviewing Bob Stein from the Institute for the Future of the Book, and describing virtual reading and writing processes. While at first questions like “Is print dying? and if so, what will happen to reading? How does toggling between Internet tabs change the way we think about reading? How does crowdsourcing?” might not seem related to Austen’s extremely popular text, Pride and Prejudice demonstrates how technology has affected reading practices, as well as how technology has changed the reception of Austen’s “darling child.”

Image Credit: The Atlantic Wire

While we might not think of the printed book as a technology, it evolved to store texts. Likewise, its forms and design have changed significantly. One example of this is the binding: during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, books were commonly sold in temporary boards, and were bound by owners later for decorative purposes. The Atlantic’s article on 200 years of Pride and Prejudice covers suggests that we can we read something of the work’s reception in the ways the text has been packaged. For example, the peacocks in Hugh Thomson’s design, repeated over the next century, first serve to visually represent the theme of “pride,” but then become self-reflexive and incorporated into the text’s iconography, similar now to Darcy’s wet shirt. Likewise, C.E. Brock’s illustrations, produced for an 1895 edition of the text, now appear on postcards distributed by the Jane Austen Centre of Bath. These pictures, with their pastel colors and delicate-featured figures, reinforce readings of Pride and Prejudice that highlight the book’s romantic relationships over its more satirical underpinnings.

Image Credit: The Republic of Pemberley

Electronic technology has allowed for individual readers to share their experiences more widely than before. During the period in which Austen wrote, as described eloquently by Heather Jackson, marginalia written in texts began to record emotional reactions to texts as well as noting interesting passages. Individual readers might write in their copy of the book, then share it with another friend who could not only read the marginalia but also add to it. Now websites like Rap Genius, plugins like the Institute for the Future of the Book’s CommentPress, and e-readers like the Kindle or the Nook allow readers to store and share marginal commentary with a broad, unknown audience. These experiences not only allow readers to share affective experiences, but offer critics the opportunity to learn more about how texts are consumed and interpreted.

Image Credit: Screenshot from Kindle website

Visiting the Kindle website allows people to browse through the numerous highlights and comments left by readers of this edition of Pride and Prejudice. While many of these seem to reflect personal responses, as J. Keime notes that “I am loving this even more than I remember!”, others like love me hate me, who writes that “I love this book it is so well detailed. I love this book and I am only 9,” seem to be about constructing and sharing an identity with a reading community. This can also be seen in video book reviews on YouTube. E-readers both allow for this greater shared experience of text, but also enable new kinds of private reading—for example, no one except the person next to you can see what exactly it is you are reading.

Image Credit: Gathering Bones

Readings can also be enacted through visual texts that readers can create and share with others online. This includes fan-created works like comics, music videos, GIFs, memes, and other visual tributes that comment on other interpretations. While the BBC’s adaptation of Pride and Prejudice itself presents an interpretation of Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet, readers of that text can comment on it with pictures like the one above, which offers a reading of Darcy’s character. While probably no man in 1813 referred to himself as “Cucumber McCool,” the language situates Darcy’s motivations and feelings within contemporary discourse. It also connects back to the eighteenth-century novel’s own rich practices of mediation: Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa contains not only decorative frontispieces but also mad letters and music sheets, whereas Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy contains black, marbled, and blank pages, each of which encourage different kinds of textual engagement. Pride and Prejudice’s third-person narrative is interrupted by Mr. Darcy’s “two sheets of letter paper, written quite through, in a very close hand,” which he gives Elizabeth to read in order so she might understand his motivations through the novel’s first half.

These early attempts at combining media are thus reduplicated today in transmedia projects like The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, which embeds a 24-year old communications major named Lizzie Bennet in a world of Twitter, Tumblr, and William Darcys. Her video blogs, like the one above, involve not just her interactions with her fellow characters, but also Q&As with her audience. Readers can not only follow her tweets, but tweet at her, leaving comments on her videos and Facebook posts. What this suggests is that while active engagement in reading has remained constant over the centuries, technology shapes how the reading experience directs that attention.

The LA Review of Books recently posted several thoughtful reviews of critical works on Pride and Prejudice and Austen's oeuvre to honor her most famous novel’s anniversary. In one of the reviews, Audrey Bilger and Susan Celia Greenfield note how central interpretive acts are to Pride and Prejudice:

Austen encourages us to read people the way we ought to read books: wary of our first impressions, ready to search for the good in others, willing to recognize our own lack of self-knowledge.

The sheer number of reviews alone suggests the power of Austen's hold on our contemporary imagination: we read and re-read Austen to find the truths she may offer us, whether those truths are about eighteenth or twenty-first century culture. Perhaps the best tribute any of us can offer her is to always keep reading in this way, no matter through what medium.

The Fate of Arcimboldo; The Fate of the Book

Laura Thain — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 21:21:10 +0000

Image credit: Wikipedia

I'll test my art history chops today (no promises) as I explore the work of Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593), late Renaissance Mannerist and an artist of interest to everyone from the critic Barthes to the stadium rock band Kansas to the surrealist Salvador Dali.

The designer(s) of this year’s TILTS symposium flier chose an engraving after Arcimboldo’s The Librarian (1566). In investigating some context for the painting, I couldn’t help but notice the aptness of the image—not only, of course, because of TILTS’ ever-present commitment to textual studies, but because of the particular place Arcimboldo holds in literary and popular imagination in the Post-Renaissance world.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

“Fate” is a tricky word because it, in its very definition, denies agency. In its most general sense, it is neutral; in its most particular, it signifies destruction and certain doom. Fate implies an unarticulated threat, inalterable and unavoidable, existing always in negation of the object at hand. In its most classical sense, the hubris to resist it can propel fate, giving it wings, enabling it in its most monstrous form.

And so here we are, two years after TILTS’ “The Digital and the Human(ities)” Symposium (2010-2011), approaching the issue of the digitizing of text from a different perspective. While in broad strokes, TILTS explored the possibilities of the digital in 2010, in 2012, it seems to be exploring, at least in part, the anxieties surrounding this structural shift—anxieties which, as the title so aptly captures, center around “the book’s inevitable ‘death’.” How can we read Arcimboldo’s imagine in tandem with this approach to the discourse of the digital humanities?

To begin, we might read Arcimboldo as existing in a pivotal (fated?) moment, as well. Painting after the last greats of the High Renaissance but at the cusp of the Baroque, he reaches back to High Renaissance aesthetics in the composition of his paintings in his form of composition, even as the work contrasts Michelangelo and Raphael in his content. But Arcimboldo’s composition strives to integrate man with nature and to highlight the divine in the marriage of the two—a distinct shift from the Neoplatonism of the High Renaissance, which elevated man as the near-divine and instructed that art should seek inspiration from the aestheticized universals (“Forms” or “nature”).

Arcimboldo’s clever visual articulation of the intersection of man and nature attracted the attention of Roland Barthes in his Arcimboldo essays; Barthes fixates on the way the artist employs rhetorical tropes into his painting—metonymy and paradox, for instance. For Barthes, Arcimboldo is a “rhetorician and magician” because of the structural semiotics he represents in his paintings; each part of what we recognize as a face is a discrete element meaningless in isolate, but when assembled, the elements of his paintings produce meaning in a sum greater than their parts. While Barthes argues that these “puzzles” are a metaphor for language, they also strongly exhibit Arcimboldo’s debt to Florentine Neoplatonism in their commitment to displaying meaning only as a composite body. When dissected, they cease to speak.

Scholars read “The Librarian” in two distinct ways. The contemporary reading (which much subsequent scholarship has acknowledged or substantiated) argues the portrait was a personal attack levied at one Wolfgang Lazius, HRE Ferdinand I’s court historian in the Habsburg court at Vienna, for his vain and inaccurate scholarship. Yet K. C. Elhard argues instead that Arcimboldo’s painting criticized not poor scholarship but poor bookmanship—that is, it levied a critique against “materialist book collectors more interested in acquiring books than reading them.”

Interestingly, as many scholars of present-day book history have noted, this is exactly the type of behavior that publishers in a dying book market attempt to capitalize on today. The one thing digital books cannot provide is the pleasure of owning a material object; as the symposium’s blurb asserts, “any publishers in the print trade are turning to eye-catching design strategies, cover art, and innovative packaging, enlivening the book arts and emphasizing physicality just when they seem under threat.” Tonight’s opening lecture (5:30 pm in the Blanton Auditorium) by Nicholson Baker, “staunch defender of paper objects,” is sure to expand the discussion of materiality of text to further interesting places. Perhaps someone more creative than I wants to update Arcimboldo's painting for the digital age?

Image Credit: LT

A closing word on our Painter/Rhetorician/Magician: perhaps existing between two major movements of European art, fitting neatly into neither, sealed more than anything else Arcimboldo’s fate in the canon of the Early modern. Though he has received no small amount of attention, in comparison to the great Renaissance and Baroque painters he remains ever the side show: a curiosity and a puzzle, but one that keeps me interested for more than just a game or two.

Fahrenheit 451 vs. Long Live Books!

Jay Voss — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 22:40:47 +0000

(Image credit: TILTS)

The Texas Institute for Literary and Textual Studies (TILTS) kicks off the 2012-2013 season tomorrow night with a lecture by Nicholson Baker, to be held in Blanton Auditorium at 5:30 PM. It’s open to the public, and all within the Austin area are encouraged to attend. TILTS is an initiative supported by the Office of the President, the Vice-Provost, the College of Liberal Arts, and the Department of English of The University of Texas at Austin. Each year the symposium brings a group of scholars to campus with the goal of enriching intellectual life in the community, and I can’t say how much I appreciate the program and the extent to which I think it’s an absolute success. Each year the symposium takes on a different theme (“The Digital Human[ities]”, 2010-2011; “Poets & Scholars”, 2011-2012), and this academic year we’ll be hearing about “The Fate of the Book”. Auspiciously titled, no doubt, but certainly relevant. And though advance copy of Nicholson Baker’s speech isn’t circulating (surely this is as important as major politicians’ speeches?), my familiarity with his books suggests that he’s going to be rather optimistic about the fate of print.

(Image credit: Reuters)

I don’t think we could be hearing about “The Fate of the Book” at a better time. Yesterday we woke up to news that there’d been a significant riot at a Foxconn Technology production facility in Taiyuan, China. This plant makes products for Apple, Dell, and Microsoft, and many sources are reporting that the new iPhone 5 has been coming out of the Taiyuan plant. While reports of worker strife in China are always spurious, we do know that at least 5,000 police offers were called in to quell the uprising. It must have been significant. So, I ask, if books are being made obsolete by various tablets and mobile computing technologies, is our convenience worth the price of exploiting poor workers in places like China and Brazil? Read enough books and you’re sure to answer that question in the negative.

On a less urgent and more domestic note, it’s striking how many arguments in the ongoing election cycle are blatantly dependent upon voters’ illiteracy. It’s shocking, really. Assuming that readers of this blog vote for both sides of the spectrum (I know, I know…most of us probably vote left, but pretending for a sec that we live in a vibrant democracy) I’ll quickly give a benign example. Two days ago, at a fundraiser for Todd Akin, Newt Gingrich proclaimed that “My expectation would be that in the crunch, in October, governor Romney is going to be for the entire ticket, and he’s going to be for Todd Akin.” While this does sound like Gingrich’s typical line of argument, he’s telegraphing Republican hopes that Missouri voters will have completely forgotten about Akin’s odd perspectives by Election Day. Democracy’s contingent upon a critical citizenry, and I’d hate to think that Missouri voters could forget about Akin’s remarks in such a short span of time. I happen to think that reading books impedes such apathy and is fundamentally important to the future of a democratic society. It’s clear that digital literacies will be necessary for corporate success in the twenty-first century, but I’ve yet to see any evidence that they will enhance democracy in the same way that traditional literacy did throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

(Image credit: easyvectors.com)

Digital literacies are important for any number of reasons, and it’s an honor that we have the opportunity to teach them in the twenty-first century. These days, anyone with a decent bachelor’s degree should be able to figure out how to use seemingly odd new computing programs, especially if they had no knowledge of how those programs worked previously. That’s the mark of digital literacy, by my measure. But it strikes me as unfair to assume that a digital system could somehow replace books. For one thing, technology remains very expensive. Lower-income homes simply cannot afford Apple products (even if the company does own an aluminum mine, which I’m starting to suspect they do), and I bet that a majority of humans will continue to read books long into the future, so long as they have access to basic education. Aside from economic constraints, most graduate students I know seek out physical books when they wish to do a few days’ worth of serious reading. Half of my own students choose to read physical versions of our text, even though everything is available digitally. In fact, when I’m in the airport, most of the people I see reading digital books are of my parents’ generation.

So, in short, I do feel optimistic about the future of books. It’ll be fun to hear what others have to say throughout the course of this year’s TILTS symposium. If nothing else, I can’t imagine that humans would ever stop telling ourselves stories – that would certainly represent a certain death.