From Text to Archive: Remaking the English Department Survey Course

Michael H. Levenson, English

1995 TTI Fellow

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Mr. Levenson plans to use multimedia technology to offer a change in the way English might be taught at the University of Virginia, in accordance with changes in the field and society at large. The study of English literature has undergone a series of profound changes in recent years. Literary criticism has become a dynamic and often controversial field, integrating the concerns of race, gender, and class, where before issues of textual form and literary history were paramount. The subject matter itself has changed as well, as critics have begun to interpret cultural artifacts at large, beyond the traditional canon of "great books," such as more popular and mundane kinds of texts and non-literary media. Additionally, the canon itself has undergone significant revision as works by women and persons of non-European descent have been incorporated into the syllabi of more and more courses.Mr. Levenson views the emergence of multimedia technology as a means of matching these changes to the manner in which literature itself is taught. In order to adequately teach literature as a focus of cultural forces, rather than a container of textual meanings, Levenson proposes a "radical pedagogical revision" in which the lecture hall is transformed into a "theatre of information," and the traditional subject matter of a course shifts from a fixed collection of texts to a fluid multimedia archive. He hopes to apply this approach to the English Department's literary historical survey course, required of all English majors, a group of about three hundred students each year. In view of his ambitious intentions, the course might be revised in two fundamental ways. First, in-class lectures could be augmented by digital slide presentations incorporating images and video clips. Second, the course can be revised in the uses of networked multimedia technologies out of the classroom. In addition to using the library as their source of literature and criticism, students would then have on-line access to an archive of the same materials that can be displayed in class-the difference being that in the out-of-classroom setting, students will be able to use the information for their own assignments. In this way, Levenson seeks to effect a shift in the way students view literature and how it is interpreted. Rather than view texts as isolated entities that one interprets by writing an essay on their internal meanings, students will learn to regard texts as nodes in a network of artifacts. Moreover, because Levenson will have students contributing to the content of the archive itself, that network of meanings will be viewed by students more and more as a changing one as time goes on. Eventually, alumni will be able to access the archive that they themselves helped to create.In teaching Dickens's A Christmas Carol, Mr. Levenson might use clips from its various film adaptations, as well as images of London during Dickens's time-maps, paintings, posters, and pamphlets, for instance. By means of such devices, students will be more able to read books in their cultural and historical contexts.