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From Gutenberg to Gates About the Course Our culture's recent experience with the internet has resulted in renewed attention to how media of expression affect what we say. Beginning with the introduction of movable type in early modern Europe, pausing briefly on the advent of film and television in our own culture, and examining the social impact of internet communications, this seminar considers the control, characterization, and production of various forms of literature, as well as addressing what literature is and who has access to it in various media. The above questions constitute a branch of cultural history and literary criticism loosely called the "history of the book"; in this course, we will ultimately apply such questions to our understanding of both literary genres and specific literary works. Texts for the course reflect three basic strands of inquiry. The first, The Medium is the Message?: Visions, Histories, and Criticisms of Communications Technologies, includes readings on the printing press as an agent of social change, on the dangers and cultural significance of television, on the merits and detriments of the internet and other computer applications. The second, When Versions Matter: Two Case Studies, examines multiple versions of Shakespeare's Hamlet and Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson as examples of when editing, publishing, and interpretation of a literary work converge. The third, Dangerous Notions: Texts and Censorship of New Media, addresses three instances of censorship controversies surrounding various types of media: seventeenth-century battles over control of the press during England's Civil War; censorship of film, television, and other artistic production during the McCarthy period in the 1950s; and governmental and self-imposed censorship of internet media. Together, the readings should help us broaden and critically assess our understandings of text and context the Gutenberg era to our own-from the time of the earliest mass produced books to what Jay David Bolter refers to as "late age of print."
Assignments Assignments will include weekly one-page (single-spaced) responses to the readings to be read or otherwise shared with class members on the first day that we discuss the reading. Although I just called them weekly, throughout the semester, you will end up writing six to eight of them, for reasons that we will discuss on the first class day. You will need to read entire works by the first day that we discuss them, so please budget your preparation time accordingly. You will then be asked to archive a select number of those responses by submitting them via a mail form to our class World Wide Web site. (Or, of course, better yet: post those responses on the forum ahead of time.) Note also that in order to maximize our class discussion, I will be presenting background material on the readings ahead of time on our class web site. Assignments also include a midterm exam, primarily to test some theoretical knowledge that will be useful for you in your final projects, a book review (3-4 pages) from a list of selected books that you will present to the class; and a final paper (approx. 12 pages) that you will also present, briefly, to the class. This project can take the form of a review essay (that is, a review of several books or writings on a similar topic), a discussion of how various versions of a selected texts convey different meanings, or a discussion, incorporating books from the semester and additional research, of a topic that our readings have suggested (for instance, how gender identity on the internet shapes communication, how scribal publication in the early modern period circulated alongside print publication, or how print did or did not shape the Renaissance and/or Enlightenment in Europe, based on the writings of Elizabeth Eisenstein and more recent critics). In order to actively use new communications technologies as we reflect on them, we may occasionally meet in a computer-assisted classroom for synchronous discussion via networked computers.
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