Teaching the new texts

March 25, 2007

By Katie Haegele

Reading a novel that gets delivered in installments to your email inbox is different from flipping through a book as you curl up in bed. Animated hypertext poems that dance across your computer screen don’t tell the same kind of story as the ones that sit still on a page.

The reading experience is different for print versus digital, no doubt about that.

But what about the writing experience? Is literary writing for digital media different in a way that matters? This is a question I keep returning to as I interview a variety of digital writers for this column. Does good old-fashioned storytelling really change just because the media it's constructed is new?

I asked Sue Thomas, Professor of New Media at De Montfort University in Leicester, England, what she thought. In conjunction with Kate Pullinger, the author of the multimedia graphic novel Inanimate Alice, Thomas devised an M.A. program in creative writing and new media that is taught online.

"Good old-fashioned storytelling was oral, and storytellers often changed their stories according to context and circumstance," Thomas said. "You only have to look at how simple fairy tales and urban legends evolve whilst still often keeping the core of the narrative intact to realize that they need a fluid environment to stay alive and fresh. Multimedia prevents the stagnation of fixed type and maintains a much longer tradition stretching way back beyond the last 500 years."

As Director of the Digital Media Project at the Department of English at Ohio State University, Scott Lloyd DeWitt says he wants to "expand notions of literacy" rather than abandon print for something new. 

"We are giving students the opportunity to produce a variety of digital media texts. Along the way, we ask them to think about the affordances of these media and make choices about using them according to their rhetorical goals: Who is your audience? What sense of ethos are you trying to establish? Where do you imagine this text appearing?" 

In other words, the same questions writers have always asked.

Dr. Robert Coover, the T. B. Stowell Adjunct Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University, is a prominent novelist who realized in the late 80s that "the digital revolution was real and immediate; I wanted my students to be wholly aware of what was happening and comfortable with it."

Today he leads the groundbreaking CaveWriting Workshop, a spatial hypertext writing workshop in immersive virtual reality he dreamed up in 2002.

Electronic writing workshops are in many ways similar to traditional writing workshops, Coover said: students are given a project that they present to the class for critique.

But CaveWriting is unique. Powered by a high-performance parallel computer, the Cave is an eight-foot-square room with high-resolution stereo graphics shown on three walls and the floor. Imagine standing in the middle of this room as a multimedia narrative is projected all around you, and you've got the "immersive" part of the equation.

Coover, who wrote an essay called "The End of Books" for the New York Times Book Review in 1992, says new literary forms don't emerge simply because the artist wants them to.

"Art forms are partly made by audiences, and if the reading public was in the process of moving from page to screen, then young writers had to understand that and know how to live and write in the new world," he said.

"E-writing is a very collaborative genre, often involving writers, artists, composers, and computer programmers," Coover added, making me think that the image of the writer suffering over her masterpiece in solitude might soon become out-of-date, which wasn't a bad thought at all.

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