Engaging Digressive Reading: Teaching Difficult Texts with Tech Tools

1. Teaching to Digress • The “difficult” text and digressive reading

2. Central aims: • to teach the “difficult” modernist text • to emphasize the social element in reading • to focus students’ attention on the “material support” upon which texts rest

3. What Tech? • Digress.it: a plugin for the WordPress blogging platform • Developed out of CommentPress, a WP theme designed to facilitate scholarly communication and collaboration • Bloglike interface that • a) shifts reader-generated comments from scroll at the bottom of the page to the margins at the side and • b) pegs comments to particular chunks of text if desired

4. highlight = object of currently visible comments comment author prominently displayed comments are threadable numbered icons refer to # of comments per section Anatomy of the interface

5. Project design • Two groups of about six-eight students • Each group has about a month to research, write, and prepare • Two products: • a “digressive edition” of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste-Land (1922) • a lesson plan for a 30-min presentation to peers of the object/process/implications

6. Group 1: making reading visible • one-half of members record spontaneous, uninformed comments in margins • sharp counterpoint to reading/commenting in heavily annotated print editions, with TSEs notes, “Norton notes,” paratexts like Sparknotes, and the like • central challenge is not mastery of text but textualizing non-mastery: how to display one’s habitually silent mode of puzzling over “difficult” experimental texts

7. other 1/2 teach lesson: • challenge is to “teach” the object as well as the process of making it • students emphasized the links between the “digressive” Waste-Land and looser, performative modes of poetry (e.g., poetry slams) • they also noted that the “difficulties” of the modernist text were more visible and less alienating in this environment • one student posed as the ethnographer of the group itself, making sociological notes on the kinds/categories of commentary (her idea, not mine!)

8. Group 2: Reading 1922 reading The waste-land • Goal: digressive edition of Eliot’s poem inserting comments of his first wave of readers in 1922-3 • Source material: published reviews, published letter exchanges, quotes from secondary lit derived from unpublished letters • Product: synchronic slice of reception of Eliot’s poem, one that reveals the social dimension of reading in a prior moment in the long history of reading

9. broader implications

10. More new avenues • from (private) informal response papers to (public) course blogs • from private, solitary reading to collaborative reading (e.g., using twitter + course hashtags) • from private consultations re: research with instructor to collaborative bibliography collation (e.g., via Zotero or Mendeley) • in sum: from writing for practice to producing for publication

11. The Big picture The work is normally the object of a consumption; ... (t)he Text ... decants the work ... from its consumption and gathers it up as play, activity, production, practice. This means that the Text requires that one try to abolish ... the distance between writing and reading, in no way by intensifying the projection of the reader into the work but by joining them in a single signifying practice. In fact, reading, in the sense of consuming, is far from playing with the text. 'Playing' must be understood here in all its polysemy: the text itself plays (like a door, like a machine with 'play') and the reader plays twice over, playing the Text as one plays a game, looking for a practice which re-produces it, but, in order that that practice not be reduced to a passive, inner mimesis, also playing the Text in the musical sense of the term. ... The Text is very much a score of this new kind: it asks of the reader a practical collaboration. Source: Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text” (1971)