Here are the course materials for my Spring 2012 course on Baseball and American Culture. Not quite as complete at this stage as the materials for my course on fantasy–I’ve yet to write the assignments for the midterm paper and the final project, but that’s the usual case at this stage.
Enjoy.
Here are the course materials for my Spring 2012 Modern and Contemporary Literature course, Fantasy after Tolkien.
The syllabus includes course policies, grading information, and CU boilerplate stuff on disabilities, etc.
The Daily Schedule lists due dates for readings, papers, and quizzes.
The Text List lists. . . err. . . texts.
I have also included here the prompts for the course’s six short writing assignments (of which the students will complete three of their choice). I have created all six assignments ahead of time to give the course some shape and to allow students to look ahead and think about which writing tasks most interest them.
The following theses come out of my experience with a faculty seminar at CU Boulder on the subject of Teaching with Technology sponsored by Arts and Sciences Support of Education Through Technology (ASSETT). I do not claim any sort of comprehensiveness nor exhaustiveness. There are further things to be said and any number of issues that I have ignored. I do not claim that any of these theses are correct or proven; they are places to begin.
1. We always “teach with technology”
Before there were computers, there were textbooks. Before there was presentation software, there were black and white boards. Before there were word processors, there were notebooks and pens. Before there was print, there was writing. Before there was writing, there was speech. And don’t forget about purposeful images. If teaching involves a passing along of knowledge, skill, etc. in a process that is not simply nor merely mimetic, but involves some sort of abstraction, then teaching involves technology.
2. “Teaching with technology” is redundant
The usefulness of the phrase has less to do with its brute truthfulness than it does with how it informs us in another manner, how it draws our attention to what we have been doing and how we have been previously informed or disciplined. In short, we have always taught with technology, even before we were aware of doing so. Our use of such technologies was mimetic (based on having seen others doing something similar), done without an abstract knowledge of what we were doing. Thus “teaching with technology” abstracts our practices so that we might know them.
3. We never teach “with” technology
Following from the claims above, we must understand that technology is never something that is simply “with” us, in two senses. First, and most simply, if teaching always involves some form of technology (from language to the Internet), then we cannot use “with.” Such would be the equivalent of “I eat with my mouth” or “I see with my eyes.” Without a mouth, I don’t eat. Without eyes, I don’t see. (Or at least not in the ways I am used to). Second, technology is not simply “with” us. That is, technology is neither transparent nor neutral. Technology adds to (or disposes of) teaching in unexpected ways, often in ways that do not conform to our desires or our expectations. Thus technology is not “with” us. That’s not to say that it is “against” us, but rather to say that whatever its allegiances seem to be at any given moment, they have, in fact, no concern for us whatsoever.
4. We need to think harder about what we mean by “technology”
We focus on computers, networks, and course management software. We think about presentation software and, maybe, clickers. We do not think hard enough about (text)books, pens, spiral-bound notebooks, backboards, our language as language, etc. No doubt there is a vast body of research on these matters, but seminars, conferences, and informal discussions on “teaching with technology” tend to focus on digital technologies. There are other technologies at work in the classroom (and outside of the classroom, where a great deal of what comprises teaching in the classroom gets done in terms of prep). Because these technologies are not neutral, because they operate in the classroom in unexpected and sometimes uncontrollable ways, we need to see that, when it comes to teaching, it’s technology all the way down; we need to think about what various layers of technology do and afford.
5. Interdisciplinarity should consist, in part, in recognizing discipline-specific technologies
There are technologies in engineering classrooms and physics laboratories that do not, at present, translate into literature courses or business seminars as technology. “Teaching with technology” effaces such difference in the name of interdisciplinarity, an interdiscipinarity that then only operates at one level of abstraction: the level on which these disciplines already meet (we all use Twitter, or Facebook, or Powerpoint, or clickers, or Blackboard cum DesireToLearn, etc.). What happens when Powerpoint meets the Bunsen burner? When Word meets a wind tunnel? Certain disciplines (cultural studies, philosophy) might be able to make sense of these meetings as objects of inquiry, but such making sense is not interdisciplinarity, but meta-disciplinarity.
6. Technology should be attached to a problem, which it tries to solves
We must resist using technology for its own sake. A wiki does not add to teaching outside of any other context, nor does a blog, Twitter, a textbook, or a pencil. A textbook provides a standardized means of disseminating information (whether it accomplishes this task is another question). A pencil provides a means of “remembering” information as well as providing a means of editing such “memories.” Each technology solves (or tries to solve) a problem, even if it introduces other problems (textbooks go out of date or limit the flexibility of a syllabus; pencils can distract from listening and notes can provide a false sense of security). Teaching with any technology must include a consideration of intended/desired outcomes: what will this specific technology do in this class under these conditions? Is there a problem here? What technology might solve that problem? How?
7. Technology is more than the latest, shiniest thing
We cannot fetishize technology as an end. We should not seek technology for its own sake. We should not listen to vendors of technology explain to us what we might do with their shiny things. We should ask ourselves what we need to do and then think of what we need to accomplish our self-set task. Because technology is not neutral and because it affords some things and not others, giving technology primacy likewise gives primacy to those things that technologies affords rather than to those things that we might desire in its absence. Homer: “The blade itself incites to violence.” The promise of technology all too often becomes bound up in the promise of the commodity: “Buy this software for whiter whites!” “Use this blogging platform and everyone will love you!” “Tweet your troubles away!” Our whites might be fine, we may be loved already, and our troubles might, it turns out, come from the new thing rather than being solve by it.
8. We must not simply instrumentalize technology
We should think about what problems technology might solve, and how, and avoid using technology for its own sake (and thus use it for our own sakes). At the same time, we must also understand the previous theses, and never forget that technology will not solve any problem without creating new ones, or that it might solve a problem in unexpected ways, or fail to solve a problem altogether. Technology should not become an end in itself, but nor should we think therefore that it can ever simply be a means to an otherwise neutral end. The introduction of any new technology to the classroom reorganizes “means” & “ends,” “subjects” & “objects.” The question of who (or what) is in control is complex, but we must never assume that the answer is simply “the professor” or some such.
9. There should be no single theory of “teaching with technology”
Technology cuts across many spaces: in-class/outside-of-class; personal space within class (the laptop screen)/public space outside of the classroom (the laptop screen at the coffee shop). Technology reconfigures memory. Technology is a (non-neutral) product and a (non-neutral) means of production. Technolgies overlap and interpenetrate one another (writing in textbooks and online) but cannot be reduced to one another (a television program on Hulu is not the same as the one on NBC). There is no single thing “technology” that is utterly coherent in all contexts, for all individuals. As such, we should not look for any single answer or even single set of answers to the question of “teaching with technology.”
Tools for thought
I wrote much of the above in the wake of (or under the influence of) the following theoretical texts (and, doubtless, others I fail to recall here).
Here is my proposal (late damnit! I was thinking “Monday! Monday!” because of the end of the month, when it was due Sunday. Ah well, we will see) for Duke’s Marxism and New Media Conference in January.
Benjamin J Robertson
The Political Economy of Digital Media and Education
Proposal for MARXISM AND NEW MEDIA
In For a New Critique of Political Economy, Stiegler summarizes his previous arguments about memory and technics: “all technical objects constitute an intergenerational support of memory which, as material culture, overdetermines learning and mnesic activities. [. . .] A child arrives into a world in which tertiary retention [memory stored in technical objects] both precedes and awaits it, and which, precisely constitutes its world as world.” That this discussion begins Stiegler’s short text on political economy comes as no surprise; much of the first volume of Technics and Time considers the articulation of technics with economics: “there is no work without technics, no economic theory that is not a theory of work, of surplus profit, of means of production and investment.”
Recently at the group blog New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science, John Protevi critiqued a series of posts on the “job market” in philosophy:
I don’t want to criticize the content of the posts; as far as I can tell, the advice has been excellent. But I do want to suggest that we change our frame of reference on these matters, and specify that we have been discussing only a small segment of the complete system of employment for philosophy instruction in institutions of higher education. So I’d like to suggest we call the analysis of the complete system “the political economy of philosophy instruction.”
However specific philosophy instruction and its political economy, Protevi’s new frame of reference provides a means by which to understand the impact of the recent focus on digital media, electronic literature, “digital humanities”, etc. within the narrow confines of English departments as well as in the broader dimensions of various initiatives, schools, professional organizations, and institutions.
Strangely, however “left” and/or free thinking the individuals in such contexts understand themselves to be, and whatever the promises they make for the technical objects they produce and study, far too often (always?), digital media fail to transform academic environments. When the student arrives, she finds waiting for her a world constituted already as a particular world, one in which institutional memories—practices of reading and writing, strategies of argument, limitations of thought—await her. As such, even with the steady increase in job opportunities for anyone working on “the digital”, the political economy of digital media education reduces such opportunities to an outdated system of academic labor. Whatever the promise of the digital humanities for a new way of thinking and doing, it would be quite easy to reverse engineer a human(ist) from a laptop.
When new media can only produce old media—i.e. when the laptop must produce the book, when the word processor must produce the essay—we must reconsider the articulation of old with new. This paper, through a consideration of Stiegler’s political economy, traces the residual and seemingly insurmountable humanism of digital media. Digital media retain many of the limitations of previous technical objects and thus constitute an institutional tertiary retention, one that constrains academic labor.
A lot of people who do 20th century lit, the posthuman, media studies, etc seem to have started their path to lifelong readerdom as SF aficionados. Not I. My first love was fantasy, although I now understand that my reading of fantasy was largely restricted to Tolkien clones. Seriously, I can recall one trilogy (fantasy is almost ALWAYS written in trilogies since Tolkien, even the heterodox stuff) that was nearly the same EXACT story complete with little people, a kraken guarding and long abandoned mine, and numerous other similarities so similar I can’t believe that there wasn’t a lawsuit. Wish I could remember the name of it. Likely buried in my parents basement along with Susan Cooper, Lloyd Alexander, and my complete Narnia collection.
In any case, it’s only been recently that I have returned to fantasy (thank you Richard Morgan for The Steel Remains!) and have been asking myself whether there is something there beyond a tenuous connection to Rabelais, Beowulf, the classical epic, etc. Hence this class.
Like the baseball class, I am somewhat nervous about this one. With baseball, that nervousness derives from the fact that I have thought SO MUCH about the topic without actually conversing about that thought with anyone but myself. The nervousness here derives from the fact that I have not done a tremendous amount of thinking about the topic, was not even aware that there was thinking about the subject to be done until recently. As such, I am only dimly aware of the themes that we need to explore in the class. I am confident that 1) these themes will clarify themselves as time goes on (I am giving myself a crash course in the fantasy I don’t know very well right now: Howard, Leiber, Moorcock, Anderson and a bit of Lovecraft for this purpose); and 2) that this immediate non-knowledge will be a feature and not a bug–classes seem to go better for me when they becoming a process of discovery with students rather than a redistribution of knowledge that flows from me to them. We’ll see. In any case, I am excited to be thinking about this stuff and for the possibilities it opens for rethinking the 20th century.
Oh, and I have to say it: next term is very boy heavy, between this and baseball. Baseball seems a given, and fantasy it turns out is not much better in this respect. There are other women who could be included here beyond Clarke, but the two with which I am most familiar (Susan Cooper and Anne McCaffrey) are not appropriate I think (the reading level of each is not right for the class, and McCaffrey strays too much towards SF). I am sure that there are others I am missing, and regret that. I also regret that race is not more of an issue for the class, although Delaney touches on it (and the question of sexuality). I think that this shortcoming has to do with the genre and its intended audience (I recently read that the “hottest” woman in the history of D&D is the one who is willing to play a role-playing game with boys). However, I am also aware that I could use to learn more about the alt-history of fantasy. I am sure its out there.
ENGL 3060-009 & -010: Modern and Contemporary Literature
Fantasy after Tolkien
Fantasy literature offers something of a contradiction. On one hand, it is a thoroughly contemporary genre. Yes, the fantastic has a longer history than that provided by the twentieth century, but it was the twentieth century that gave the world fantastic as fantasy, magic that no one believed in, monsters that only existed in the imagination. However, on the other hand, fantasy implicitly and explicitly continues to allude to moments in the past when our understandings of the world were not quite set by science and rationality. The conflict endemic to a great deal of fantasy literature is that of modernity: the passing away of the supernatural and its replacement by the mundane. Think of Tolkein’s elves leaving Middle Earth or Lewis’ children who grow up and can no longer find Narnia.
Considered in this context, fantasy literature offers up a number of avenues of investigation. What happens to the fantastic in the face of the rational? Why is the fantastic so often portrayed according to the tropes of realism? How do various representations of the fantastic allow us to rethink the history of modernity in the United States and the West? This class will read fantasy literature produced in the wake of and against Tolkien as an evolving set of genre conventions and as a literature committed to experimental considerations of nature and history.
Evaluation will be based on quizzes, class presentations, response papers, and a final essay.
Reading List
Susanna Clarke: Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell
Samuel R. Delaney: Tales of Neveryon
Stephen R. Donaldson: Lord Foul’s Bane
Neil Gaiman: American Gods
Felix Gilman: The Half-Made World
Robert E. Howard: “The Phoenix on the Sword”
Fritz Leiber: “Ill Met in Lankhmar”
George RR Martin: A Game of Thrones
China Miéville: Perdido Street Station
Michael Moorcock: Elric: Stealer of Souls
JRR Tolkien: The Return of the King
What I really wanted to say about the quote from Field of Dreams: “utter bullshit.”
In any case, I am tremendously excited about this course and tremendously nervous about it. I have been having a conversation about baseball with myself for about the last 15 years, one that has matured and developed in complexity over that time. the problem: I rarely talk about baseball out loud except in the most conventional ways, namely with relatives as a fan. I never ever bust out with my ideas about anti-intellectualism in sportswriting or the ways in which race remains an important, invisible, and deplorable aspect of our national conversation on sports. So now I get to talk about these things for a whole semester! Out loud! Let’s hope they still make sense when their words in the air rather than in my brain.
ENGL 3246: Topics in Popular Culture
Baseball and American Culture
People will come Ray. The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again.
Such is the story that we tell, or once told, ourselves about baseball. But it’s just that: a story. Of course, baseball is intimately involved in American culture, but that involvement is historical rather than natural or transcendental. This class is not “about” baseball. Rather, it is about the stories we tell about baseball, about the myth of baseball: how that myth comes to be and the consequences of that myth.
Our work for the course will be divided into three unequal parts. We will first consider Roland Barthes great work of cultural criticism, Mythologies, so that we may develop a framework in which to understand America’s cultural concerns with baseball. From there we will consider certain novels about the interaction of baseball with American culture and life as well as contemporary discussions about baseball (focused on steroids, statistics, and race). We will supplement these three aspects of the class—myth theory, literature, contemporary sportswriting—with essays about the history of baseball and the themes it presents in the American culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Evaluation will be based on class presentations, blog posts, and two or three short to medium length essays.
Partial reading list
Roland Barthes: Mythologies
Leonard Cassuto and Stephen Partridge, eds: The Cambridge Companion to Baseball
Robert Coover: The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.
Don DeLillo: Underworld
Kenneth Goldsmith: Sports
Michael Lewis: Moneyball
Phillip Roth: The Great American Novel
I’m teaching Liz Grosz’ essay “The Thing” today. Jane Bennett on things next. I am reminded of one of my favorite PSAs ever, “Art. Ask for More.” Here it is:
And below the fold, my thoughts on the video from the introduction to my dissertation. I can’t say that I still LOVE this part of the diss (or any of it), but I still basically agree with it.
Here is the text of my E-poetry 2011 paper. I am taking part in the Sugar City Dialogues part of the program, which calls for five minute “statements” in rapid fire succession. Hence the brevity of the following, and hence its nature, which many of you will no doubt discover on your own. It’s rather unoriginal, in several senses, but I will leave that alone. As I read, I plan to have Joerg Piringer‘s “Unicode” running behind me (or to the side, whatever). Read more about “Unicode” here, or watch below.
Key your present time texts and you will begin to see who you are and what you are doing here. Mix yesterday with today and feel tomorrow your future rising out of old apparatuses. You are a programmed apparatus set to read, select, copy, and write.
Who disposes of you?
Who decides what particles to dis-play back in present time?
Who dis-plays back old humiliations and defeats holding you in predisposed set time?
What I am trying to pick out with “apparatus” is a thoroughly heterogenous ensemble consisting of discourses; institutions; reading practices, close or otherwise; regulatory decisions; laws; administrative measures; letterforms; writing machines; philosophical, moral and aesthetic propositions—in short, the disposed as much as the indisposed. Such is the system of the apparatus. Not only, however, corporations such as Apple and Microsoft and Adobe, departments, schools, conferences, disciplines, tenure processes, the proportional representation of men and women among us, and so forth (whose connection with power is in a certain sense evident), but also the pen, writing, prose, philosophy, verse, code, applications and apps, computers, cellular telephones, e-poetry, and—why not—language itself, which is perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses—one in which thousands and thousands of years ago a chimpanzee inadvertently let itself be captured, probably without realizing the consequences that it was about to interface.
If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be arrangements of technical images; the rest, fragments of letters, bits of code, lumps of semantics, records of sound, pieces of movement and stasis, phials of odors, plates of food and excrement. Booksellers would consider it quite a novelty; critics would murmur, yes, but is it art, conceptual, representational, or otherwise; and I could trust a majority of you to use it as you would a parlor game. After all, in European printed language it is an automatic assumption that letters forming words are separated by space from other letters forming words, that these letters march (without moving) across the page from left to right, and that the lines so formed—lines of force interacting with curves of visibility and enunciation—are strictly parallel and progress downwards at equal intervals. The hypothesis to be presented here is: Occidental culture is a discourse whose most important information is stored in an alphanumeric code. This code is in the process of being replaced by other, differently structured codes. If this hypothesis were accurate, we would have to count on a fundamental change of our culture in the near future, perhaps the end of the anthropological machine of Western humanism.
For mechanized writing to be optimized, one can no longer dream of writing as the expression of individuals or the trace of bodies—no longer the signature or the traditional image. The very forms, differences, and frequencies of its letters have to be reduced to formulas—now the password or the technical image. So-called humanity is split up into physiology and information technology. When Hegel summed up the perfect alphabetism of his age, he called it Spirit. The readability of all history and all discourses turned humans or philosophers into God.
Speaking of Hegel, if “positivity” is the name that, according to Hyppolite, the young Hegel gives to the historical element—loaded as it is with rules, rites, and institutions that are imposed on the individual by an external power, but that become, so to speak, internalized in systems of beliefs and feelings—we, by borrowing this term (here renamed “apparatus”), take a position with respect to a decisive problem, which is actually also our own problem: the relation between individuals as living beings and the historical element. By “the historical element,” I mean the set of institutions, of processes of subjectification. and of rules in which power relations become concrete.
For we belong to apparatuses and act in them. The newness of an apparatus in relation to those preceding it is what we call its currency, our currency. The new is the current. The current is not what we are but rather what we become, what we are in the process of becoming, in other words the Other, our becoming-other. In every apparatus, we have to distinguish between what we are (what we already no longer are) and what we are becoming: the part of history, the part of currentness. History is the archive, the design of what we are and cease being while the current is the sketch of what we will become. Thus history or the archive is also what separates us from ourselves, while the current is the Other with which we already coincide.
So what is the status of of human freedom with respect to writing with an apparatus, with this transparent, mechanical process? Probably as follows: I know, when I strike a key, that I am dealing with a programmed instrument that reaches into the swirl of particles and packages them into texts. I know that a word processor can do this automatically, a chimpanzee can do it accidentally, and a stenographer can do it by copying an existing pattern, and that in all cases, the same text as mine will appear. I know, therefore, that my keys are inviting me into a determined mesh of accident and necessity. And, in spite of it all, I experience my writing gesture concretely as a free gesture, in fact, free to such an extent that I would rather give up my life than give up my apparatus.
Ah, the posthuman. We all want to be it. But I doubt we are it or ever will be it. That’s just the way it is. We’re too comfortable with being human, with thinking in a human manner. We are so good at being ourselves and recognizing ourselves wherever we go and I doubt that can or will change.
Of course, that won’t stop me from teaching a class about what media might be like outside of a human or humanist context.
I am still not certain about everything I will be dealing with, and therefore no course documents yet. But here is the course description. I would love comments and feedback. Oh, and a big shout out to this bibliography from Eileen Joy, which has helped me remember things I would have otherwise not remembered and has drawn my attention to things I would not have otherwise found.
ENGL 3116: Topics in Advanced Theory
Posthuman Media: Life, Animals, Nature, Things
Marshall McLuhan famously calls media “extensions of man.” In other words, media is that which exists in a relationship with the human and must be understood from a humanistic point of view. This course will challenge these assumptions and consider media outside of the context of the human.
Is not air a medium for sound? Does not what we call nature extend the insect beyond itself? Does not our own, which is to say “human,” media evolve in relationships with things beyond the strictly human? Do you know what is going on inside your computer right now or what it “feels” like to travel through a wire? Are we even sure that we know what it means to be human?
We will address these and other questions through a consideration of several figures or concepts, among them: life, the animal, nature and ecology, and the thing or matter.
Partial/potential reading list:
No course documents for this one yet, but here is the description. I don’t have much to say about it. Fairly straightforward course whose main recommendation is that it will let me teach some stuff that I really want to teach right now (although I could not find a way to make The City & the City work here–damn). My first time teaching Lovecraft, so there’s that. Also, my first time teaching Imago, which is a great novel, but the third in a trilogy. I don’t think it will be a problem, but given that it’s told from the POV of a non-human and other-gendered being, the first two books in the series help put it in perspective. Also, first time teaching Mielville. The Scar is the second in a trilogy, but I don’t think that matters at all given the nature of the Bas Lag novels. Finally, I don’t much like Accelerando, but it should work well here. And, really finally, I love Roadside Picnic. Thank god it’s online (PDF), as it’s been out of print forever. (And, now that I am thinking about it, and speaking of out of print stuff, Joe McElroy’s Plus would have been great here.)
ENGL 3060-021 & 022: Modern and Contemporary Literature
Encounters with the Nonhuman
Benjamin J Robertson
Science fiction has long imagined the encounter between the human and the alien and, at the same time, demonstrated the unwillingness on the part of humans to confront the nonhuman’s nonhumanity. In the words of Stanislaw Lem: “We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don’t know what to do with other worlds.”
This class will read science fiction that deals with meetings between the human and its others in order to consider the following questions, among others: How does the human react to the alien? How does the human construct itself in the face of the other? Is it possible to think from a nonhuman perspective? Can we imagine a culture other than our own? Do we even know what the terms “human” or “human culture” even mean?
Reading List
evening redness 