ENGL 7453: Modernism In/And the Archive

That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout?  Will it bloom this year?
Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,
Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!
You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!

Waiting for a corpse to sprout.  The image is an eerie one, but also extremely tragic, carrying with it the connotation of bereaved family members who have watched their young sons and brothers bloom and then die, cut off at their prime.  As a gardener returns often to the spot where he has buried a seed, so a mourner returns often to the burial site of his or her loved one.  There is that sense of not quite letting go, that inability to move on.  Instead, a sick, twisted need remains to return to that place of heartache, as though it would be sacrilegious and petty to forget and escape from it.  

The passage is almost mocking as it queries "Grown anything yet?  I would've thought that with your dedication to that 'seed,' you'd have more to show for it!"  On one hand, there is a desire for change, for something to happen, for life to be given back, for the corpse to sprout and bloom.  Yet at the same time, there is a parallel image of it reemerging from the ground not in bloom but as the unearthed remains that comprise a dog's meal.  There is the tension between a desire to try and restore what was lost and a realization that it is probably better to leave well enough alone.  

I find this much more powerful than a simple expression of sadness and regret.  Rather, the reader is almost implicated for daring to suggest that things be reversed—or perhaps for daring to suggest that moving on is the best course of action.  He is forced to wrestle with the guilt of either side, really drawn into the conflict and the shattering of death and loss.  

 What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

There is shadow under this red rock,

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

(Lines 19-30)

In these lines she is remembering the past. The trenches of the war and the rubbish it has become. She is speaking to someone, but no one is really there listening. She is stuck in this moment from the past, but cannot see the picture clearly, only images. She sounds like she is experiencing PTSD- Post traumatic stress disorder. She could be depressed and scared and wants someone to talk to and share her past. The red refers to the blood and the death of the war. The shadows that were present and that haunt her still all these years later. The last line is both drawing the reader in and pushing the reader away. She says come and let me share with you all the horrors and fears and sadness. She does not want to be alone in her memories.  The line with the cricket is the memory of silence. Even the silence is deadly. These lines remind me of loneliness and loss. There is no cheerfulness in these memories of the past. 

I read this poem last semester, but now that I read it again I feel like I am seeing more in this poem then I saw before. I keep referring to "her" because of the lines in Latin before the poem begins. The lines translate to "I have seen with my own eyes the Sibyl hanging in a jar, and when the boys asked her "What do you want?" She answered "I want to die." So from the very beginning there is loneliness and sadness and regret. It feels like all of the negative feelings are thrown together in one person's mind and she can't handle it. She is lost in a world of her own with no way out of a past she cannot change nor control. These lines in the poem are very dark to me. 

 My experiences with my major started out with lots of reading and writing. Recently my experience has grown throught the use of technology. I never really cared much for technology, but recently my interests have grown. Technology is also becoming more world wide and the tool that people seem to prefer. Now I am simply following everyone else and learning to adapt with the changes. Only recently has the use of technology become of interest to me. I much prefer the literature side of english. I have done plenty of research when it comes to writing papers, but any research on my own I have not really started. I have used technology in many different ways. I have used programs like Wordle and Prezi to present projects and I have realized that there are a lot of different ways to look at literature through technology. English is not just about reading words on a page and deriving meaning from them. I am begining to learn that english can be changed into different forms of technology like video games. Many video games have a story and in order to finish the story you must finish the game. The more technology progresses the more I use it to think in new ways. The simplist form of technology that I use or rather many use is changing the way we write papers. Papers are not written by hand and turned in through chicken scratch anymore, rather we use programs like "Word" to write papers on the computer where writing is faster, easier to correct and far easier to read. The internet is also a great tool for pretty much anything. Why take all the time that is needed to go somewhere when all a person needs to do is Google it. Technology has become more a way of life than I am sure anyone believed it could be. My favorite creation so far is the e-reader. I can access books much faster and and download them in seconds instead of going to the bookstore or a library. 

My experiences with English have been quite limited and quite recent, as I come from a primarily ENS background due to family pressures.  Since changing over to English last year, though, I have been extremely excited about the ability of literature to explore and convey the human experience and identity.  It's only recently, though, that I've begun to have much of a focus within that broad field.

I've been an avid reader for as long as I can remember, and while I continue to read obsessively, I have also had a long-standing fascination with newer forms of media and their ability to expound on the experience and communication that the written word offers, especially in the area of storytelling.  As a creative writer, I take a keen interest the ability of one medium or another to tell a story, whether oughtright or implied, general and theme-oriented or intensely detailed.  Video games in particular have captured my attention over the past year; while I play video games only as time permits and very poorly, I have always loved the potential of certain games to evoke a sense of deeper stories behind even the primary storyline.  I gravitate towards story-heavy games, as this is my primary motivation to care at all about the objective of a game, but I have also been interested in some smaller independent games that do not necessarily offer a strong storyline, but instead bring up new ideas, new ways of thinking, new philosophies, and new types of experience.

Aside from the video games/interactive storytelling aspect of technology, I am also extremely excited about the role of the internet in literary (and all other forms of) discourse.  Having started out my internet experience in a book-discussion forum and moved from there into roleplaying and text-based games before discovering the enormous cyberworld that I know today, I love the sheer speed and volume of discussion and joint theorizing that occurs online.  Contrasted with the Age of Enlightenment, when we had maybe a hundred or so great thinkers publishing enormous books and essays at a rate they thought revolutionary (printing press!), the present day struggles with information overload!  I've done a bit of my own discussion on books, movies, games, and even webcomics and been fascinated by the number of people who devote honest time and critical thought to comments on blogs.  Where writing used to be something that needed to be a career in order to have the leisure to devote to scholarly discourse, it has become something amazingly available to the everyday person.  Yes, there are a lot of trolls on the internet, but the number of honest thinkers from all walks of life is just staggering.

Lastly, I have been keeping an eye on the impact of technology and the internet on publication.  The sheer ease of publishing stories, essays, games, videos—anything—on the internet has given rise to both problems and enormous potential.  Video games have a chance to reinvent themselves as the backing of huge gaming companies is not necessary for publication, and artists in that field have the chance to explore newer approaches to interactive media.  Visual art has become much, much more accessible due to sites like DeviantArt that have brought it all out of high-class galleries and into the eyes and criticism of the everyday public, which has in turn affected what we now think of as "art."  

I digress.  I think my point was that I am extremely excited about the role and potential of technology for not only literature but communications media and storytelling as a whole.

 Being an English major I find that my experience to be enlightening. I’ve read some new classics, but I’ve also delved further into classics I love. Then there is the new wave of technological English that has piqued my interest introduced in classes. I’ve always found different forms of literature or using words to be an interest of mine. Then again I am a word person. So English really does suit me as a profession. As far as research goes if it means with my major or course then yes. Writing essays you have to research for proof to defend your essays with. If it is with technology then I’ve used technology with my research as technology helps me achieve the research I need faster. I can’t sit for hours trying to find the right books although if I had the time I wouldn’t mind it. However, with technology I can find what I need for my research easier and faster than I ever could.

To use technology to think with I’m not sure if I do but I guess playing games on technology counts? It forces me to think about where things go and how to place things and how to get to things. However, a technology becomes more advanced I am sure they will find a way to make it helpful in matters of thinking. After all we already use a calculator for helping us think and solve problems. Or the computer for it provides us ways to write and research things that we think about. So I guess in truth technology does help us in many ways with our thinking process. Even if it seems minimal compared to other areas of technology that help scientists discover things. Yet technology is everywhere so there are bound to be more ways in which technology can help us think about things.  

I chose to be an English major (and a Creative Writing minor) because I have always loved reading and writing, ever since I was really young. I mostly like to read fictional literature from a variety of time periods and genres, but mostly I like reading about adventure (for instance I love JK Rowling). That is the sort of thing I like to write about too. If I could be an adventure novelist some day, that would be my dream job. I am also very interested in other languages, so I am a Spanish minor, and I am also very interested in anthropology and learning about other cultures, as I have never traveled out of the country before and I am very curious about what I'm missing out on. I don't really think I have much experience with technology. I know how to do the basics on a computer and how to work Facebook and how to work my phone but I would say that's about it. Hopefully from this course I will be able to expand my knowledge of technology, and hopefully I will become a better literary analyst, because analyzing and interpreting and looking into the deeper picture is something I tend to struggle with sometimes. I hope to expand my literary horizons a bit.

 My name is Toby Decker, and I am a transfer student from Tulsa Community College.  I came to become an English student at the University of Tulsa because at TCC I decided to pursue an interest I enjoy most--writing.  I particularly enjoy researching contemporary cultural topics and doing literary research; I do experiment with fiction and poetry, but I feel like I might need to live another 400 years before I have anything very relavent to say.

I enjoy reading a little bit of anything I can get my hands on.  I do read very slowly, so oftentimes I will read to a certain point in a book, then move to a different author.  I hate having this habit, but it keeps me from reading nothing, or focusing too long on a work simply because I feel the need to prove myself through accomplishing it. Nevertheless, some of my favorite writers are Jonathan Franzen, Michael Cunningham, Walt Whitman, etc.  Only recently have I really started to read short stories; the last collection I read was called "Smut."  My favorite line from the collection concerned self-love/hate and went something like, "Gary could have found the strength to do almost anything, so long as he could watch himself do it."

When I read books, poems, articles, etc, I often do so with a pen or pencil.  I hope to find forms and words in what I read which will (hopefully) help me develop my own literary voice.

I'll post more soon!  Thanks.

As far as intellectual interests go, I'm pretty certain anime and videogames might not count. I also blog on the side and am going to actually create two new ones. As fa as reading goes I love to read poetry. W.B. Yeats is probably my favorte next to John Donne and Dylan Thomas. I also enjoy reading Agatha Christie's works and am a major Hercule Poirot fan. I'm slowly trying to collect all the Poirot works. Aside from that I also enjoy Sci-Fi, Fantasy and mangas. I became an English major because I love to read. I am also going to my masters in the library field under the archieves. So I find English might be helpful toward my goal, might not it all depends. I also mentioned I love to read and I figured English is the best major to go to with my love of reading.

Technology I've messed with would probably be things like computers, ereaders, video games, film in general and I am hoping this class will help me to become better acquainted with the world of technology. I suppose I am hoping also to learn what exactly digital humanities is. I've heard of it, I've heard people talk ofit but no one has ever really explained to me what it really was. So I am hoping by the end of this course I can know what digitial humanities is all about. It also seems like we're going to learn about different digital technologies so I'm excited about that. It will be interesting to interact with some things I haven't before and also to better improve on things I have. 

Edit: Apprently I can't type today so forgive me for all the mistakes in my post!

Welcome to ENGL 3713: Digital Humanities and Literary Studies. This course will introduce you to some basic technologies and methods for thinking about literature. Take a look around and familiarize yourself with the site.

Here are a few sample digital humanities projects to help you gain a sense of what the field is about.

• The Modernist Journals Project
• The William Blake Archive
• The Rossetti Archive
• Hypercities
• The LitMap Project
• Voyeur Tools: Graphing the September 1918 issue of The Little Review

The research report and images for my project presentation are located at the following address: http://postapocalypticcities.wordpress.com/

Also, I have run the TEI work from the first half of lab through Juxta. It was mostly correct, but I did manage to miss about 3 or 4 genres. I suppose that shows how easy it is to miss information when you're faced with all of those words and symbols. It certainly reminds me of how much more comfortable I am with a GUI.

Woolf (or actually "we") opens her first letter drawing "a sketch of the person to whom the letter is addressed," because "Without someone warm and breathing on the other side of the page, letters are worthless" (3).  She then continues to say that I'm "a little grey on the temples," my "hair is no longer thick on the top," and I've "reached the middle years of life not without effort."  I'm assuming her "letters" are not intended for anyone specifically, or non-fiction, because there's no reason to describe the intended reader's appearance back to "him."  This opening caught me off guard and I wasn't sure what to make off it.  As Emma and Kent discuss, this text seems to be related to the archive.  My question is why does this archive both create an (inaccurate) image of (me) the reader and why does the narrator use 3rd person personal pronouns throughout? 

This weird distinction came up again later.  Woolf explains to her reader the "Outsider's Society" (106).  The Outsider's Society is "anonymous and elastic," and will support the pascifist cause but not join the addressee's organization.  Each individual of this secret group must "analyse the meaning of patriotism in her own case" (107).  The question, I suppose, I'm struggling with is whether or not I'm an outsider of this textual archive.  I'm not really sure the exact connection between this feeling or the way Woolf opens letter 1, but I am interested in the function of the opening drawing of the reader and what that says about archives and historians/readers.

I managed to forget my copy of Moretti's book today, so unfortunately this is going to be from memory. The thing that primarily struck me about the maps section of the book was the troublesome idea that fictional spaces could be interpreted through factual maps. Though the maps and the texts are doing a similar kind of interpretation of space (just with one through diagrams and one through language), they're not necessarily doing so for the same ends. Take, for instance, the distance impressed upon the reader in Jude the Obscure between Jude's village and the university at Christminster. If we were to see both of these on a map, that distance would probably seem paltry, but for the young Jude it is an significant and importance distance. Or, for instance, the distance travelled by Pip to be in London in Great Expectations, and how much of a world away that feels for him. With our more modern reading of maps, being frequent travellers (and particularly, I'd imagine, for those used to travelling in America), the distance, again, would probably seem insignificant. A line from Swann's Way also made me think of this problem over interpreted and actual spaces: "nothing could have differed more utterly, either, from the real Balbec than that other Balbec of which I had often dreamed, on stormy days, when the wind was so strong that Fracoise, as she took me to the Champs-Eylsees, would advise me not to walk too close to the walls or I might have my head knocked off by a falling slate" (545-6). Again, what is crucial is the perception of space for the characters, rather than any fixed, proven record of the makeup of that space. Still, I'm not saying that because of this we shouldn't map fictional space, and quite on the contrary as literary students we definitely should, so that we can see where a writer develops this subjective reading of space by the character where in fact the actual space may have differed.

  With my project, I plan to map out the imagery of The Waste Land and compare this to its many allusions.  I'm specifically interested in highlighting the motifs of water and dust, which type of allusions are connected to these images and ultimately how they function in the poem.  The conceptual aim of my project is to evaluate any thematic conflict between the allusions in the text, which have been read as the voices of the dead (and thus waste), and the visual aspects, and then understand the potential meaning of this conflict.  Water, for instance, is the most frequently used word in The Waste Land.  This seems counter-intuitive, though, because my general impression from reading the poem suggests dryness, sterility, and death.  Why, then, is the most commonly used word, and specifically its represented meaning (fertility), opposite to the general tone of the poem? 

This project, however, might go in a different direction.  If the imagery of The Waste Land operates as a modified allusion, I am curious to know the subtle differences between quoting another author's work and suggesting a collectively understood idea through an image.  Can imagery allude to something?  Would this depend on a cultural understanding of an image or does each reader have to interact with the image to create meaning?  Whichever direction my project goes, I intend to make a map of the word associations of images and allusions.

My archive will include a list of textual allusions in The Waste Land.  I will use criticisms about these allusions for an interpretative framework.  Most of these, I expect, will agree that the voices are from the past and therefore dead.  Hopefully, I'll find a few that disagree, though.  This part should not be too different from the bibliography of a book or codex.  Next, I'll start "mapping" the imagery in the poem.  This will require tagging.  Since tagging is interpretive, I will use more criticism and also do some of my own close-reading.  My archive will also be effected as I break and separate images into concrete units, which is different than treating imagery as a continuous landscape.  

I expect the biggest problem will be archiving critics that disagree.  If I tag an image as two contradictory things, how will my map look?    

I am intending for this project to be a way of digitally archiving my research to date on the theme of the imagined destruction of cities in literature and visual culture from around the 1850s to the present. The archive is currently a spreadsheet list of the source materials I'm using, which include prose, poetry, film, video games, and paintings, but will come to also include essays and critical works on the source materials. The spreadsheet also has a list of tags for each entry that I hope to develop as the project goes on. I also hope to add in quotes and descriptions so that it goes beyond being just a list of works, and so that it will become possible to look for buzz words in the actual texts themselves as well as my interpretations of them.

At the moment the archive is quite sparsely populated as I still have a lot more research to do, but I hope that this digital version will become something that can evolve as the research continues.

What I hope to do with the spreadsheet is to input this data in certain programs to establish connections between primary materials, and between secondary and primary materials. At the moment I am not sure what types of software will be useful for doing this.

Here's one of the paintings:

José Clemente Orozco - Los Muertos (1931)

My plan for this project is to track associations of parts of nameless novel. First, I will run part of a nameless novel through Wordle (PS the parts being used appear in a magazine). Then, I will take the most popular words from this part of the work. Then, I will find a passage in that part of the work (or maybe another part, we shall see) that does not have those most popular words. I will then take that part that does not have those words, tag them with my associations in an Excel file. Then, I want to poll a group of graduate students and undergraduate students with the selection who have not read the selection before and see what their associations are. Then, I will see if those who have not read the entire passage pick up on the words that are most frequent in the overall passage but not there in the passage they read. Then, I will map my associations, their associations, and the content of the magazines onto a Gephi graph. I will then discuss what kind of things may shape those associations for those reading the magazine and those in the modern group. 

The archival nature of this project lies in the maintenance of people's associations or the way that they categorize this reading in their mind. I will also kind of be tracking any changes that happened in the work (if they do at all) through Juxta. It could also be interesting to see if people make associations with words that are associated with words that appear in the text, like honest instead of true or something. 

No pics or whatever yet.