Literature of Your Lifetime: Exploring the Effects of New Media on Writing
Most Duke freshmen have read widely and well—you’ve opened up books and used your imagination to follow Beowulf through his journeys, grapple with Hamlet’s existential angst, or languish with Robinson Crusoe on his lonely island. No doubt you’ve observed while Jane Austen’s characters wrung hands and hearts, you’ve stood back while Hemingway’s narrators drank too much and said too little, or you’ve watched Fitzgerald’s characters waste fortunes on bad decisions. But rarely have you had a chance to critically examine the diverse literature that writers have produced during your own time on earth.
This course takes up the study of the literature written during your lifetime—roughly in the last twenty years. One exciting aspect of this study is that as academic writers we will be able to work in conversation with a literary world that is very much alive. What we will discover in looking at the most exciting work of this period is that much of it has been affected by the most important technological development of the later 20th century—one which has developed alongside your generation—the ascendance of the personal computer and the internet.
The course will be divided into three sections. In the first, we will discuss the truly new literary field that has developed during your lifetime—that of electronic literature. We will ask: what does it mean to “play” a text rather than read it? As a part of this exploration, we will ourselves explore a new technology, that of the Wiki, as a location for academic writing. In the second section of the course, we will read the novel The People of Paper, by Salvador Plascencia. While they are still recognizable as works in a traditional format—most basically, ink on paper—we will explore the ways in which changing media technologies are working to change traditional narrative genres. You will write a traditional analytic essay on this topic. Finally, in our third unit, you will select a literary work that has been published within the last year and write a review of that work that we publish digitally; imagine that living authors with Google Alerts set to their names may read your reviews of their new work the day that we publish them!
This course calls for a spirit of adventure, a willingness to be open to innovation in our reading as well as in our writing. The course will prepare you to participate in the modes of writing the university uses now, and at the same time it will allow you to think through the ways these modes may change in your lifetime.
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