Structures and Speculation
Deciphering a Book-Puzzle: Exploring Experimentality in S.
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Abhirami Ajith Kumar
The modalities of reading are incessantly evolving, and many sensational reimaginations stipulate that the reader approaches a text as a challenge. In the narrativization of experimentality, the codes of perception of a reader are scrutinized with a conscious effort made by the author to create a rhizome of seemingly endless connections and departures. Re-interpretations of the defining boundaries of textuality, enhanced by digital tools, facilitate a space for unconventional storytelling and inventive conceptual contingencies. S. by Doug Dorst and J.J. Abrams is a text that has a novel inside a novel where the inner novel called “Ship of Theseus” has a fictitious author, and the outer novel progresses on the margins of the inner novel as a conversation between two students. An illusion is created where readers presume that they have the agency to assemble all the codes of the text to assemble a coherent narrative that explains everything. The study critically investigates how S. demands to be decoded conceptually and structurally. It explores the formation of a peculiar semiotic narrative grammar to trace the significant shifts in contemporary experimental fiction that effectuate a paradigm shift in “reading.” Through literary criticism and inquiries into textuality, the study seeks to situate the idea of a ‘book’ and a ‘puzzle’ in the digital age and foreground the emergence of a narrative aesthetic and the power of signification it exerts while capturing the state-of-the-art of experimentality in textual culture.
Teaching the Memoirs of Israelis and Palestinians
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Daphne Desser
In Spring 2023, I taught an undergraduate course in the English department focused on the memoirs of Israelis and Palestinians. More specifically, the course aimed to address two guiding concerns: what can we learn from writers from different groups who have lived in this region and the family stories they have decided to tell? What is the responsibility of the reader to these different histories? Course goals included using memoirs from this real and imagined homeland as a site for analyzing the persuasive power of memoir, taking into consideration its appeal to both affect and intellect. Additionally, the course raised questions about autobiographical writing and (inherited) trauma, the politics of memory, and the problematics associated with writing personal history. In this paper, I discuss my selection of memoirs, my secondary readings, my syllabus, and my teaching methods. I also discuss the relative merits of these decisions, assessing their strengths and weaknesses. Finally, I discuss what I would do differently given the events of October 7th and their aftermath and how I envision teaching the course in the future.
“Augmented Lecturing”: Making the Humanities Matter to Today’s Students
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Daniel Miller
In the last two decades, North American post-secondary institutions have seen a precipitous drop in humanities enrolments at the undergraduate level. Regarded as abstruse, dry and essentially irrelevant to students’ day-to-day existence, the humanities have been marginalized as merely an academic extravagance, to be engaged with only in passing, if at all. Cognizant that our students have grown up in the internet, smartphone and YouTube age, I have developed a pedagogical method that aligns with their increasingly audio-visual way of learning and concomitantly demonstrates that the humanities do indeed occupy a prominent place in their lives. “Augmented Lecturing” functions through pairing conventional speech with sensory stimuli: relatively brief audio-visual excerpts, curated to target lecture points. All extraneous material is edited out of the original video and audio (through, e.g., iMovie) and excerpts are then embedded within the presentation program (e.g., PowerPoint). Pauses in the shift between verbal and audio-visual modalities are eliminated. Modalities amplify and reinforce each other in a framework that continually links sensory stimuli to course material in order to activate areas of the brain that enhance learning and memory. As part of a study funded by my university, I ran a survey last year in four of my classes to measure the efficacy of Augmented Lecturing on student engagement, motivation and memory. There was a 60-percent response rate, with the positivity score on every question ranging from 80 to 95 percent. Augmented Lecturing allows me to show students that the humanities are all around us. They matter.
