About this course

This course explores the praxis of reading and writing through explorations of text technologies including manuscript, textile, print, and digital forms––emphasizing nontraditional understandings of the textual object. Through investigation that is theoretical, applied, and creative in nature, we will examine the social and material conditions under which form has been imposed on matter to create graphic meaning. Informed by poststructuralism and feminist criticism, we will examine scrolls and book rolls, women’s needlework, memorial engravings, midcentury typewriter poems, mechanical production and digital diffusion, culminating in literary production in twentieth- and twenty-first century media ecologies (podcasting, augmented reality, web novels etc). The course questions techno-determinist histories that plot a linear progression from manuscript, to print, to digital by exploring the ways in which at any given moment a variety of text technologies are available, though they may have differing hierarchical status. Each week will combine theoretical, critical or philosophical readings with textual artifacts that test the conceptual and practical boundaries of textual production or otherwise draw attention to language and textuality. Student led “Textual Practice” demonstrations will provide opportunities for collaborative nonhierarchical exchange of ideas and skills. This course fulfills either a Technology & Media Studies or Literary & Cultural Studies credit.

How to get in contact

ENGL 701/801 | Spring 2020 | Thursdays 7:10-9:50pm Dr. Margaret Konkol | mkonkol at odu dot edu | Office: BAL 4046 and Office Hours 1:30-3:30 Wednesday and by appointment (in my office or through webex/facetime, phone, etc). Room: BAL 2019 & web conference (distance)

The Chesapeake Digital Humanities Consortium

This Friday 21 February the CDHC conference will take place at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, VA. You can view the full conference schedule at this link. If you’d like to attend and/or join the consortium check out the CDHC website.

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Suzanne’s Coding Practice Site!

I was able to make a WP site to practice Emma’s coding cues! It worked! I’m not sure how to link the new page to the T&T page, so I’m copying the URL here to see if that works! Is there some magical HTML code for that? LOL https://sites.wp.odu.edu/sgutcodingpractice/

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Media, Pictures, and Lisa Gitelman’s Always Already New

In the introduction to her book Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture, Lisa Gitelman explains that media are plural, that they exist as “socially-realized structures of communication” (7). This definition is important because it deals with two ways that people tend to talk about media. The first, as outlined by Gitelman, …

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Which Is Your Favorite This Time? A Reader’s Perspective

Several years ago during a class discussion about favorite stories and composition, a student asked me to identify my favorite line or scene from A Christmas Carol, and I couldn’t answer. Try as I might, I couldn’t pinpoint one. After class, the question haunted me. Why wasn’t I able to answer a simple question about …

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