Obsolescence and Innovation in the Age of the Digital

The relationship between obsolescence and innovation in the digital age is a peculiar one, conveying not past and future but instead demonstrating their eternal simultaneity

Giving It Away: Sharing and the Future of Scholarly Communication

Text of the keynote given by Fitzpatrick at MLA (Modern Language Association) 2012 for the Council of Editors of Learned Journals

The Pleasure of the Blog: The Early Novel, the Serial, and the Narrative Archive

Blogs have in the last couple of years loomed large in the western imagination, but the ideas about blogs that have circulated both through the mainstream (particularly U.S.) media and through academic circles have been extremely limited in scope. In the first place, there is a common distinction at work in the U.S. imaginary between blogs, which are assumed on some level to be doing public work, whether political, technical, academic, or journalistic, and online diaries, which are primarily personal, if not exactly private. The personal blogs often mistakenly labeled online diaries, as well as the more apparently diaristic forms such as LiveJournal, are too often dismissed as the narcissistic rantings of teenage girls and other hysterics, a nonsensical — and, not incidentally, hyper-feminine — form of oversharing. Such a dismissal, however, overlooks the important work that such personal blogs are doing in helping to construct what might be morphing into a new literary form. In fact, western literary history can shed some important light on the current state of personal blogging. As Nancy Armstrong has argued, the English novel has its roots in the domestic practices and personal writing of middle-class eighteenth-century women. Such early fiction, moreover, was frequently structured in ways that seem familiar to contemporary blog-readers, mimicking the forms of exchanges of letters or of diaries. These two factors combine to suggest that blogs that are interested in the ongoing production of a personal narrative are in fact poised to become a literary form with all of the resonance and sophistication of the novel. But of course, such comparisons to traditional print literature only go so far in attempting to account for the aesthetic potential of the blog. Theories of digital media must come into play, as the authors of personal blogs create, through a diachronic series of postings, not simply a narrative but rather a first-person narrative archive of the self. Such an archive, or database, bears certain things in common with other serialized media forms, such as television, in which the viewer\u27s interest is obtained and maintained through the delay of resolution and the ongoing production of conflicts and complications. But the fact that the narrative here takes on a non-linear, database-driven form, suggests that ideas of seriality in the blog must be complicated through their intersection with the notion of the database narrative explored by Marsha Kinder and Lev Manovich. Such a meshing of notions of seriality with an understanding of the database, particularly as combined with a willingness to approach the blog as an incipient literary form, may help deepen our thinking about the blog as an aesthetic production — and, in particular, about where the pleasures in reading blogs originate

Tune In, Turn On: The Novel, the Family, and the Plug-In Drug

This article, forthcoming (January 2010) in an online casebook from Dalkey Archive Press on Curtis White’s Memories of My Father Watching TV, explores the peculiar relationship between the novel and its representations of television, arguing that this novel significantly complicates the anxious representations that I explored in The Anxiety of Obsolescence, by focusing on the subversive potential that television presents within the family

Images of/and the Postmodern. Review of Spectacular Allegories: Postmodern American Writing and the Politics of Seeing by Josh Cohen

Josh Cohen, in his new book Spectacular Allegories: Postmodern American Writing and the Politics of Seeing, argues that postmodern American novelists ranging from Norman Mailer to Joan Didion, Robert Coover to James Ellroy, do not merely fall into accord with this critique -text good; image bad- but are in fact using the allegorical nature of their encounters with and representations of visual culture as a means of reintroducing the image to history, an attempt to construct a new critical politics of visuality. The possibility of a critical visual agency is raised for Cohen in these writers’ gendered representations of the reversible and dialogic nature of specularity-that the watcher may, at any moment, become the watched-a mutable relationship that is made possible by a perceived crisis in masculine narrative and visual authority, and may undermine the domination imposed by that traditional authority

On the Importance of the Collective in Electronic Publishing

We are paid, by and large, and whether we like it or not, for delivering certain kinds of knowledge-work to paying clients. We teach, we advise, we lecture, and so forth, and all of this is primarily done within the constraints of someone else\u27s needs and desires. But the job also involves, or allows, to varying degrees, reserving some measure of our time and devotion for projects that are just ours, projects whose greatest benefits are to our own pleasure and to the collective advancement of the field as a whole. If we’re already operating to that extent within an open-source model, what\u27s to stop us from taking a further plunge, opening publishing cooperatives, and thereby transforming academic publishing from its current (if often inadvertent) non-profit status to an even lower-cost, collectively underwritten financial model? I can imagine two possible points of resistance within traditional humanities scholars toward such a plan, points that originate in individualism and technophobia

Untitled Peer Response to ThoughtMesh by Jon Ippolito and Craig Dietrich

This article discusses the approach taken by ThoughtMesh, a dynamic and compelling mode of structuring and interlinking scholarly texts via shared tags. The combination of a simple user interface with a system of both automatically and manually generated tags that serve as links across all of the texts in the mesh results here in a compelling means of reorganizing scholarly publishing as a community-based, rather than individual, activity, one that recognizes the foundations of such publishing in open, mobile discourse

Learning Public Health Through Civic Issues

This course is organized around current challenging health issues, such as mandatory immunization, childhood obesity, health insurance, tobacco control, etc. Activities included issues-focused debates, lecture and video presentations, case study discussions, and guest speakers. Students completed fifteen hours of community-based service learning, many in the Lawrence Math-Science Partnership, an outreach program in which undergraduates work on after-school STEM enrichment activities with middle-school students. Several activities complemented the course issues, allowing college students to make connections between course theory and community needs, while engaging middle-school students in important public health concepts. The SENCER-SALG assessment (N=189/192 (98%) of enrolled students) indicated that the course was of much/great help for learning in addressing real world issues (80%), looking at the interplay of science and civic issues (71%) and in the service learning activities (53%). 58% of students indicated good/great gains in their interest in volunteering for science-related community service

Introducing MediaCommons

At the moment, we imagine MediaCommons as a wide-ranging network with a relatively static point of entry that brings the participant into the MediaCommons community and makes apparent the wealth of different resources at his or her disposal. On this front page will be different modules highlighting what\u27s happening in various nodes ( today in the blogs ; active forum topics; just posted texts from journals; featured projects). One module on this front page might be made customizable ( My MediaCommons ), such that participants can in some fashion design their own interfaces with the network, tracking the conversations and texts in which they are most interested

Women in the Contact Zone. Review of The Frontiers of Women’s Writing: Women’s Narratives and the Rhetoric of Westward Expansion by Brigitte Georgi-Findlay

Georgi-Findlay\u27s project in The Frontiers of Women\u27s Writing is in many ways a synthesis of these two revisionary projects, both re-attributing importance to women\u27s narratives of westward expansion and re-reading those narratives for their constructions of the colonialist presence in the west. She examines in these narratives, which span genres including fiction, travel writing, semi-public diaries, and personal letters, across a range of cultural discourses ordering relations of race, class, and gender (pp. x-xi) to show how women\u27s accounts are implicated in expansionist processes at the same time that they formulate positions of innocence and detachment (p. xi). By mobilizing Mary Louise Pratt\u27s notions of the contact zone, the anti-conquest, and imperial meaning-making, Georgi-Findlay explores the ways in which the narratives of westward expansion reveal the colonialist project in the West precisely by their attempts at erasing the other cultures present in these contested spaces