From Text to Txting

Paul Budra is author of A Mirror for Magistrates and the de casibus Tradition and co-editor of Part Two: Reflections on the Sequel and Soldier Talk: The Vietnam War in Oral Narrative (IUP, 2004). He is Associate Professor of English and Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Simon Fraser University.Clint Burnham is the author of The Jamesonian Unconscious, The Benjamin Sonnets, The Only Poetry that Matters: Reading the Kootenay School of Writing, and other works of criticism, fiction, and poetry. He is Associate Professor of English at Simon Fraser University.

Literary scholars face a new and often baffling reality in the classroom: students spend more time looking at glowing screens than reading printed text. The social lives of these students take place in cyberspace instead of the student pub. Their favorite narratives exist in video games, not books. How do teachers who grew up in a different world engage these students without watering down pedagogy? Clint Burnham and Paul Budra have assembled a group of specialists in visual poetry, graphic novels, digital humanities, role-playing games, television studies, and, yes, even the middle-brow novel, to address this question. Contributors give a brief description of their subject, investigate how it confronts traditional notions of the literary, and ask what contemporary literary theory can illuminate about their text before explaining how their subject can be taught in the 21st-century classroom.

IntroductionPaul Budra and Clint Burnham1. Roll a D20 and the Author DiesPaul Budra2. Consider the Source: Critical Considerations of the Medium of Social MediaKirsten C. Uszkalo and Darren James Harkness3. Voice of the Gutter: Comics in the AcademyTanis MacDonald4. Television: The Extra Literary DeviceDaniel Keyes5. Hypertext in the Attic: The Past, Present and Future of Digital WritingAndreas Kitzmann6. The ABCs of Viewing: Material Poetics and the Literary ScreenPhilip A. Klobucar7. "Let the Rhythm Hit 'Em": Hip-Hop, Prosody, and MeaningAlessandro Porco8. Thinking Inside the Box: A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of Television StudiesC.W. Marshall and Tiffany Potter9. Middle Brow Lit and the End of Postmodernism,Clint BurnhamContributors