Draft Two - In process

Here is a link to my second draft for the ebook.  Please do your critique of this draft.

Social Reading and Research (first draft of ebook chapter)

Prominent literary critic Harold Bloom writes that “real reading is a lonely activity and does not teach anyone to become a better citizen” (Richter, 226). Yet in this same epilogue to his book The Western Cannon: The Books and School of the Ages he claims that “such a reader” reads to “enlarge a solitary existence” (Richter, 226). I find these two statements somewhat at odds with each other and tend to agree more with the later than the former, especially within today’s reading population. Reading is no longer “lonely” and has so much more capacity to “enlarge a solitary existence” by the connections one is able to make with others simply by sharing what one reads online. In the digital information age, individuals and the information they produce are increasingly connected not only by social ties, but ties of information and interest.  Online research of a theme in a book is only a few clicks away from the individual who produced that research. Knowledge is becoming socialized in a way it never has before and literary knowledge is swept up in that bundle as well. I would argue, through my experience this semester, that readers are not only limited when they do not allow themselves access to this socially connected knowledge, but, further, that they are not fully informed and cannot experience the text as it exists socially today. Students of literature must read and engage in a process of social inquiry and discovery, enabled by the richness of online resources, in order to properly engage with a text as it exists in today’s world.

Traditional literary reading and research would have us read the paper copy of the text in isolation, ask several questions about it and do a close reading explication of it, and find a few articles to corroborate our interpretation. Depending on your method or your instruction, you can rearrange the order of those tasks.  I started my academic journey in this way, reading my copy of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and going to the library to search out articles about the subject I was primarily concerned with in the book: the censorship of the N word in Alan Gribben’s latest edition. This is a hot topic in academic circles right now. I found an article that interested me from the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled The Redacted 'Huckleberry Finn': 'Chronicle' Bloggers Respond. Intrigued by the summary of several different arguments revolving around the N word issue, I followed this lead to the Chronicle’s blog (2011). Here I found academic and internet community collide. On these posts academics wrote, posted these articles online, and anyone who wanted could respond via the comments section.  There were even dissenting arguments! I followed one comment to the commenters blog and sent him an email asking more about his opinions. This is just one way information can lead to people who can lead to more information.

It reminds me of a theme in the very novel I was researching. Huckleberry Finn and his friend Tom Sawyer put a lot of stock in “book learnin'”.  At several points in the novel, Tom wants to do everything by the book, at one point chastising his friend Ben when he asks why they can’t play a their game a certain way. Tom says: “Because it ain't in the books so -- that's why. Now, Ben Rogers, do you want to do things regular, or don't you? -- that's the idea. Don't you reckon that the people that made the books knows what's the correct thing to do? Do you reckon you can learn 'em anything? Not by a good deal” (Twain, 11). But in reality, Huck doesn’t begin to really learn until he gets away from a structured school environment and associates with others.  It is in long discussions with Jim, his socially acquired knowledge, that Huck learns the most important lesson and decides not to give Jim up; he discovers that doing what society says is “right,” doesn’t always feel right and decides he’d rather “go to hell” and help a good man become free, than betray his friend (Twain, 217).

Just as Huck has to search outside of books to learn the most important lessons of the novel, readers and students of literature must take off on a wider river of information in order to understand the current social significance of what we read. In my own research journey, I found a plethora of resources that increased my understanding of the novel and involved me in ongoing discussions about it. Listening to the audio version of the novel contextualized the sounds of the dialects I was reading. Searching for syllabi online helped me understand the controversies and issues currently being discussed about the novel. I found a hypertext version of the novel that linked to pictures of the action that helped me as a reader to visualize the plot.  Searching the social streams (such as twitter) that were discussing the novel helped me to find interesting things others were doing with the novel and author such as google maps all the important locations Mark Twain’s life, literary pilgrimages one could take to explore the novel and Twain’s life, photos of original copies of the novel, and even a version of the book translated into bar codes. I also found plenty of blogs and groups discussing themes from the novel. All of these resources and more enriched my study and more fully contextualized my understanding of the issues I was researching. I could not have engaged with the novel to the same degree without using these methods of digital and social inquiry and it is necessary for students of literature today to do the same, because knowledge isn’t isolated anymore. The internet makes even reading a social process.

Richter, David H. Falling into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature. Boston: Bedford, 2000. Print.

"The Redacted 'Huckleberry Finn': 'Chronicle' Bloggers Respond." Chronicle of Higher Education 57.21 (2011): B4. Print.

Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 2003. Print.

Academic Inquiry leads to Social Inquiry

Remember how an academic article in the Chronicle for Higher Ed led me to their blog? Well I was scrolling through the comments on one of their blog posts and found an interesting comment with a link to this person's fascinating blog. I wanted to see if he had written anything more about the Huck Finn censorship issue discussed in the article, but his blog didn't have a way to search past entries and his comment was from three months ago. So I clicked over to his information and sent him the following email:

Granite Sentry,

I followed an interesting comment you made here to your even more interesting blog. I couldn't find a blog history and wondered if you had written any posts of your own on the Huck Finn censorship issue. I am a English student and for a current assignment I am trying to find online discussions of literary issues, like the one posed in the article from the Chronicle. Thanks for your help! 

Bri Zabriskie

http://brizabriskacademic.blogspot.com/

I'll let ya know if I hear anything back. :)

----- update at 2:45 pm 03 Jun 2011 ------

His response:


Hi, BZ. Thanks for your interest, but I haven't touched on the Huck Finn thing so far. Fascinating topic though. Good luck!
GS

Ah well! Better luck in other social endeavors!

One Week of Huck's Digital Life

Ok so this screen shot is actually just of the Twitter feed about Huckleberry Finn in the last 9 hours, but if you follow this link, you can see all the tweets about Huckleberry Finn in the last week or longer. I've found it to be a great resource for social discovery!

Why?

Probably the most interesting/ unique thing I've seen done with Huck Finn so far is to turn the entire book into barcodes... Why? Who knows. But it is pretty cool, you gotta admit.

Here's a screen shot:

Hey it worked!

I commented on that quotes blog that I mentioned in my last post and the author commented back already! Here's our short but relevant conversation!

I wrote: "I find it almost ironic, after reading this quote by the author, that Alan Gribben’s latest edition of Huckleberry Finn has replaced the word “nigger” in a new edition of Huckleberry Finn with “slave” so as not to offend potential readers."

And Richard Scott replied: "Hi, Bri, and welcome to Uphill Writing. A lot of what is going on with Mark Twain’s work would not fit with his philosophy, I think. But then, he DID stipulate that his autobiography should not be released until a hundred years had passed."

Yay for social discovery!

Mark Twain

I found this blog with a number of quotes by Mark Twain through Google Blog Search. I thought this particular quote was somewhat relevant (and slightly ironically) related to my subject of study, the censorship of both Twain's novel and/ or the N word in his novel. The quote?

“Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.” - Mark Twain

Huck Finn Reading Group

That's right! On goodreads. It's private, but I've sent a request to join along with a message about my interest in joining and a link to my blog (forgot to copy the message so I could paste it here before I sent it via goodreads). Thought that'd be an awesome social discovery connection to make especially in relation to my thesis for my chapter of our ebook (see my previous post on my chapter).

Processing Huck Finn Research

I thought I'd share my process of gathering all my research in and trying to formulate it into an outline with you all. Here is my google doc in process. We'll have to see if this embed feature works. If not, check out the external link to my document here.



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bleh. Please ignore that embeded doc and just to to the actual document. It is UGLY.

The N Word

This is truly the hot topic among scholars surrounding Huck Finn and education right now, the censorship of the novel itself, the offending N word, and racism and where I plan to focus my research. The article Aly found for me addresses the attempt by teachers of Huckleberry Finn to teach in an anti-racist way that often brings up subconscious or unnoticed racism. Thus the teaching of the novel itself is under severe debate.

One noted Mark Twain scholar, Alan Gribben, has produced an edition of the book that replaces the word "nigger" in a new edition of Huckleberry Finn with "slave" so as not to offend readers and open up potential audiences (i.e. high schoolers) that the book might not have had before. Research I did previously in the Chronicle of Higher Education reveals intense academic debate about the censorship issues this presents. 

 The article Taylor provided for me addressed the N word/ censorship issue as well stating that on the American Library Association's banned- books list on the Web, Huck Finn is right up there in the top ten. I think the fact that this novel and the censorship of it are so controversial is a perfect subject to discuss in an ebook for educators who may be interested about where the conversations about Huck Finn are happening online, what the general public has to say about them (and so their possible students), and even a summary of what is being said. This is a potential aim for my article. I think it would not only interest educators, but i could also write in such a way that it could act as an avenue for the average Joe to become interested in the novel.

Thoreau's Education in ABELL for James Matthews

After many dead ends, at least online, I've decided to start tracking my progress in searching out a useful article for James Matthews who is studying Henry David Throeau's Walden.

2. I have been using ABELL to look for articles about Thoreau and education or teaching (unsuccessfully at least in full text carried at BYU for the past hour I might add).

3. The Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature contains 860,000 records, covering monographs, periodical articles, critical editions of literary works, book reviews and collections of essays published anywhere in the world from 1920 onwards. What I am confused about is why the library site, when I click on ABELL's database takes me to LION and uses that platform to search ABELL. Rather confusing.

4. I searched terms like "thoreau" and "edu*" in the keywords box and "throeau" and "walden" in the subject box. I turned up a number of "brief records" but in order to determine their usefulness to the project I wanted abstracts. I tried looking up several of the journals on the HBLL site but without sucess. Once the journal was in another language, once not listed, and the last time I found an article that from the title looks as though it'd be very pertinent to James's research but is only available in hardcopy at the library. I thought I would list it here for James's to determine it's usefulness.

5. Dillman, Richard H. "Thoreau's Harvard Education in Rhetoric and Composition." Thoreau Quarterly (1981): 47. Print.

6. I assume the article to explore Thoreau's Harvard education though I could not access an abstract of it presently. I thought it might be interesting for James to check out the journal it is in though as that may be a valuable (if dated) resource. The journal is the Thoreau Quarterly and the HBLL has a copy of the journal, including the issue containing the aforementioned article at this location: PS 3053 .T5

7. About his research, James wrote, that he'd like to "analyze Thoreau as a teacher and an educator, that's actually what he did right after he graduated from Harvard. To the casual onlooker of his life at that point, he was rather unsuccessful at it. I want though to look at his mode of teaching in Walden, especially as a spiritual/moral/ethical teacher." An article on Thoreau's Harvard education would certainly be a great entry point into James's research and who knows what other valuable articles he might find in the Thoreau Quarterly.

Good luck James! (P.S. Are you still in the class? I see you haven't posted since the 17th.)

Huck's Bloggophere and Cussin'

2. My purpose is to explore LION (Literature Online), a literary database, in order to pursue my research on connections between current hot topic discussions of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the online writing environment and higher education.

3. LION (Literature Online). This is a resource indexing multiple databases about English poetry and drama, some fiction, and Shakespeare. It has reference works and lists of selected web resources.

4. I searched "Huckleberry Finn" and scrolled down to a list of criticism on the text. The title of one article caught my attention but they didn't have the text, only the "full record". I might've been tempted to count this as a dead end but I'll never tell. However I was so interested in what the article had to say that I went to the library website, looked up the journal that the article was in - Chronicle of Higher Education - and found we had the full text online through EBSCO host so I linked through the journal with the rest of the publication information and then scrolled down till I found this article. I clicked the full text link and there it was!

5. "The Redacted 'Huckleberry Finn': 'Chronicle' Bloggers Respond." Chronicle of Higher Education 57.21 (2011): B4. Print.

6. A compilation of sorts of blog posts by different bloggers from this journal on the deletion of the 'n' word in Huckleberry Finn by editor Alan Gribben of NewSouth. 

7. This article is all about the hottest topic of discussion about Huck Finn today, that Mark Twain scholar, Alan Gribben, has replaced the word "nigger" in a new edition of Huckleberry Finn with "slave" so as not to offend readers and open up potential audiences (i.e. high schoolers) that the book might not have had before. I followed the lead in the article to the Chronicle's original blog posts on the subject and found a listing of several. I'm interested now to know what audiences outside of higher education are having this debate, if any, and what they're saying. 

Literary Inquiry (gone digital)

I gotta say, I appreciate Dr. Burton's efforts to focus us towards literary research of late. At the beginning of the class, we were focusing so much on where literacy is headed and what digital literacy meant that, to be honest, I was a little leery about the whole approach. After all, literary criticism is a huge field full of writers, professors, and critics and to ignore that when the title of the course is Writing Literary Criticism seemed incredibly bizarre to me. Yes, the topics we began with in this class have value, but it's not entirely the purpose of a course like this, is it? (No, Ms. Granger. It isn't. Why don't you step outside with me so I can hex you and hide you in a closet so as to benefit the rest of us who are enjoying class the way it is?)

Lately, I think we've been focusing more on doing research on literature in the critical age which feels a bit more comfortable to me. Anyways, I looked up the course description on BYU's site: "How to address an academic audience, support arguments, and engage effectively in critical conversations about literature." I think we're getting closer to this goal with the class focusing more in general on doing research. I know the library instruction will be largely focused on this.

Researching Huck Finn

Today I went to OER's site to find out more about Huck Finn. After narrowing my search to the humanities and searching the terms "Huckleberry Finn," I found a plethora of resources for exploration. First I found two courses taught at MIT with their syllabi and course information (Course 1 | Course 2). This is valuable information because it is so recent and gives me some idea of where to head with my own research. One of the courses had links to other resources that might be helpful including this awesome site from the University of Virgina that places Mark Twain in his context. I also stumbled upon the site for the Mark Twain museum which I didn't even think of including on my site till now! I've created a "list" with my diigo account to start accumulating these resources so I can delve into them at more depth when I'm ready and add them to my site as I do.

Friending Huck: Making Mark Twain's Novel Universally Accessible

Photo by Jiaren Lau | Flickr

I have valued friends that don't read. That's what they tell me. They are digitally literate: they have deep social network available at a twitch of their fingers on their mobile phones and computers, they can find any information they need at the click of a button, but they "don't read" ...at least not literature.

That's why I want to create an online platform that makes The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain and the discussion surrounding it available and interesting to people who "don't read". Literature professors always encourage us to understand the discussion surrounding a work before we add our own voices to that discussion and I want to create a platform for the average person to have all that information at their fingertips in one place, not having to understand how library research works and the scholarly terms thrown around in critical articles in order to be able to read and participate in a meaningful conversation about the novel. I also hope this to be an excellent resource for those teaching about the novel in public and homeschool environments.