From Text to Txting Ne Media in the Classroom [Paperback]

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.

It is not just that this is a timely collection in response to the way in which the digital now wholly saturates our classrooms, our thinking, our reading and writing. It is also that the editors and contributors to From Text to Txting deeply understand the necessity for humanities teachers and scholars to stand firmly in the 21st century and look ahead to where teaching and scholarship ought to gotoward reading and writing the videogame as much as the play, parsing tweets as much as poems, making sense of the comic book as much as the novel.

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 lsj