Interpretation of Literature
A Student-Generated Exhibit
About This Project
Welcome! This site houses an exhibit of student digital writing that seeks to offer unique insights into various works of literature and serve as a platform for the voices of today’s literature students in the Midwest. To protect the authors and creators, this exhibit is password protected. For access, please contact the site adminstrator here.
The works displayed here come from both formal and informal writing assignments that seek to evoke what Kris Gutierrez terms the “third space,” a place characterized by “distinctive participation structures and power relations,” which offer “the potential for authentic interaction and a shift in social organization of learning and what counts as knowledge” (152). For this project, I find Bonnie Stewart’s work on the digital third space useful for thinking through how we can cultivate the third space, while acknowledging the expectations, pressures, and requirements paired with general education requirements at an R1 institution.
This semester, we had students from all over the Midwest, but also reaching to various locales in Malaysia. Despite, or perhaps because of our different perspectives and experperiences, these classes found creative and unique ways to address themes such as home, sexuality, and transformation in the texts we read and discussed as a class, including as Marilynne Robinson's Home, Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade," and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. The topics they chose to post on in our blog were developed during class discussions and then formulated into prompts for their writing assignment for Paper 2. While they didn't comment on each other's posts on this site, they did select corresponding tags that link their papers together and acknowledge the formative in-class discussions that built connections across the themes and texts addressed in their blog posts. The graph below demonstrates the frequency of certain topics that had a major influence on how each writer framed their interpretations.
In addition to their insightful analytical posts, several students also contributed audio recordings of poetry and fiction excerpts. These recordings followed our mid-semester poetry reading, during which we examined the aural quality of literature, but also paused to simply enjoy the literature.
In a less formal vein, we also curated an author- and work-centered exhibit for Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five that includes a #slaughterhousefive twitter feed with student commentary, several handmade timelines, and sample assignments that I've included for instructors who are interested in incorporating these activities into their classrooms. We created the handmade timelines halfway through the novel in order to clarify not only what was happening in terms of the plot, but also to examine how Vonnegut uses time jumps and purposefully confusing plotlines to make meaning. For the twitter feed, students crafted tweets on an intertextual or historical reference of their choice from the novel, which would later serve as their research topics for Paper 3. This activity moved our conversations outside the bounds of the classroom so that students were responding to and retweeting the ideas of strangers whose only connection to us was this novel. Furthermore, the wide variety of topics, ranging from the International Red Cross Committee to the iconic and disturbing Golliwogs, made the students the experts on their topics. Once they had added to their research they pulled up their tweets and wrote commentary that could accompany their tweets within storify. While these kinds of interactions seem to exemplify Stewart's online third space, they also suggest that such a space is necessarily fragile and temporary. The materials I have posted throughout this exhibit are much more static and conclusory than the processes that produced them.
As a result, the goal of this student exhibit isn't to generate online conversations around the themes and topics that we addressed. Instead, this site serves as a memorial of the authentic conversations and "destinctive participation structures" that occured within the classroom throughout the semester (Gutierrez 152). Furthermore, this collection seeks to validate students by acknowledging their work separate from grades, while still incorporating the skills and expectations demanded in general education humanities courses.
Please remember that the entries here are original works and any references to their work requires citation. For other copy right and liscence concerns see below.
Thank you for your interest!
English Literature, Composition, and Rhetoric Instructor
Site Administrator
Bibliography
Backer, David. “The Purpose of Online Discussion.” Digital Pedagogy Lab. 22 March 2016.
Cronon, William. “'Only Connect…' The Goals of a Liberal Education." The American Scholar. 67.4 (1998): 73-80.
Gutierrez, Kris. “Developing a Sociocritical Literacy In the Third Space.” Reading Research Quarterly. 43.2 (2008): 148-164.
Hamilton, Sam. “Risk Taking is a Form of Playing it Safe.” Digital Pedagogy Lab. 26 April 2016.
Morrison, Aimeée. “Blogs and Blogging: Text and Practice.” Eds. Schreibman and Siemens. n.p.
Price, Kenneth M. “Electronic Scholarly Editions.” Eds. Schreibman and Siemens. n.p.
Stewart, Bonnie. “Third Places and Third Spaces.” Digital Pedagogy Lab. 01 April 2016.