Proposed Grad Course for 2013-14: Digital Romanticisms (Draft)

Here’s my second proposed graduate course for 2013-2014, this time focusing on how digital technology can change the way we think about British Romanticism. I approached it from a historical angle. How, for example, is digital technology changing the stakes and the purpose of literary history? What does the digital humanities, broadly speaking, do to the new historicism and the archive? Further, if we take Marcel O’Gorman’s argument about DH’s fever for archiving as opposed to invention or creativity seriously, what kinds of new purposes for the study of Romanticism can we envision for the digital humanities? Inspirations for this course include Jon Klancher’s course on “Romantic and Postmodern Historicisms,” Andrew Stauffer’s course on “The Digital Nineteenth Century,” as well as various Technoromanticism courses taught by Neil Freistat, Laura Mandell, and Katherine Harris. As always, suggestions are welcomed.

ENGL 521: British Romantic Literature: Digital Romanticisms

This course will consider the impact of digital technology on the study of Romantic literature. A guiding principle will be the historical parallels between the period and our own. While authors in the late 18th and early 19th century dealt with an explosion of print technology, a literate middle class, and a redefinition of the public sphere, we struggle with a world in which digital technology transforms communication at an accelerating rate, where expertise is being questioned by new forums for authorship, and where the public sphere we had taken for granted seems to be disappearing. In the wake of such changes, this course will examine digital editions, digital archives, distant reading, GIS-enabled projects, social media sites, games, and alternative histories as potential new methods for studying Romanticism. To what degree can these new forms of communication archive, represent, or transform the history of Romanticism? What is the role of a scholar of Romantic literature? Why study Romanticism at all? Course requirements include weekly blog posts, twitter conversations, and a semester-long digital humanities project that will be completed collaboratively.

Required Books:

• Jerome McGann, Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World Wide Web. Palgrave, 2004.
• Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation. U of Chicago Press, 1983.
• China Mieville, Perdido Street Station. Del Ray, 2003.
• Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History. Verso, 2005.
• Jussi Parrika. What is Media Archaeology? Polity, 2012.
• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein. Broadview, 2012.
• William Wordsworth, The Prelude. Penguin, 1996.

Course Objectives

• Investigate the relationship between media change and historical writing.
• Articulate the benefits and problems of archival research in relation to the discourse of new historicism and the struggle over expertise between scholars and online fandom.
• Learn how nineteenth-century authors dealt with media change and what opportunities for creativity these changes afforded them.
• Learn the basics of HTML, CSS, and strategies of textual markup, digital editing, and distant reading.
• Acquire digital skills including project management, collaboration, and other skills based on the needs of the project we envision.

Week 1: History and Historicism

1. Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation. U of Chicago Press, 1983.
2. William Wordsworth, The Prelude. Penguin, 1996.

Week 2: The Reading Public

1. William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge UP, 2007.
2. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein. Broadview, 2012.

Week 3: The Book and the Newspaper

1. James Mussell and Suzanne Paylor. The Nineteenth Century Press in the Digital Age. Palgrave, 2012.
2. Selections from Blackwood’s and The London Magazine.

Week 4: A History of the Archive

1. Examine Blake Digital Text Project, The William Blake Archive, and The Blake 2.0 Cloud.
2. Jerome McGann, Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World Wide Web. Palgrave, 2004.
3. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Read in the BDTP and the WBA.

Week 5: XML, TEI, and the Digital Scholarly Edition

1. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein. Ed. Stuart Curran. Romantic Circles Electronic Edition.
2. Textual Coding Initiative. TEI Consortium.
3. Allen H. Renear “Text Encoding.” In A Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by Ray Siemens, John Unsworth, and Susan Schreibman. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.

Week 6: Maps

1. David Cooper, “The Poetics of Place and Space: Wordsworth, Norman Nicholson and the Lake District”, Literature Compass, 5 (May 2008).
2. Lancaster University, Mapping the Lakes: A Literary GIS.
3. Thomas Gray, ‘Thomas Gray’s Journal of his Visit to the Lake District in October 1769′, ed. by William Roberts (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001)
4. Seamus Perry, (ed), ‘Coleridge’s Notebooks: A Selection’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)

Week 7: Encyclopedia and Wikipedia

1. Robert Darton. The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie: 1775-1800. Harvard UP, 1987.
2. Andy Famiglietti, “Negoitating the Neutral Point of View: Politics and the Moral Economy of Wikipedia.” Vimeo.
3. Close Reading of the Talk pages on several Wikipedia pages associated with “Romanticism.”

Week 8: Distant Reading

1. Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History. Verso, 2005.
2. Dan Cohen and Fred Gibbs, “A Conversation with Data: Prospecting Victorian Words and Ideas.” (Pre-Print Version). DanCohen. May 30, 2012.

Week 9: Distant Readings

1. Ryan Heuser and Long Le-Khac. “A Quantitative Literary History of 2,958 Nineteenth Century British Novels: The Semantic Cohort Method.” Stanford Literary Lab.
2. Ted Underwood, “How You Were Tricked into Doing Text Mining.” The Stone and the Shell. February 6, 2011.
3. —. “Where to Start with Text Mining.” The Stone and the Shell. August 14, 2012.
4. —. “The Differentiation Between Literary and Non-Literary Diction.” The Stone and the Shell. February 26, 2012.
5. —. “Etymology and nineteenth-century poetic diction; or, singing the shadow of the bitter old sea.” March 19, 2012.

Weeks 10: Distant Reading and Visualization Experiments

Week 11: The Nineteenth-Century and Media Archaeology

1. Jussi Parrika. What is Media Archaeology? Polity, 2012.
2. Rachel Bowser and Brian Croxall, “Industrial Evolution.” Neo-Victorian Studies, 3.1 (2010)

Week 12: Alternative and Weird Histories: Steampunk

1. China Mieville, Perdido Street Station. Del Ray, 2003.
2. Play Echo Bazaar.

Week 13: Steampunk

1. Richard Coyne. Technoromanticism: Digital Narrative, Holism, and the Romance of the Real. MIT Press, 2001.
2. Mieville, Perdido Street Station

Week 14: Conclusions/The Future of Romanticism?