Who: John Plotz, Professor of English and American Literature
LTS Liaisons: Sarah Shoemaker and Anne Woodrum
Course: ENG 40B: Birth of the Short Story: Gods, Ghosts, Lunatics
Overview
During the spring 2008 semester, students from Professor John Plotz’s course “Birth of the Short Story” (English 40B) analyzed and reinterpreted short stories from the nineteenth century using multimedia tools, including blogs, Web pages, and video.
For their first “‘Publishing’ a Short Story” assignment, students set out to locate or re-discover a forgotten story that they thought worthy of republication. Working collaboratively in groups of 3 to 4, the students delved into the resources of the Brandeis library, both digital and print sources, to produce modern editions of their chosen stories.
Students made use of full-text online databases of nineteenth-century short stories as well
as original print editions held in the stacks and in the Archives & Special Collections Department.
Along with the text of the short story, the modern editions contained contextual and critical components created by the students, such as a preface, critical introduction, note on the text, glossary, and illustrations. Each group was allowed to select the appropriate publishing format for its edition. Creative use of the Web was encouraged but not required, and the students produced their modern editions in a variety of formats, including print, Web, and video.
For their final assignment, students were given an opportunity to return to these “Publishing” projects and examine them in a new medium. Using a blog, students posted online commentaries, a sort of “director’s cut,” in which they excerpted and analyzed their projects.
The result is the Online Republication Showcase, which gives an inside look at some of these publishing projects. In their posts, students published passages from their original projects, described how they re-discovered their lesser-known stories, reflected upon the assignment and the implications of republishing and Web publishing, and explained why they want their projects to be available beyond the Brandeis community.
The Showcase also includes links to some of the other students’ creative projects, including a multimedia interpretation of Golem stories, a translation of Varlam Shalamov’s “The Resurrected Larch” in Web format, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Endicott and the Red Cross” reimagined as a modern-day movie trailer, and more.
Intended Learning Outcomes
- To gain some understanding of the original manifestations of stories that we generally view only in their modern formats.
- To grapple with publication questions that are analogous to—although very far removed from!—publication decisions facing original authors and publishers
From John’s Perspective:
“Pushing students to research original visual material related to the author, the work, or the original place of publication (e.g., page views from surrounding issues of a magazine) proved surprisingly productive—as is asking them to consider making visual responses to the work, although that seems a bit less grounded in the scholarly ambitions of the project.
“There are copyright issues surrounding reproductions of twentieth-century materials—and embedding video from other sources—that have to be navigated carefully.
“Students were astonishingly eager to run with the project, once they were given ownership of it. Therefore, the key might be to figure out useful ways to channel or harness that excitement and energy—as a first foray, I think I downplayed the structural constraints and the rigorous formatting limits, but next time around, I would look around for a better guide to how to produce such Web publications in ways that conform more closely to scholarly forms.
“I hear that the NINES project at UVA is about to release a guide to scholarly preparation of research/database sites. That might prove a useful resource for future versions of this project.
Contributors: Anne Woodrum, Sarah Shoemaker, and John Plotz
Last Updated: 01/14/09
