Course Syllabus

Hyper Hermeneutics: Understanding Narrative in the Digital Age

This course will take up two important questions: what is hermeneutics; and how are we to make sense of the often strange and unfamiliar world of contemporary, digital-age narrative?

Print narratives, like Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, and the Lincoln Motor Group’s hypermedia narrative, Meet the Lucky Ones, both experiment with extreme forms of fragmentation, presenting stories that utterly violate Aristotle’s narrative unities. Even so, we are able (if with some difficulty) to make sense of them as “unified” narratives. How is this possible? What interpretive strategies have we developed to allow us to not only understand, but even to enjoy, these “problematic” works?

The process of uncovering the multiple and sometimes subtle mechanisms operating within the sphere of digital-age narrative will lead quickly to deep questions of interpretation and understanding – what does it mean to interpret a digital-age narrative, what kind of works are to be interpreted, what is the relationship between the author, the reader, and the work, and what understandings of the digital-age environment are necessary to begin this work of interpretation, to name just a few – questions central to the hermeneutical tradition.

As Richard Palmer succinctly explains, “hermeneutics is the study of understanding, especially the task of understanding texts” (Hermeneutics 8). There is a foundational impediment, however, to interpreting texts, referred to as the “hermeneutical problem”: how can one accurately interpret texts written by other people, potentially living in far distant lands and possibly in long ago times? Hans-Georg Gadamer, one of the towering figures in modern hermeneutical thought, notes that the hermeneutical problem is characterized by the fact that “something distant has to be brought close, a certain strangeness overcome, a bridge built between the once and the now.” (“Scope” 22). Though Gadamer’s focus is on works from the past, Palmer clarifies that hermeneutics is the process by which “something foreign, strange, separated in time, space, or experience is made familiar, present, comprehensible” (14). The act of building a bridge between digital-age narratives and our “familiar, present and comprehensible” understandings of traditional narrative modes and structures must be performed very carefully, lest the “strangeness” of digital-age narrative be lost, buried under the connotations of traditional narrative and the now-familiar (and thus seemingly “transparent”) instrument of the personal computer.

The work of this seminar will be to acquaint ourselves with modern hermeneutical theory – the efforts of textual theorists to understand how it is we understand texts – and to apply these insights to a range of difficult and problematic contemporary narratives. The hermeneutical theory will help us to make sense of our work to make sense of the texts, which will, in turn, give us common experiences and language, with which we will make sense of the theoretical texts, and so on. Proceeding circuitously and recursively, the more we begin to understand about one, the more we will be able to understand about the other, and vice versa.

This seminar will be challenging. Hermeneutics is widely considered to be one of the most difficult theoretical undertakings in the entire field of English Studies. We also will be grappling with notoriously challenging and structurally innovative narratives. If you’re willing to give it a try, though, this seminar will give you insight into the big questions of English Literature: what is a text; what is a reader; what is reading; how do we understand understanding; and what are the relationships (if any) between culture, technology, and narrative?

Course Texts

• Roland Barthes’ S/Z
• Michael Betcherman and David Diamond’s The Daughters of Freya (online)
• Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler
• N. Katherine Hayles’ Writing Machines
• Louise Rosenblatt’s The Reader the Text the Poem
• Rachel Timms and Laurence Hayes’ Whatever You Want
• Additional readings (available online or on reserve)

Course Requirements

Seminar Standards:

• Informed Participation in weekly seminar discussions.

• 5-minute presentation to open discussions. These presentations should help open up the discussion of one of the major assigned texts by focusing on a passage, re-focusing on an issue raised in another work, or by bringing a critical/theoretical perspective to bear – the result should be questions of interpretation posed for the seminar which will open up conversation.

• Seminar project: this research/critical project will develop over the semester, beginning as a proposal and resulting in two forms: first, as a draft conference presentation of 15-20 minutes (no longer than 8 pages); second as a typescript of about 20 pages with notes and bibliography. These forms of the project aim at providing members of the seminar with two versions (three, if you count the proposal) of their work, which they might submit for publication or presentation. Related calls for papers will be distributed to the seminar as they are released.
  

Distributed Cognition:

• 5-minute presentation of research resource, one book from the seminar critical bibliography. These presentations are aimed at providing all members of the seminar with working knowledge of several important resources.

• 5-minute presentation on a “problematic” contemporary narrative; a report to acquaint the rest of the seminar with another work of interest, which should have some relation to the assigned works and which could also be connected to the seminar project.

• Blog responses to the weekly assigned texts: a critical/analytical response to that week’s assigned readings posted to the course blog. This will be the blogged equivalent of a 1-page paper. The brevity of these posts will require difficult critical choices on your part. Because interpretation never happens in a vacuum, you will also read your classmates’ posts and comment thoughtfully on their responses.