I’m writing this post for a number of reasons, not the least of which is an MLA report that recently gained a number of detractors from various circles within the English Department. Rhetoric and composition scholars are (rightly) pointing out that writing pedagogy has long adopted a number of these reforms. Graduate/adjunct advocates are wondering how students can prepare for all of these requirements. Scholars in literary studies are wondering what their field even means after the reforms. Let me say at the outset that I do not think that the MLA report is perfect.

But English departments really need the MLA report.

I was astonished to find this exchange on Rebecca Schuman’s critique of the report, which underlines precisely why it is so urgently needed. Schuman critiques the stipulation on the report to “Reimagine the Dissertation,” with the idea that new forms of the dissertation can only be condescending. “You should not be expected to write a Real Dissertation either. Why don’t you just do an interpretive dance? That sounds neat.” One of her commenters, Carlotte Canning, said the following:

I. Dance. Why is dance the “go to” field when one wants to sneer at something? There’s no such thing as “interpretative dance,” but there is a lot of excellent work in that field. It might be better to ally yourselves with those of us in the arts, instead of using us to make a disdainful point.

Schuman responds that dance “would not–and should not–qualify as a dissertation in English Literature, because it is NOT THE RIGHT FIELD.” And yet, this response strikes me as precisely the wrong way to approach the challenges English has in the twenty-first century. Our discipline should be encouraging experimentation, not quashing it under assumptions of what the field “really” encompasses. Such rhetorical moves, as Ted Underwood has recently and painstakingly pointed out, are often the product of sheer neoconservative fantasy rather than any real understanding of the historical dimensions of our discipline. We certainly should not be ignoring the potential insights that could be found by directly confronting how a University might evaluate original research delivered as a performance.

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The following is a response crafted by the Washington State University English faculty regarding the revelation that WSU is among 55 schools currently under Title IX investigation over the handling of sexual assault allegations. The administration reported and responded to the probe on May 1, and The Seattle Times covered it on May 2. I am proud to be part of a faculty who is passionate about ending both sexual violence and the secrecy surrounding it. Both problems are all too common on American college campuses.

Dear President Floyd,

The U.S. Department of Education recently released a list of universities under investigation for their handling of sexual assault allegations by students. We were dismayed to find Washington State University on that list, and as faculty members we are ready and committed to transforming our campus and its culture.

The large number of sexual assaults on American campuses—the vast majority of which are unreported—has devastating consequences for not only individual victims but also the campus community as a whole. According to the AAUP’s report on Campus Sexual Assault: Suggested Policies and Procedures, co-authored by Professor Donna L. Potts of the WSU English Department, “Sexual assault may affect students’ academic achievement as well as their capacity to contribute to the campus community. [...] Along with decline in academic performance and social withdrawal, long-term outcomes may include increased risk of depression, substance abuse, self-harm, eating disorders, post-traumatic stress, personality disorders, and suicide.” These consequences are only magnified when victims are met with official disregard.

We therefore applaud the administration’s decision to comply with the investigation, provide information, meet with representatives, participate in OCR’s “voluntary resolution” process, and state unequivocally that WSU “does not tolerate any form of sexual harassment, sexual assault, or other sexual misconduct.” We hope that WSU can immediately implement procedures identified in new federal guidelines for responding to campus sexual assault: adopting effective prevention programs, gathering more accurate data on campus assaults, and striving for greater transparency. We would also like to see an expansion of bystander training (such as WSU’s Green Dot program) and continuing efforts to ensure that officers who respond to allegations are properly trained to do so.

None of these measures, however, will be as effective without the full engagement of WSU’s faculty. As faculty members, we are especially well-positioned to lead this fight against sexual assault, and we are committed to doing so. Those of us in English, for example, teach the majority of first-year students, and we are ready to explore co-curricular opportunities to combat directly not only the problem of sexual assault but the larger social and campus culture that enables it. Along with colleagues in other departments, many of us regularly research and teach about issues of gender and sexuality, sexual violence, and prejudice, and we are ready to work to improve the materials and other educational experiences—speakers, readings, campus conversations—that address these issues.

We are especially committed to moving outside our classrooms and working with our counterparts in Student Affairs and advisors and members of student groups to develop a more comprehensive and integrated approach. Along with the Dean of Student Affairs and CCGRS, we have arranged for Laura Gray-Rosendale, author of an award-winning memoir on her rape, College Girl: A Memoir, to come to campus next year to speak and conduct workshops.

We are ready to work with you, Provost Bernardo, and all other members of the university community—faculty, students, and staff—to transform the climate at Washington State. Changing the culture of assault and silence demands the attention of all of us—men and women; faculty, students, and staff; and individuals of all sexualities.

Anything less than our full commitment to create an assault-free campus would effectively disempower and victimize the members of our community who have experienced assault. It would, in short, make us complicit, and we will not be complicit.
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from The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque by Gilles Deleuze

The recent issue of J19 dedicated a section to “Evidence and the Archive” without engaging at all with much of the work done in the digital humanities. This absence is of profound importance to me, because I believe that this kind of lack of collaboration inhibits the critical work humanists can undertake when considering the impact of emerging technologies on cultural experience. Ryan Cordell critiqued the warnings by Maurice Lee and Brian Connolly about the “overabundance” of data as necessarily leading to a lack of critical awareness about the truth by pointing to the many ways the digital humanities have altered their methodologies to address this very point. Ted Underwood, on the other hand, pointed out the lack of any reference to people within Library and Information Science, who study these issues as the major part of their research. [edit: Paul Erickson's piece does engage with library and information science and talks about how librarians might see archives as fundamentally different from literary scholars.] I’d suggest that the inability of most of the authors to mention DH or LIS scholars at all points to a kind of willed ignorance comparable to what Marc Bousquet has recently called the “moral panic” in literary studies.

Normally, panic discourse involves real or perceived threats to a group identified with some aspect of the dominant social order (such as literature faculty members facing the declining cultural capital of their work). Reacting with a disproportionate degree of hostility and resentment, the group generates scapegoats and fake solutions intended to maintain its power and influence in the status quo.

Now Bousquet’s argument has an entirely different context, particularly with regard to jobs and rhetoric and composition, but knee-jerk generalizations against the digital humanities have a similar source: i.e. an anxiety (sometimes justifiable, sometimes not) that work in digital modalities is marginalizing traditional approaches in literary studies. This is not to say that there aren’t good arguments against particular ideologies, methodologies, practices, or funding sources within the digital humanities, but that we need and deserve more care in our critical approaches to technology.

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Nevada Mining diagram from the Comstock Lode, 1877.

While digital humanities have alternately challenged and invigorated discussions surrounding technology in the past few years at the MLA conference, relatively fewer of these discussions have focused on the implications of media objects for literary history. Media archaeology is a loose constellation of different historical approaches to media, characterized by the synthesis of Foucauldian archeology and media-specific analysis by Friedrich Kittler; the deep time work of Siegfried Zielinski; the examination of the postal system by Bernhard Siegert; the archival research of Wolfgang Ernst; and the viral/insect media of Jussi Parikka. As explained by Parikka in What is Media Archaeology?, these approaches see “media cultures as sedimented and layered, a fold of time and materiality where the past might be suddenly discovered anew, and the new technologies grow obsolete increasingly fast.” Yet, media archaeology is also self-consciously anachronistic. “New media might be here and slowly changing our user habits,” Parikka observes, “but old media never left us. They are continuously remediated, resurfacing, finding new uses, contexts, adaptations” (3). How do we uncover these obscured media histories? What are their implications for nineteenth-century literature, a period of massive technological and media change in which many of the assumptions about information technology emerged? How are media objects sites where memory and futurity are negotiated—technically as well as thematically?

These questions form the basis for our roundtable, which draws from the different periods and nationalities of the nineteenth century to create a transatlantic approach to literary history informed by the materialist concerns of media archaeology. As Richard Menke details in Telegraphic Realism (2008), we seek an understanding of literature that delineates “the deep ways in which new technologies, and the wider understandings that a culture could derive from them, register in literature’s ways of imagining and representing the real” (3-4). Yet we also recognize that technological change often occured in uneven and unseen ways. Along with Shannon Mattern, we insist that media objects are enfolded forms of material infrastructure in which we can “dig up the cables, pull out the wires, analyze the disks—and observe their layering and interconnection.” In consumer electronics, this kind of folding is often perceived in the threading of circuits onto a board or the jury-rigging of existing technologies into what Brian Larkin calls the “bowdlerized copies” found in places like Nigeria (20). The comparatively simpler media objects that are the focus of our study are also products of technological threading, jury-rigging, even path dependency in which different technologies are etched into the urban landscape in similar ways, like the “telephone lines [which] follow railway lines” (Varnelis 28). Indeed, we argue that media objects and literary works have analogous pathway dependencies that help to form their global development.

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