English Matters

It’s the end of the Spring semester and time for me to leave UTA. I thought I’d leave by sharing this wonderful anecdote about phonemes, morphemes and plain old sound-it-out fun.

This evening, as I basked in not having to work on any assignments, my husband and I were spending our time browsing the web and listening to the news.

All of a sudden, my husband asks, “What is hypocrites?” I was a little surprised, because I know English is his second language, but he has a very good handle on usage and vocabulary. I thought he knew what a hypocrite is, because I briefly remembered that word being used in our marriage before.

“A hypocrite?” I asked in surprise.

“Yeah, h-i-p-p-o-c-r-a-t-e-s.”

“Hmm, that sounds like someone who just doesn’t know how to spell hypocrite. It’s h-y-p…”

“It says, ‘Hypocrites used honey in many different ways.’”

I burst out with sudden enlightenment. “Oh! Hippocrates, the Greek physician!”

The beauty of language never ceases to amaze me.

When I moved into the Chair’s office in the far corner of 203 Carlisle Hall, in 2002, the first person to visit me in my new digs was Emory Estes. I was barricaded behind the Chair’s desk, staring blankly at the blank wall in front of me. “TIM!” said Emory. “I was sitting in that VERY spot when I had my HEART attack!” Thanks, Emory, I thought. Thanks for the vote of confidence.

Many of my conversations with Emory in those years revolved around death, always his own. “I am about to depart,” Emory would tell me. “Soon I will be part of the force that through the green fuse that drives the flower. The noble and virtuous cancer has made an end of me.” (Everything with Emory was “noble and virtuous.”) This was back around the turn of the century, understand. Emory so routinely announced he was dying that I was, naturally, dead certain that he would outlive me. When I saw his death notice in the Star-Telegram, I was sure it was hyperbole.

Emory Estes taught at UTA for fifty years or so – or would have, if it had been called UTA when he got here. It was a two-year school then, one of the jewels of the state junior-college system, and Emory was a young MA with an irrepressible presence and an absolute, lifelong love of teaching. His first office was shared with seven other junior faculty (well, so he said; allowing for Emory, let’s make that two or three). It was most notable for having been repurposed later on into a second-floor women’s restroom in Ransom Hall.

I would be insincere if I extolled Emory as a distinguished “researcher.” He published little in his field of training (19th-century American Literature). He was always going to write the big book about Robert Burns, and we always knew he never would. But you know what? Times change, and we change in them. Emory went back to school, while teaching full-time here, to earn his PhD at TCU. In those days, earning a PhD in itself demonstrated that you had serious scholarly credentials. As it should! Nowadays, junior faculty come aboard with a PhD, six articles, a dissertation under consideration at a university press, and a “second book project” confidently announced. These young teachers aren’t any smarter or more learned than Emory Estes; they’re just living in a different century.

When I became Graduate Advisor in the late 90s, I was struck by how many prospective grad students had become inspired to earn their MAs or PhDs by being students of Emory Estes. And during those years, many, many recommendation letters for successful graduate students came from Emory. I learned to trust his judgment – admittedly based more on his reading of a student’s character and dedication than their adherence to the most recent theoretical shibboleths – as one of the best indicators of prospective academic success.

During my brief term as department Chair, Emory said to me: “Tim, you have to understand about being Chair: you CAN’T have any FRIENDS any more! You have to make decisions about these people’s careers. They can’t like you. You can’t like THEM!” It was good advice about supervisory management, but it was oddly ironic. Emory Estes always had myriad friends. Everybody continued to respect and like him, despite his peccadillos, despite the fact that he’d made tenure-or-nay decisions about so many of us.

Emory had a sharply-defined sense of himself and his perquisites, but he was an extraordinarily generous senior colleague. One of my favorite stories about him can perhaps be left to its teller, but it concerns a research area that one of our faculty subsequently developed into a world-renowned speciality. One day, Emory (the story goes) said to one of our colleagues, “YOU can teach a course on {thus-and-so}, can’t you?” Matter of fact, Emory had the strongest of personal claims on the same course material. But he cheerfully, in fact insistently, consigned it to his junior colleage – and the rest is history.

Emory persists for me in a haze of his inimitable cologne and his proclivity to clutch his male colleagues on the shoulderblades – and to hug and kiss his female ones. Those of us young enough to be his son have long since been trained out of such predilections. But he never meant the slightest harm by it. He was one of those tactile fellow-workers of whom, as the wife of one of my mentors once told me, and I know Dorothy Estes would concur: “I never worried. He never strayed, not in more than half a century.” Physical contact is good for us mammals. I sometimes wish that I could now be half as uninhibited as Emory.

Emory was chair of the English Department at UTA for 12 years, longer than any of us except for the mythical Duncan Robinson. After his heart attack in the line of duty, Emory’s admin not-so-subtly switched out the departmental coffeemaker from caffeinated to non-. Everyone complied meekly, though the quality of our 8am lectures may have suffered for a while. For many years, Emory’s admin just as unsubtly shielded him from irritating decisions. When a faculty member (in those days of paper) submitted a suggestion that his admin didn’t want him to hear about, the admin would impale it on “The Spike,” one of those dangerous office items more typically reserved for obsolete restaurant checks. Emory didn’t know the half of what went on – except of course, he always knew more than one-and-a-half of what was brewing, and acquiesced in his own protection.

Emory retired – well, at least announced his retirement – about ten years ago; he went on to teach on “phased” retirement for several more years, and when at last fully retired, he was literally the “dean” of the UTA faculty, the professor who’d been here before anybody else was.

I never talked with Emory about spirituality; I don’t to this day know what his religion was, if he had any. I do know that for fifty years, he began every class with “Good Morning, Scholars!” and called every test he gave an “Opportunity.” 1960s liberal eyewash, I hear you cry, and perhaps you’re right. But what a wonderful way to accentuate the positive about academic evaluation. So I think of Emory’s death as he taught students to think about difficult passages in their intellectual careers. Wherever you are now, Emory, I am sure you are making the most of this Opportunity.

Rachel Elmalawany – I’m an English and journalism senior. I’ve been invited to post student perspectives of the English department on the English Matters blog. I write columns for UTA’s student newspaper, The Shorthorn, both online and in print. I freelance for trade magazines and blogs (yes, it is as glamorous as it sounds!) between studying, volunteering, internships and running a household. I enjoy theory almost as much as theory enjoys me, and have an uncanny appreciation for the power of words.

Here’s a little nursery rhyme which I’m sure is at least slightly relatable:

Hush little English student, don’t say a word,
Your professor’s going to grade you on a curve.

If that curve doesn’t ease your mind,
You can go home and have a glass of wine.

If that wine doesn’t help you forget,
Just remember when you’re done, you’ll have a lot of debt.

If that debt doesn’t make you work hard,
You can always live in your mom’s backyard.

If that backyard doesn’t sound like fun,
Then now is the time to take action.

If that action doesn’t give results,
Then maybe you should pick another major.

In light of recent advancements in technology and pedagogical attempts at evolving alongside it, consider the following:

If humanity relies on technology, it will cause them to be forgetful; they will stop using their minds because they will rely too much on technology to do the thinking for them, not by their own critical thinking, but by means of algorithms and binary code. What we have discovered is not a recipe for learning and knowing, but for empty exposure to more ideas than we’d ever be able to absorb. It is no real knowledge that you offer your students if you allow technology in your teaching, but only something that seems like knowledge.  It will only seem as though they are learning effectively, while for the most part they learn nothing, and as students filled, not with wisdom but the idea of wisdom, they will be a burden to society.

If you are familiar with Plato, then what I’ve written will sound strikingly similar to Plato’s own words:

“If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.”

…which we remember because someone wrote it down…

Plato’s lived in an oratory culture.  I myself am constantly exposed to oral tradition through intense memorization of the Qur’an which follows strict rules of recitation.  Speaking through a double lens, straddling ancient tradition and new-age developments, I ask myself – is one really better than the other?

It seems every generation bemoans the next, complaining of some old thing lost and some terrible, useless new thing gained.  Teachers hated erasers when manufactured on the ends of pencils, saying it would cause students to stop thinking about what they write before writing it, ruining their minds. Writing will make us forget, erasers will make us stop thinking.  Technology will make us mindless googly-eyed reading machines?

Mark Twain said that history doesn’t repeat itself but it sure does rhyme.  It seems that looking through history, any technological advance, including writing itself, was seen as a threat to higher thinking and humanity as a whole.  What we’ve really gained are tools which make learning and thinking easier, not dumber.  I swear if I had to remember everything my professors profess without note-taking, though I try hard, I’d certainly do worse on exams that I already have.

It is said in an Islamic tradition that the first thing created, even before the earth, was the pen and it was ordered to write.  Even Plato believed in to theion, the divine, though more in a ho theos, common noun type of way.   The pen is divine creation, Plato! If we apply this divine logic to present-day, can we say that laptops are divine too?  Because I really don’t know what I’d do without my online thesaurus.

Because a poem be like a pearl in the midst of your papers, findeth inscribed below another offering in the style of John of the Donne wherein Master Zachary Sandri compareth love to your modern device of moving portraits.


Celluloid (A Kiss in Times Square)
(A Petrarchan Sonnet Inspired by John Donne)

by Zachary Sandri

I’ve been to see my love a dozen times,

and each time features of her flesh do change.

In all my searching, love hath rearranged,

yet every time my mistress stands sublime.

Rosy cheeks reflect mirrors free from grime.

Spirit, here confined; images estranged.

In mine hungry eyes, a body is exchanged

for celluloid, my heart’s great petty crime.

On screens in cinemas my love doth wait.

We share a kiss twixt dancing Times Square lights

or lay prostrate in emerald fields of fate.

Alas, with absent warmth it feels not right.

My love in paper lights doth glow and gleam.

My lips press up against the movie screen.

The students of the olde history of the much esteemed literature of Britain be writing poems in the style of John of the Donne this finaltide.  And forsooth they are most deserving of an audience more broad and be-steeped in learning than their instructress, and for this reason find inscribed below the words of Hannah Coble, who hath wrapped the mystery of love within a comparison to the new-fangled device of minstrelsy y-cleped I-pod.


The Bottle

by Hannah Coble

Send back my iPod home to me,

So that I may have music while I’m at sea;

I’ve nothing left to listen but the waves,

Who afford one tune,

Come sunlight or moon,

That it were

You prefer

Keep it then, else our playlists due their graves.

Send back my yellow earphones then,

Which we shared time and time again;

Though given their use of you and they,

To divvy him,

By use of them,

And ru’n both

But I’m loathe

To do more than toss, so keep them anyway.

Neither iPod nor earphones do I want back,

To listen and endure and remind of that I lack;

Too easy it’d be to lose myself in song,

As I was lost,

In you then crossed,

They would too

Empty as you

Would merely linger, as another you did wrong.

So the phone rings, and it’s my old friend and mentor Lars Abraham. You remember Lars. He teaches four courses in English per semester at Seattle State University, as a reward for his decades of service.

“Lars, I can’t talk right now. I’m doing some reading for a big lecture at UTA this week. It lasts for three hours on Thursday morning. We’re hearing from Neal Raisman, an expert on how to provide great academic customer service!”

“Customer service,” said Lars. “What, do they want fries with their blue books now?”

“Lars, please go out and tell some kids to get off your lawn. I need to keep up with what it takes to be an effective 21st-century faculty member.”

“So what pearls of wisdom does this Raisman intend to cast before your swinish self?”

“Ha ha. Lars, stop channeling John Houseman in The Paper Chase long enough to read Dr. Raisman’s blog post on How to Cope and Overcome Irritated and Irritating Students. ”

“You should read it to me. My eyes go strabismic trying to read these bog posts or what you may call them.”

“Fine. Listen to this, Lars. Title:”

How to Cope and Overcome Irritated and Irritating Students

“Ah, it has been a long time since I have seen “cope” as a transitive verb. As Iago says to Othello, ‘He hath, and is again to cope your wife.’ Are you sure this Raisman knows what he’s saying, Tim?”

“Stow the pedantry, Lars. Raisman has dynamic stuff to offer. Listen to this:

Here are fopur ways guaranteed to help make irritating students less irritated and thus easier to help.

“What, pray tell, does “fopur” mean?”

“Maybe it’s a typo for ’super.’”

“So how do I make the irritating of the world less irritating?”

“Less irritated, Lars,” I said. “Rule Number One is Smiling but do not overdo it.”

“I parse such sentences at my peril. But presumably I should smile at my students? Tim, I have not smiled since 1962. If I start smiling now, my students will think I need to go into Assisted Living.”

“You don’t need to go all Vanna White, Lars. A little smile will do the trick. Listen:”

A smile is correct and called for but it needs to be an empathetic one. A simple, small smile that says “I see you’re upset and I WILL try to help.” The smile you would use with one of your children with a problem. Students are someone’s children and will respond to this smile.

“I am going to send this Raisman a shipment of commas. In any case, Tim, I should smile at a grown adult as if he or she were a child.”

“Everybody’s somebody’s baby, Lars.”

“And if you were my father’s baby, you would have gotten a smile once a year, on Tisha B’Av. So here I am, smiling at my students as if they have just dropped their Popsicle. Then what?”

“Here’s the second technique:”

Give and Name- Get a Name This is a technique that asks you to do exactly what it says. You provide an irritated student your name and ask her his or hers. “Hi. I’m ________. And you are?” When you exchange names you create a small community of people who know one another.

“I know how I will do this. Hello. I am University Distinguished Professor Lars Abraham, PhD. I assume your name is Jessica, everyone’s seems to be these days. That will create a small community of people who acknowledge that I deserve their respectful deference.”

“If you take that attitude, Lars, you’ll have to go straight to Step Three:”

Apologize This is a lesson that we learned from people like Captain Kangaroo on TV

“Tim, Captain Kangaroo spent a significant portion of his time chatting up Mr. Green Jeans and hallucinating about dancing bears. He had a lot to apologize for.”

“Apologize all the same, Lars. And then proceed to step four, Compliments:”

If you need to give a fallacious compliment to keep you and the student healthier, do it. Here’s an example. “Hi, I’m _____ Just want to say that I like your tee shirt, blouse, hair, glasses, jeans, backpack…” whatever seems to strike your eye quickly. Say it casually too so it will sound less contrived. Then as the student’s anger is interrupted you can even follow it up with a normal secondary question such as “Where did you get the tee, blouse, glasses….”

“Excuse me. What if the first thing that strikes my eye is Jessica’s …”

“Don’t say it, Lars. English Matters is a family weblog.”

“I was going to say ‘necklace.’ So here I am, an 82-year-old man with cigar breath. I frequently button my shirt unevenly, and eggstains are not unknown thereupon. I see 19-year-old Jessica, and I get close enough to say casually Hi, I’m University Distinguished Professor Lars Abraham, PhD. Just want to say that I like your necklace. Jessica looks around for a campus policeman. While she is distracted, I follow up with Where did you get that stunning necklace, Jessica? Tim, I am too old to deal with restraining orders.”

“Lars, you’re full of beans today, but the plain fact is that college faculty need to become customer servants if we’re to deal with today’s savvy, entitled consumer. Universities need to be run like businesses, Lars, and that includes creating a satisfying, if fallacious, customer-service environment.”

“Tim, for once in my life I will not bother to refute the claim that a university should be run like a business.”

“Great!”

“Because it is horse manure. But let us accept the premise. Seattle State is a business. And I am the point person for customer relations.”

“Now you’re seeing the light, Lars!”

“Now, every year, my salary slips further and further behind inflation. Every year, I get more courses to teach, and the class sizes get larger. Every year, there is more committee work. I spend more and more time performing self-evaluation, and more and more time peer-evaluating colleagues who have already proven their worth over dozens of years in the profession.”

“Nothing like that happens at UTA, Lars. We’re an emerging Tier One institution!”

“I spend more and more time filling out compliance forms, and tracking my behavior on websites that ask me to give progress-report grades every four weeks, or simply to note that I have talked with my thesis students. Already this semester, I have wasted six hours in meaningless meetings, four trying to get into classrooms with the wrong electronic-lock PIN number, six listening to presentations by Deans, and another eight trying to encrypt my laptop computer.”

“Should have thrown it out the window, Lars.”

“What? Anyway, I am trying to say this, Tim. Many, many service businesses are making working conditions worse for their staff. They are cutting corners, imposing regulations, stifling initiative, dictating every aspect of performance from the corporate office. There are no incentives for good performance, and many threats for bad performance. Service gets worse and worse, and customers are irritated. And what is the most common response from Corporate?”

“Cash in their stock options and move to the Caymans?”

“The response from management is: SMILE HARDER. As things are getting worse, pretend they are getting better. Live the brand. Greet each customer as if you were Captain Kangaroo on a tea bender. If you do not, there are a hundred unemployed people in line ready to smile even harder. We call them adjunct faculty.”

“Lars, you are such a peevish cynic. I don’t know why I called you.”

“You did not, Tim; I called you.”

“Yeah, why?”

I could hear Lars smile. “This is Lars, Tim. I’m sorry if I upset you. You have such a nice telephone voice. Where did you get that beautiful telephone voice?”

Recently we got a memo from the Provost’s Office insisting that we encrypt our laptop computers with military-grade security software. Since I went to graduate school for English and not computer science, I failed miserably at the task. So I had to call my friend Ken Kleinkram, who was just named Associate Pinch Provost for Informatic Assets at a salary several multiples of my own. Ken came over to my office with a set of tiny screwdrivers and a device that looked like a tricorder.

“Let’s see if we can’t get you encrypted, Timbo,” said Ken. “First of all: are you connected to the Internet?”

“Ha ha,” I said, “the old ‘Tim’s an idiot’ assumption. I am certainly connected to the Internet,” I said, “it’s this grey cord that comes out of this socket here.” Which I picked up and pulled out of the various desk spaghetti, to find that the other end was plugged into my printer.

“That might explain your issues,” said Ken. He plugged something into something else, intoned a few incantations, pressed a few keys, and suddenly some element of my laptop began to rumble away like a reactor preparing for a meltdown.

“That program will run in the background for 36 hours,” said Ken. “Just don’t turn your computer off in the meantime. And don’t try to log into MyMav or Blackboard while the encryption is running.”

“That’s OK,” I said. “It’s the first week of the semester, so MyMav and Blackboard are down anyway. But tell me this: why do I need military-grade encryption on my laptop? It already has a password.”

“But what if somebody stole your laptop, broke it open, and extracted the hard disk? Thieves have procured countless bytes of essential medical-research data from unencrypted university laptops across the nation.”

“I don’t do medical research, Ken. I teach poetry.”

Ken thought for a minute. “You’re going to go all snarky on me in a sec, aren’t you?” he said. “Can you shut up for ten minutes while I explain how vital this encryption can be to the University and the State of Texas?”

I promised to restrain myself.

“OK, then,” Ken said, clicking on my hard-disk icon. “Let me show you the kinds of problems you’re not anticipating. Look at all this data that would just lie around unencrypted if you didn’t comply. What’s this, for instance?” He clicked on a file, and a checkerboard-like grid came up.

“That’s the Monday Prize Crossword Puzzle from the Financial Times.”

“Did you solve it?”

“I have one word left to get. If I mail in the first randomly drawn correct answer, I win a Collins Gem Dictionary!”

“And what if somebody from Texas A&M steals the answer and wins the dictionary?”

“Presumably it would improve spelling in College Station. But I’m starting to see what you mean. This is some serious intellectual property we’re talking about here.”

“No snark, you promised. What’s this file?”

“Oh, that’s a spreadsheet. I’m trying to find out how many major-league second basemen have played an entire season while hitting more than 20 doubles and grounding into fewer than 10 double plays. I need to find better data, though. Going through newspapers boxscore by boxscore is slow work.”

“And what if that research gets pre-empted by our competitors? Suddenly peer-reviewed results will be racked up by other universities, based on your man-hours of research production. What are these?”

Ken pointed to some dark icons.

“They’re … um … pictures of Whisper Wilson.”

“She isn’t some kind of exotic dancer, is she, Tim?”

“No! Whisper Wilson is my cat.”

Ken clicked on an icon and whistled.

“Think about this, Tim. Suppose somebody posted a picture of Whisper on Facebook.” I stared at the ceiling. “This is by conservative estimate the most adorable cat that has ever been photographed. If someone were to disseminate this photo, innumerable working hours would be spent Liking it, causing the world economy to tailspin out of control.”

I began to feel very glad about encryption.

“There isn’t much else on this machine,” said Ken. “But I think you can see the dangers of leaving it unprotected. No, wait a second – here’s another 10MB of data I didn’t see before. The folder is called The Girl with the Phoenix Tattoo. What’s that, Tim?”

“Oh,” I said, “that’s a draft of my novel. It’s a completely original idea. It’s about this English professor named Mitt Sorem, see? He’s 53 years old and irresistible to women. So he has this student who’s 19, she’s got a lot of piercings and wears leather and has a tattoo of a phoenix on her back. They have wild sex and drink lots of coffee. And it turns out she’s a hacker, and she breaks into this computer network where the drug cartel is funneling money through a Swedish furniture store and there are also spies. They beat the cartel with hacking and martial arts and Mitt Sorem gets locked in a serial killer’s basement and the girl frees him by hitting the serial killer with a badminton racket.”

“A badminton racket?”

“I may have to think more about that one. But it’s great stuff, it’ll sell mill…”

“And you’re writing this story on a UTA laptop, Tim, which means that it’s an invention and/or concept which belongs to the State of Texas. If it gets stolen by an unscrupulous literary agent, we would not only lose our investment in your intellectual labor, but you yourself would have to reimburse the university for foregone revenue.”

I grabbed my laptop and threw it out the window.

“I told you not to disconnect the machine!” screamed Ken.

“That’s fine, I’ll do without a laptop,” I said. “You’ve convinced me, the risks are just too great.”

“But you still have the idea for the novel in your head, right?” said Ken.

“Of course.”

“Come over here,” said Ken. He inserted a USB drive into my ear. “Hold still for the next 36 hours. We’re going to have to encrypt your brain.”

I often hear others say (and sometimes think, myself) that students are far too busy to bother with reading, particularly deep reading, the sort of reading we do for the pleasure of the experience, or for deeply personal and focused analysis, for no other reason but to know — or for inspiration.

Indeed, this is precisely the problem because today’s readers are on a deadline. The above-mentioned impulses to read are overridden by the current cultural imperative to be “successful” at an occupation or trade that students have presumably come to university to train for. We professors recoil in shock and horror at the thought our students would be at university for anything other than learning for learning’s sake, but the principle of occupational preparation bears out in many, if not most, of the kinds of comments I often see and hear from students.

I think one of our primary goals, as humanities professionals, is to show our pupils that a college or university education is far more significant than training for a specific profession, that it is the beginning of a new life, and that reading, particularly novels, is the perfect activity to accomplish this task. But we also have to recognize that the novel (like most of our students and the cultural milieu we live in) is also in a state of change. It is largely technological, but also conceptual, right down to the question of what it means to be.

One of my own biggest challenges has been to get students to slow down, to read with deliberate interest, and not to suck on “relevant facts” useful for test-taking, but rather to see the words on the printed page, to feel their weight, to know the voices and persons speaking the text.

Kyle Beachy in his essay “The Extent of Our Decline,” writes, tongue in cheek, “Who today reads a novel to learn when Wikipedia offers the shorter, more condensed version?”

The cynical (or mischievous) part of me wishes to say “Right on, Brother! Speak it!” But I know what is really at stake here is not the burden of teaching resistant or under-appreciative students to read books for the sake of collecting the secret knowledge they contain. The real secret, the one many life-long readers learn as children, is that we do not read novels to learn. Rather, we read novels to live a fuller life.

* * *

Novels connect us to people. The words we read in a novel are the psychic air that breathes emotional bonds between reader and the world. I have read novels that made me feel more whole, more of a complete person, upon reading the final sentence, as if I were only a partial person before attempting its pages.

But I contend that we must not mistake the pages of a book for the novel. The physical book is a fine thing, and certainly in no danger of disappearing any time soon, but the digital book, the novel in electronic form, abstracts us no more away from the story, its characters, and the passion of the narrative than the physical book object. It is simply another medium, and one with great potential that is being realized as it is developed by really interesting writer-experimentalists.

Margaret Atwood talks about how she was reprimanded by readers of one of her articles for suggesting that the Internet was good at promoting literacy. I discovered this article after reading a Twitter post from someone I follow:

I then went to the source. Indeed, there is a palpable reverence for the physical book form, particularly when we talk about fiction and novels. Perhaps this strong emotional feeling many of us have (myself included) for the book, and for teaching the book in its traditional form, is related to the history of the codex, which was the preferred medium for inscribing the Bible during the rise of Christianity between the 3rd and 6th centuries. Maybe, we descendents of the Judeo-Christian tradition unconsciously associate a certain religiosity or piety to the form. I think it has much to do with my generation having grown up with so many beautiful memories and emotional relationships nested in the folds of those old tomes sitting on our bookshelves. Old friends *live* in those books.

Atwood is right, I believe. We need to look to new media, and new media platforms like the Internet, for vibrant, new ways to supplement where we read, write, and especially teach to our students.

Beachy says in his essay, “If only Horace were here to clarify for us the complicated relationship between a novel and its pages. Clearly, the novel is built around the mechanics of the book. But to conflate the two is a mistake both easy and terrible” (61).

To insist on the book without investigating the possibilities for joy and connection through other forms will, I believe, ultimately lead to the stagnation of the written word, particularly the form of the novel.

Some alarmist literature would have us believe that the novel is in an existential crisis, and has been for over a decade. This is bunk. The novel is alive and well, and is ever more valuable as a transformational experience.  Though it is currently going through its own transformation, and experiencing changes much the same way many of our student are. There is a part of me that thinks that the novel is only just growing out of its two-hundred year adolescence to becoming a more mature, if not experimental, young adult.

I always marvel at how deeply students read off of their mobile devices, especially their smartphones. I’ve watched students on campus bump into passers-by and walk into dangerous traffic without a thought to what they were doing, they were so engaged with the text on the screen. And here we have an opportunity to consider how we might leverage a forward-looking approach to teaching new forms of literature, especially the novel, to our students who are, themselves, being formed by the experience of a college education.

Cedrick May is an Associate Professor of Literature at UTA and a lover of coffee,  Ebooks, Borges, and Regular Expressions.