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I will be presenting on "Digital Design with William Morris" on the William Morris Society's "Teaching Morris" panel at the Modern Language Association Convention in Austin, Texas in 2016. This paper addresses the vital role of William Morris’s aesthetic practices in the students’ engagement with visual art and technology in my Victorian Technology and Art course at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Victorian Technology and Art is a WOVEN (Written, Oral, Visual, Electronic, and Nonverbal) writing and literature course in which students learn to formulate complex arguments across a range of modes and media. After reading Imogen Hart’s “The Designs of William Morris” from The Cambridge Companion to the Pre-Raphaelites and Elizabeth Miller’s introduction to Slow Print, members of the class worked in groups to complete an in-class exercise called, “Illustrating with Morris.” Using digital images of Morris’s designs for wallpaper and typography, the students created a decorated version of 10-20 lines of Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” or Alfred Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott,” which we had previously read. The students used Word or Google Documents to combine text and images, and then introduced the class to the rationales behind their design choices. Following this exercise, the students completed strong writing assignments drawing fine distinctions between the statements on art in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Morris’s aesthetics. This presentation will also consider Morris’s influence on students’ “Digital Dorian: Fin de Siècle E-Books,” interactive, annotated e-books. Working in groups, the students will create e-books consisting of a cover and at least two pages of Dorian Gray for a tablet or computer. The design will extend to all elements of the e-book, including its typography, and will draw on such examples as Morris, the Arts and Crafts Movement, and The Yellow Book. The students will accompany their e-books with 500-word rationales addressing their stylistic decisions.  One group's decoration of "Goblin Market." We are excited to host renowned Yeats scholar Wayne Chapman of Clemson University on March 23. If you are interested in joining or presenting at a future event, please contact John Morgenstern or me. You can also follow us on Twitter @ATLModernisms or like us on Facebook.  And some images from Lisa Chinn's fantastic presentation, "Listening to Print Culture: Acousmatic Voice in the Mimeograph Revolution" on Friday:   The following is an excerpt from one of my current students' blog postings reflecting on the Student View art exhibition of work from English 1101 and 1102 courses at Georgia Tech. The exhibition is on display at the Ferst Center on campus. Sandrine LeFebvre's project At this year’s Student View Georgia Institute of Technology’s finest Literature, Media, and Communication were on display. But one particular exhibit that stuck out to me was Sandrine Lefevbre’s work, Buzz’s The Word: Communication & Culture Edition. Lefevbre was a former student of Dr. Golden and pointed out something that I have begun to notice in my class with her now. Lefevbre’s piece centered on how meanings of words do not only get lost in indirect translation, but also in lack of cultural understanding. She pointed out the phrase, “Cockeyed son of a bow-legged scorpion,” in Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (1935). While this book was written in English it was also written by an author from India. Because of the difference between culture in 1935 India and 2015 United States the very insulting phrase did not fully click with American readers. . . . I would like to extrapolate on Lefevbre’s video by applying it to what I have noticed so far in Dr. Golden’s class. While reading books such as The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Picture of Dorian Gray that take place during 1800-1900 England I realized that my appreciation for the setting was not at its full potential because I did not understand what was going on during that period. England was in the mix of an Industrial Revolution that brought upon great changes particularly in the way people lived. People began to settle down in urban areas compared to rural areas because there was opportunity in cities. By researching the history of 1800-1900 England for my first project I have a much better understanding of what was going on. This is why reading The Picture of Dorian Gray is significantly easier than The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. What stands out to me from The Picture of Dorian Gray that I likely would’ve missed was the difference in class between Dorian and Sibyl and what it means towards the book. Dorian is a man who comes from money and seems to have an endless supply to spend as he pleases, while Sibyl is from a lower class family on the East End of England. These two types of people do not usually mix, which is what causes Sibyl’s brother to be skeptical of their engagement as he should’ve been. Just after becoming engaged Dorian calls off the marriage leading to Sibyl committing suicide. The magnitude of their engagement would have gone unnoticed to me had I not known how rare it was to see marriage through such a difference in class standing. Overall, I support Lefevbre’s point and applaud her on her ability to explain it through a digital medium. By doing this she exemplifies on her own point. Youtube videos have become very common in my generation because I have grown up using and creating them. However, other generations that do not fully understand the digital revolution that is going on right now truly appreciate her work and all of the different digital effects she put into it.   This May, I have been invited to present on "Modernism's Apps" at the Digital Diversity: Writing, Feminism, Culture Conference in Edmonton, Canada. This paper takes its title from the applications (apps) that my students envisioned in my "Digital Woolf" course at Georgia Tech. The images to the left and below are from my student Joseph Robinson's design for "Digital Woolf with Google Glass" and you can read more about it and other projects here.  This July, I will be presenting "Mapping Global Modernisms: Nella Larsen and Jean Rhys" at the Keystone Digital Humanities Conference, held at the University of Pennsylvania's Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts. This paper examines the element of what Emily Apter calls "untranslatability" in Against World Literature (2013) in teaching global modernism using digital tools, specifically the mapping of Nella Larsen’s Harlem in Passing (1929) and Jean Rhys’s Paris in Good Morning, Midnight (1938). The students in my Global Digital Modernisms course at Georgia Tech completed map and essay projects examining how the women of Passing and Good Morning, Midnight navigate the city. Both assignments asked students to formulate arguments engaging a constellation of texts, ideas, and forms of media in order to analyze texts’ and cultures’ untranslatable elements. I have included below one student group's map of flâneurie in Good Morning Midnight and you can see more examples of students' maps here.  |
Amanda Golden is an Associate Professor of English at New York Institute of Technology. She is the author of Annotating Modernism: Marginalia and Pedagogy from Virginia Woolf to the Confessional Poets (Routledge, 2020) and editor of This Business of Words: Reassessing Anne Sexton (UP of Florida, 2016). Her research and teaching interests include American and British literature from the nineteenth century to the present, modernism, poetry and poetics, literary archives, composition, and the digital humanities.
July 2020
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