Book description
Literary scholars face a new and often baffling reality in the
classroom: students spend more time looking at glowing screens than
reading printed text. The social lives of these students take place in
cyberspace instead of the student pub. Their favorite narratives exist
in video games, not books. How do teachers who grew up in a different
world engage these students without watering down pedagogy? Clint
Burnham and Paul Budra have assembled a group of specialists in visual
poetry, graphic novels, digital humanities, role-playing games,
television studies, and, yes, even the middle-brow novel, to address
this question. Contributors give a brief description of their subject,
investigate how it confronts traditional notions of the literary, and
ask what contemporary literary theory can illuminate about their text
before explaining how their subject can be taught in the 21st-century classroom.
"The essays in Budra and Burnham's book successfully map out
the range of new mediating instances and issues that will define a
contemporary role for English studies-and that mapping is both
stimulating and innovative!" -Thomas Carmichael, Dean, Faculty of
Information and Media Studies, University of Western Ontario
Paul Budra is author of A Mirror for Magistrates and the de
casibus Tradition and co-editor of Part Two: Reflections on the Sequel
and Soldier Talk: The Vietnam War in Oral Narrative (IUP, 2004). He is
Associate Professor of English and Associate Dean of the Faculty of
Arts and Social Sciences at Simon Fraser University.
Clint Burnham is the author of The Jamesonian Unconscious, The
Benjamin Sonnets, The Only Poetry that Matters: Reading the Kootenay
School of Writing, and other works of criticism, fiction, and poetry.
He is Associate Professor of English at Simon Fraser University.
