Category Archives: Syllabi

Golden, “Digital Landscapes: Mapping Global Modernist Women Writers”

Course Websites

Golden’s course, “Global Digital Modernisms,” at the New York Institute of Technology

Golden’s course, “Global Literature and Digital Media,” at the New York Institute of Technology

Further Reading/Project Examples

Golden on mapping Jacob’s Room for TECHStyle, a forum for sharing multimodal pedagogy at Georgia Tech, November 12, 2013

Link here

Soweto Historical GIS Project at Digital Humanities Initiative at Hamilton College

Link here

Brian Croxall, mapping Mrs. Dalloway, Introduction to Digital Humanities at Emory University

Link here

Additional previous posts and resources by Golden here on “Teaching Modernist Women’s Writing in English”:

“Navigating Modernism’s Visual History”

“Digital Woolf”

Related Reading: Gordon and Southworth, Foster

Cheney, “How to Write and Gertrude Stein and How to Read”

Gertrude Stein: Resources
compiled by Matthew Cheney

By Gertrude Stein

Texts

Collections

A Stein Reader, ed. Ulla E. Dydo (Google Books)
A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Worldcat)
The Gertrude Stein Reader: The Great American Pioneer of Avant-Garde Letters, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (Google Books)
The Yale Gertrude Stein: Selections, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (Worldcat)
Gertrude Stein: Selections, ed. Joan Retallack (Google Books)
Gertrude Stein: Writings 1903–1932 and Gertrude Stein: Writings 1932–1946, ed. Catherine Stimpson and Harriet Chessman (Library of America)
Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl van Vechten (Google Books)

About Gertrude Stein

Analytical

“All About Ida” by W.H. Auden
“Twenty-two on ‘Tender Buttons’” ed. Julia Bloch, Jacket2
Primary Stein: Returning to the Writing of Gertrude Stein ed. Janet Boyd & Sharon J. Kirsch (Google Books)
The Critical Response to Gertrude Stein, ed. Kurt Curnutt (Worldcat)
Gertrude Stein: The Language that Rises by Ulla E. Dydo (Google Books)
“Gertrude Stein: The Original Texter” by Lucy Ferriss, The Chronicle of Higher Education
“Portrait, But of Whom?: A Discussion of Gertrude Stein’s ‘Christian Bérard’”, Poem Talk podcast roundtable discussion by Al Filreis, Lee Ann Brown, Bob Perelman, and Jerome Rothenberg
“An Essay on ‘Patriarchal Poetry’” by Karen Ford, Modern American Poetry (see also: selected analyses of “Patriarchal Poetry” at Modern American Poetry)
“Understanding Steinese” by Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker
How Reading Is Written: A Brief Index to Gertrude Stein by Astrid Lorange (Google Books)
“The Making of ‘Tender Buttons’: Gertrude Stein’s Subjects, Objects, and the Illegible” by Joshua Schuster, Jacket2
“Impossible Poetry? On Gertrude Stein” by Anne Waldman, poets.org

Biographical

“Stein’s Life and Career” by Linda Wagner-Martin, Modern American Poetry
“Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories”, National Portrait Gallery
“Gertrude and Alice in Vichyland” by Charles Bernstein and “Gertrude Stein’s War Years: Setting the Record Straight: A dossier”, ed. Charles Bernstein, Jacket2
“In the Great Green Room: Margaret Wise Brown and Modernism” by Anne E. Fernald, Public Books

Pedagogies and Practices

Approaches to Teaching the Works of Gertrude Stein, ed. Logan Esdale & Deborah M. Mix (MLA)
Creative Writing Innovations: Breaking Boundaries in the Classroom ed. Michael Dean Clark, Trent Hergenrader, Joseph Rein (Google Books)
Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process by Peter Elbow (Google Books)
“Unoriginal Genius: Student Poems Made from Tender Buttons” by Logan Esdale, Modernism/Modernity Print Plus cluster: Teaching Modern Poetry
Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning by James M. Lang (Google Books)
The Writing Experiment: Strategies for Innovative Creative Writing by Hazel Smith (Google Books)
“Gertrude Stein: Unlikely Comp Teacher” by Kyle Winkler, The Millions

Kopley, “Teaching the Revisions of Woolf and Others”

Bibliography of Draft Material by Woolf

Draft versions of books by Woolf

(listed chronologically by initial publication of each book for which the following are draft versions)

Melymbrosia: An Early Version of The Voyage Out, edited by Louise DeSalvo, New York Public Library, 1982.

Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room: The Holograph Draft, edited by Edward Bishop, Pace UP, 1998.

“The Hours”: The British Museum Manuscript of Mrs. Dalloway, edited by Helen Wussow, Pace UP, 1996.

To the Lighthouse: The Original Holograph Draft, edited by Susan Dick, U of Toronto P, 1982.

Orlando: The Holograph Draft, edited by Stuart N. Clarke, S. N. Clarke, 1993.

Women & Fiction: The Manuscript Version of A Room of One’s Own, edited by S. P. Rosenbaum, Blackwell, Shakespeare Head P, 1992.

The Waves: The Two Holograph Drafts, edited by J. W. Graham, U of Toronto P, 1976.

The Pargiters: The Novel-Essay Portion of The Years, edited by Mitchell A. Leaska, Hogarth Press, 1978.

Pointz Hall: The Earlier and Later Typescripts of Between the Acts, edited by Mitchell A. Leaska, New York UP, 1983.

Articles and book chapters including primary draft material by Woolf

Daugherty, Beth Rigel. “Virginia Woolf’s ‘How Should One Read a Book?” Woolf Studies Annual vol. 4, 1998, pp. 123–85.

DeSalvo, Louise A. “Virginia Woolf’s Revisions for the 1920 American and English Editions of The Voyage Out.” Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, vol. 82, 1979, pp. 338–66.

Gabler, Hans Walter. “A Tale of Two Texts: Or, How One Might Edit Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.” Woolf Studies Annual vol. 10, 2004, pp. 1–29.

Gewirtz, Isaac. “‘With Anger and Emphasis’: The Proof Copy of A Room of One’s Own.” Woolf Studies Annual, vol. 17, 2011, pp. 1–76.

Haule, James M.; Charles Mauron (trans.) “‘Le Temps passe’ and the Original Typescript: An Early Version of the ‘Time Passes’ Section of To the Lighthouse.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 29, no. 3, 1983, pp. 267–311.

Hankins, Leslie Kathleen. “Virginia Woolf’s ‘The Cinema’: Sneak Previews of the Holograph Pre-Texts through Post-Publication Revisions.” Woolf Studies Annual vol. 15, 2009, pp. 135–75.

Hildick, Wallace. “Virginia Woolf.” Word for Word: A Study of Authors’ Alterations with Exercises. Faber and Faber, 1965. 176–87.

Lavin, J. A. “The First Editions of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.” Proof: The Yearbook of American Bibliographical and Textual Studies 2, edited by Joseph Katz, U of South Carolina P, 1972, pp. 185–211.

McGinn, Emily, Amy Leggette, Matthew Hannah, and Paul Bellow. “Comparing Marks: A Versioning Edition of Virginia Woolf’s ‘The Mark on the Wall.’” Scholarly Editing: The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing vol. 35, 2014. Web. 21 March 2017. <http://scholarlyediting.org/2014/editions/markonthewall.html>.

Moore, Madeline. “Orlando: An Edition of the Manuscript.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 25, nos. 3/4 (Virginia Woolf Issue), 1974, pp. 303–55.

Radin, Grace. “‘Two enormous chunks’: Episodes Excluded During the Final Revisions of The Years.” Bulletin of the New York Public Library, vol. 80, 1977, pp. 221–51.

Scott, Alison M. “‘Tantalising Fragments’: The Proofs of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. 88, no. 3, 1994, pp. 279–351.

Shields, E. F. “The American Edition of Mrs. Dalloway.” Studies in Bibliography, vol. 27, 1974, pp. 157–75.

Squier, Susan. “A Track of Our Own: Typescript Drafts of The Years.” Virginia Woolf: A Feminist Slant, edited by Jane Marcus, U of Nebraska P, 1983, pp. 198–211.

Wright, Glenn P. “The Raverat Proofs of Mrs. Dalloway.” Studies in Bibliography, vol. 29, 1986, pp. 241–61.

Digital primary draft material by Woolf

Digital Orlando. Loyola University Chicago. Web. 21 March 2017. <http://students.ctsdh.luc.edu/projects/finals/hannah/?node=content/text&id=117>.

McGinn et al. [cited above]. “The Mark on the Wall” Edition. Web. 21 March 2017. <http://scholarlyediting.org/2014/editions/markonthewall_ho17.html>.

“Notebook drafts of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.” The British Library. <https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/notebook-drafts-of-virginia-woolfs-mrs-dalloway-volume-i>. Accessed 1 April 2017.

“Woolf in the World: A Pen and a Press of Her Own.” Page proofs of To the Lighthouse. Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College. <http://www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/rarebook/exhibitions/penandpress/case10b.htm>. Accessed 1 April 2017.

Woolf Online. Ed. Pamela L. Caughie, Nick Hayward, Mark Hussey, Peter Shillingsburg, and George K. Thiruvathukal. Web. 21 March 2017. <http://www.woolfonline.com>.

Related reading: Gordon and Southworth, Mendelman, Kane, Sorensen

Ambrose, “The Woman Born with a Difference: Teaching the Lesbian Novel in a Modernist Context”

The Lesbian Novel: Recommended Reading/Suggested Course Texts

Barnes, Djuna. Ladies Almanack: showing their Signs and their tides ; their Moons and their Changes ; the Seasons as it is with them ; their Eclipses and Equinoxes ; as well as a full Record of diurnal and nocturnal Distempers. Dalkey Archive P, 1992.

—–. Nightwood. New Directions, 2006.

—–. Ryder. St. Martin’s, 1979.

Barney, Natalie Clifford. Women Lovers, or The Third Woman. Translated by Chelsea Ray, U of Wisconsin P, 2016.

—–. The One Who is Legion; or A.D.’s After-Life. Orono: U of Maine Printing Office, 1987.

Berners, Gerald. The Girls of Radcliff Hall. Elysium P, 2000.

Collette. The Complete Claudine: Claudine at School; Claudine in Paris; Claudine Married; Claudine and Annie. Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2001.

Delarus-Mardrus, Lucie. The Angel and the Perverts. Translated by Anna Livia, NYUP, 1995.

Frederics, Diana. Diana: A Strange Autobiography. NYU P, 1995.

Hall, Radclyffe. The Unlit Lamp, White P, 2015.

—–. The Well of Loneliness. Anchor, 1990.

H.D. HERmione. New Directions, 1981

Larsen, Nella. Passing. A. A. Knopf, 1929.

McCullers, Carson. The Member of the Wedding. Mariner, 2004.

Proust, Marcel. Sodom and Gomorrah. Penguin Classics, 2005.

Renault, Mary. The Friendly Young Ladies. Vintage, 2003.

Sackville-West, Vita. Challenge. Virago, 2012.

—–. Heritage. Bello, 2012.

Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Vintage Books, 1990.

—–. Three Lives. Enhanced Media, 2017.

Stratchey, Dorothy. Olivia. Cleis P, 2006.

Vivien, Renée. A Woman Appeared to Me. Translated by Jeannette H. Foster. Naiad P, 1976.

—–. L’être double. ErosOnyx, 2014.

Wilhelm, Gale. Torchlight to Valhalla. Pomona P, 2012.

—–. We Too Are Drifting. Naiad P, 1985.

Woolf, Virginia. Between the Acts. Mariner, 1970.

—–. Mrs. Dalloway. Mariner, 1990.

—–. Orlando: A Biography. Mariner, 1973.

—–. To The Lighthouse. Harcourt Brace, 1989.

—–. The Voyage Out. CreateSpace, 2017.

—–. The Waves. Harvest, 1978.

Dinsman, “Adapting Women’s Writing: Melodrama and the Second World War”

The course website described by Dinsman was created with WordPress and is housed on the CUNY Commons. Link here

Hinnov, “Teaching the Harlem Renaissance: Hannah Höch, Marita O. Bonner, and Nella Larsen”

Teaching Literature of the Harlem Renaissance: Primary Materials

Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. Johnson Reprint Corp, 1968.

Fisher, Rudolph. City of Refuge: The Collected Stories of Rudolph Fisher. U of Missouri P, 2018.

Hughes, Langston. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Edited by Arnold Rampersad., Knopf, 1995

Hurston, Zora Neale. Folklore, Memoirs, & Other Writings. 1942. Library of America, 1995.

—. Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937. HarperCollins, 2000.

Johnson, Helene. “A Southern Road.” Fire!!: Devoted to Younger Negro Artists. The Fire Press, 1926, p. 17.

Kramer, Victor A., editor. The Harlem Renaissance Re-examined. AMS Press, 1987.

Larsen, Nella. Passing. 1929. Edited by Carla Kaplan, Norton, 2007.

—. Quicksand and Passing. 1928, 1929. Edited by Deborah E. McDowell, Rutgers UP, 1986.

Locke, Alain. The New Negro. 1925. Touchstone, 1999

McKay, Claude. Harlem Shadows: The Poems of Claude McKay. Harcourt, Brace and Company, Google Books.

West, Dorothy. The Living is Easy. 1948. Feminist Press, 1982.

Hannah Höch: Images and Catalogue

Maloney, Meghan. “Hannah Höch and the Dada Montage.” In the In-Between: Journal of New and New Media Photography, April 29, 2013. Accessed April 9, 2018.

Link here

Jansen, Charlotte. “Hannah Höch’s Reimagining of Indigenous African Artefacts.” AnOther, August 3, 2016. Accessed April 9, 2018.

Link here

Höch, Hannah. Abduction. 1925. ArtStack. Accessed April 14, 2018.

Link here

The Photomontages of Hannah Höch. Organized by Maria Makela and Peter Boswell. Essays by Maria Makela, Peter Boswell, Carolyn Lanchner, chronology by Kristin Makholm. Published by the Walker Art Center. Catalog from the exhibition held at the Walker Art Center, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 1996. Accessed April 11, 2018.

Link here

Recommended Reading:

In 2018 the New York Times launched an interactive feature entitled “Overlooked”: a series of obituaries for notable women not deemed notable enough at the times of their deaths to receive actual obituaries in the newspaper. These figures include Sylvia Plath, Diane Arbus, Ida B. Wells, and Qiu Jin.

Readers can submit a form suggesting additional “overlooked” figures, and the potential for use in the classroom seems vast. In addition to working with students on texts by and about these figures, and on students’ own (possibly multimodal or interactive) compositions along the lines of “Overlooked,” instructors could ask questions like: How does the genre of the obituary work as a form of life writing, and how does it function to celebrate, commemorate, narrativize, and/or erase? How do text and image work together? How has the work of recovery impacted the Times‘s decision to devote time and resources (precious commodities in our information-saturated media moment) to pursue this project, and what work remains to be done? What selection criteria seem to be at work in their choices, how do they square with the selections we make vis à vis canon, etc., and are they open for critique/interrogation? Is this a feminist project? In many ways, this feature makes visible the fruits of—and the ongoing need for—the work of recovery, as well as the questions raised by that work.

Here is the “Overlooked” obituary for Nella Larsen (accessed April 11, 2018):

Link here

Snyder, “Teaching Votes for Women and Suffrage Propaganda in the Modernist Classroom”

Teaching Suffrage Literature: Primary Materials

Barnes, Djuna. “How It Feels to Be Forcibly Fed.” The World Magazine. 6 September 1914. Wikisource.

Brown, Stephanie, editor. Edith Ayrton Zangwill’s The Call: A New Scholarly Edition. Bloomsbury, 2019.

Chapman, Mary and Angela Mills. Treacherous Texts: An Anthology of U.S. Suffrage Literature, 1846-1946. Routledge, 2011.

Christensen, Carolyn Nelson. Literature of the Women’s Suffrage Campaign in England. Broadview, 2004.

Colmore, Gertrude. Suffragette Sally. 1911. Ed. Allison Lee. Broadview P, 2007.

Lytton, Constance. Prisons and Prisoners. Ed. Jason Haslam. Broadview, 2008.

Maud, Constance Elizabeth. No Surrender. Persephone, 2011.

Robins, Elizabeth. The Convert. Ed. Jane Marcus. Feminist Press, 1980.

–. Votes for Women. Women’s Suffrage Literature (Volume 1), edited by Katharine Cockin, Glenda Norquay, Sowon S. Park. Routledge, 2004.

Talbot, Mary and Bryan, with Kate Charlesworth. Sally Heathcote Suffragette. Cape, 2014.

Wells, H. G. Ann Veronica. 1909. Ed. Carey Snyder. Broadview P, 2015.

Images for “Teaching Votes for Women and Suffrage Propaganda in the Modernist Classroom”

(Hover over the images for captions/credits)

John Hassall’s “A Suffragette’s Home” can be found in Lisa Tickner’s The Spectacle of Women (U of Chicago P, 1988), in the color plates section between pages 210 and 211.

Gordon and Southworth, “Women Making Modernism: Digital Humanities and Modernist Women’s Innovations”

Note: These resources correspond to the six course components described in “Women Making Modernism.” They include recommended readings and digital resources.

General Resources:

The Modernist Journals Project

The Modernist Archives Publishing Project

Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginning to the Present

The Reading Experience Database (RED)

Related reading: Kopley, Mendelman, Kane, Sorensen

PART ONE

Drouin, Jeffrey. “Close-and Distant-Reading Modernism: Network Analysis, Text Mining, Pedagogy, and The Little Review.” Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, 2014, pp. 110–35.

Hammill, Faye and Mark Hussey. Modernist Print Culture. Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.

Brooker, Peter and Andrew Thacker, editors. The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. Oxford UP, 2009.

Poetry magazine’s open-access archive with full-text versions from 1912 to the present. Link here

PART TWO

Ford, Hugh. Published in Paris. Norton, 1980.

Kennedy, Richard. A Boy at the Hogarth Press. Hesperus, 2011.

Cunard, Nancy. These Were the Hours. Southern Illinois UP, 1969.

Beach, Sylvia. Shakespeare and Company. U of Nebraska P, 1991.

Southworth, Helen. Leonard and Virginia Woolf, The Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism. Edinburgh UP, 2010.

Jaillant, Lise. Cheap Modernisms and Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary Canon: The Modern Library Series, 1917–1955. Edinburgh UP, 2017

Willis, J.H. Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers:The Hogarth Press 1917–1941. U of Virginia P, 1992.

Cunard, Nancy. Negro Anthology online version. Link here

On Robert Graves’s and Laura Riding’s Seizin Press. Link here

First edition of Ruth Manning Sanders’s Karn (Hogarth Press) at Hathi Trust. Link here

PART THREE

Light, Alison Mrs Woolf and the Servants. Penguin, 2008.

—–. Common People: The History of an English Family. Penguin, 2014.

Cuddy Keane, Melba. “From Fan-Mail to Readers’ Letters: Locating John Farrelly.” Woolf Studies Annual, vol. 11, 2005, pp. 3–32.

Southworth, Helen. Fresca, A Life In the Making: A Biographer’s Quest for A Forgotten Bloomsbury Polymath. Sussex Academic Press, 2017.

Reading Experience Database for readers of Woolf’s work. Link here

Open Modernisms for full text digital versions of modernist texts. Link here

Modernist Versions Project at the University of Victoria. Link here

PART FOUR

A MYRIAD and other Attempts at Boredom Murder (supervised by Claire Battershill, Simon Fraser University)

Gillespie, Diane. The Sisters’ Arts: The Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Syracuse UP, 1988.

Staveley, Alice. “Name That Face.” Virginia Woolf Miscellany, vol. 51, 1998 (on the Three Guineas photographs).

Fry, Roger. “Book Illustration and a Modern Example,” Transformations: Critical and Speculative Essays on Art. 1926. Doubleday, 1956.

Lahiri, Jhumpa. The Clothing of Books. Penguin, 2016.

Willson Gordon, Elizabeth. The Woolf’s Head Publishing: The Highlights and the New Lights of the Hogarth Press. U of Alberta P, 2009.

Schaeffer, Talia. “Posing Orlando.” Genders vol. 19, 1994.

Southworth, Helen “Bloomsbury and the Book Art,” Cambridge Companion to the Bloomsbury Group. Cambridge UP, 2014.

PART FIVE

Staveley, Alice on Hogarth Press manager Norah Nicholls. “Marketing Virginia Woolf: Women, War, and Public Relations in Three Guineas.” Book History, vol 12, 2009.

Wilson, Nicola. “‘So now tell me what you think!’: Sylvia Lynd’s Collaborative Reading and Reviewing the Work of an Interwar Middlewoman.” Literature & History (forthcoming). Osborne, Huw (ed). The Rise of the Modernist Bookshop: Books and the Commerce of Culture in the Twentieth Century. Ashgate, 2015.

Snaith Anna. “Wide Circles: The Three Guineas Letters”. Woolf Studies Annual, vol. 6, 2000.

Beth Daugherty (ed). Special Issue on Woolf’s Fan Mail. Woolf Studies Annual, vol. 12, 2006.

Alan Liu’s Toychest. Link here

Johanna Drucker’s course website. Link here

Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP) order book scans. Link here

PART SIX

Tufte Edward. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Graphics Press, 2001

McLoughlin, Kate. The Modernist Party. Edinburgh UP, 2013

Stein, Gertrude. Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Vintage, 1990.

Churchill, Suzanne. Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde. Link here

McCracken, Scott. Dorothy Richardson. Link here (see also Cucullu)

Navigating Modernism’s Visual History

This is a guest post by Teaching Modernist Women’s Writing in English hopeful contributor Amanda Golden. Amanda Golden is an Assistant Professor of English at the New York Institute of Technology. She previously held the Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Poetics at Emory University’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry and a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is the author of Annotating Modernism: Marginalia and Pedagogy from Virginia Woolf to the Confessional Poets (Routledge, forthcoming) and editor of This Business of Words: Reassessing Anne Sexton (UP of Florida, 2016). She has published in Modernism/modernity, Woolf Studies Annual, and The Ted Hughes Society Journal and her essays on digital pedagogy can be found in TECHStyle and Postcolonial Digital Humanities.

My “Writing New York” course this term at the New York Institute of Technology invites students to develop greater facility with visual and digital tools as they construct arguments analyzing the role of New York in poetry, prose, and fiction from predominately the first half of the twentieth century.

The students began navigating modernism’s visual history early in the term. While reading Elizabeth Losh, et al.’s Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Writing, the students practiced constructing visual arguments while exploring the relationship between the design of a little magazine published in New York and its contents in our “Visual Literacy and the Modernist Journals Project” assignment. (The digital tasks described here took place during the second half of an eighty-minute class period.) When we read Edith Wharton’s “New Year’s Day” from Old New York (1924), the students interpreted the role of the city in the characters’ interactions in an assigned section of the reading, investigating the significance of their locations using Google Maps. In “Locating Old New York,” the students had unexpected observations, including the number of fires that the novella’s Fifth Avenue Hotel experienced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This assignment also enabled the students to gain greater familiarity with “New Year’s Day” in preparation for their essays analyzing the role of humanity amidst the machinery of the city in E. B. White’s “Here is New York” (1949), Wharton’s story, or in both texts.

As we turned to the Harlem Renaissance, our class assignments began to include more written, oral, visual, electronic, and nonverbal components.* We held a thesis contest in which students presented arguments addressing Langston Hughes’s poetry and prose. Students then combined text, images, and videos in their interpretations of the role of New York in at least one poem during our “Snapchat with Claude McKay.” When we read a chapter of Nella Larsen’s Passing, the students used Google Tour Builder to depict its events, including the contents of the conversations and their significance. The task of mapping Passing presented an opportunity for students to explore the text and the software in preparation for their group map assignments. In this project, the students have the option to use Google Maps, Google Tour Builder, or a combination of elements in a Prezi, Power Point, or Word Document, to create a visual argument analyzing at least one text by one of the writers we have read. Each group will also compose a rationale addressing the arguments that their map makes.

The linear format of Google Tour Builder provides a legible structure in which students can insert annotations interpreting passages from the text. After I learned of this program from Gabriel Hankins, I asked students in my Global Digital Modernisms course this term to construct tours of Paris in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight (1938). Google Maps, which my previous classes have used in projects, such as creating annotated maps of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, allows for a visual interpretation in which the lines on the map need not address one route, but could indicate various connections with different colors.

Figure 1

When I last taught my Global Digital Modernisms course, the students used Prezi when mapping Good Morning, Midnight to combine annotations and current Google Street views with backgrounds, such as historical maps (Figure 1). Prezi also allows for more complicated maps of texts, such as one group’s depiction of the protagonist’s memories (Figure 2). A current issue with Prezi is that their free educational subscription no longer allows students to keep materials private. I prefer that students keep their work offline, sharing it with their professor. If students choose to do so, they can make their work public when it is finished.

Figure 2

The final project in my Writing New York course will combine research and digital media as students compose a script that they will record or film as a podcast or video. This assignment includes students’ research using primary and secondary sources and builds on the digital and visual literacy skills they acquired in previous assignments. Complementing our reading during the second half of the course, we will look to The History Chicks’s Dorothy Parker podcast and Patti Smith’s interview with Paul Holdengräber at the New York Public Library video as examples for synthesizing elements of conversation, research, and close reading. When I assigned a similar project in my African American Literature from the Harlem Renaissance to the Digital Present course, the students found our critiques of sample interviews particularly helpful in developing their own projects. Their assignment, “Mock Interviews with Contemporary African American Writers,” grew out of one that Anne Sexton proposed to her “Anne on Anne” students at Colgate University in 1972.

In their script and podcast or video assignments, my Writing New York students will demonstrate the ability to analyze quotations, acknowledge sources, and develop arguments. Creating podcasts or videos, using such tools as Audacity, Soundcloud, and VoiceThread, the students can use phones, tablets, and computers to record and edit their projects, working in new ways with devices with which they may already be familiar. Blending creativity and research, this assignment invites students to combine language, sound, and media to create digital interpretations of modernist texts.

*In the Writing and Communication Program at the Georgia Institute of Technology, this is called WOVEN Communication and the ways these elements overlap comprise an artifact’s “multimodal synergy.” See WOVENText. Version 2.2. Bedford/St. Martin’s Press. http://ebooks.bfwpub.com/gatech.php. Accessed 21 March, 2016.

Resource: Digital Woolf

A resource from Amanda Golden: Digital Woolf, containing links to assignments and an article about mapping Jacob’s Room.

Screenshot from Mapping Jacob’s Room