Tag Archives: new media

Is Domestic Noir the New Sensation Fiction?

by Karen Bourrier

I’ve been listening to a lot of the bestselling (contemporary!) author Liane Moriarty on audiobook over the last year. She’s the one who wrote Big Little Lies. If you haven’t read the book, maybe you’ve had a chance to watch the HBO series? At the same time, I’ve been teaching an upper year seminar on “The Victorian Bestseller,” which includes a unit on sensation fiction. We read The Moonstone as it was originally published in periodicals, comparing its appearance in Harper’s in the US to its appearance in All the Year Round in the UK. (We also do a digital assignment comparing The Moonstone’s appearance in these two publications, which you can read about here.)

All this has me wondering whether domestic noir, the genre that Liane Moriarty as well as Paula Hawkins (The Girl on the Train) and Gone Girl (Gillian Flynn) write in, is the new sensation fiction. There are a lot of similarities between sensation fiction and domestic noir on both a formal and a thematic level.

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Dickens’s Extraordinary Traveller: Immersive Media Forms and the World as Panorama

By Daniel Martin

Of all of Dickens’s prose non-fiction, the one piece that has consistently troubled me the most since I started thinking about Dickens’s journalism and its bearing on the prehistory of immersive media spectacles is “Some Account of an Extraordinary Traveller,” published in Household Words in April, 1850. A typical Dickensian flight of Fancy, this notice introduces readers to the figure of Mr. Booley, who at the age of 65, “left England for the first time” (511) on a series of trips around the world. “Mr. Booley’s powers of endurance are wonderful,” Dickens writes: “All climates are alike to him. Nothing exhausts him; no alterations of heat and cold appear to have the least effect upon his hardy frame. His capacity for travelling, day and night, for thousands of miles, has never been approached by any traveller of whom we have any knowledge through the help of books […] Though remarkable for personal cleanliness, he has carried no luggage; and his diet has been of the simplest kind” (511-12). Readers follow this account of Mr. Booley’s travels, which take him to such far-off locales as New Orleans in the United States, New Zealand, Australia, Egypt, India, and the Arctic regions of the World, before reading in Booley’s own words the inspiration for his “roving spirit” (515):

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Floating Academy: Twitter in the Victorian Studies Classroom

By Karen Bourrier

For the past few semesters, inspired by Joshua Eyeler’s post on “Teaching with Twitter; or Adventures in Student Engagement,” I’ve had a social media participation component in my classroom. I’ve now used Twitter at all levels, from the freshman writing seminar to the graduate classroom. It’s worked well in all of these settings, but I think I’ve had the most success at the 400-level, with third and fourth year university students studying Victorian literature. The reason for this success, I think, is two-fold. One, third and fourth year students are sophisticated and engaged enough with literature that they get the possibilities of the medium immediately: they use Twitter to respond in real-time to plot developments (there’s a madwoman in the attic!), to comment on versions of Victorian texts that have entered the cultural mainstream (Please sir, can I have some more?), and of course, to raise questions for class discussion. The second reason for this success, I think, is that third and fourth year university students are not yet too worried about formulating identities as professional literary critics on the web, which leaves room for a freewheeling discussion.

What I enjoy most about using Twitter in the classroom is finding out more about my students and what they think about the works we’re reading early on in the semester. I learn about their sense of humour and the many ways they encounter Victorian literature in popular culture. I also find out who the really smart but shy students are early on, since they will Tweet, but not necessarily put their hands up in a class of 40. (Incidentally, our class Twitter stream is also a pretty good gauge of who is keeping up with the reading!) In my class of 40, which is something in between a seminar and a lecture, social media fosters some of the bonds that would come from a smaller classroom. I also assign a Storify, where a student archives the Tweets from one day’s class, in lieu of a seminar presentation. This serves as a record and a study guide for the final exam.

The odd student won’t complete the Twitter assignment. That’s okay, it’s only worth 5% and won’t kill their grade. When I started this assignment, I thought more students would want to remain anonymous, and though I have the option written into the assignment, I have yet to have a single student take me up on it. If you are interested in seeing what we’ve done with Twitter, you can take a look at our Storify archives for Early Victorian Literature here, and Late Victorian Literature here.

I’ll post my assignment below. In the meantime, I’d love to know, have you used social media in the classroom? Was it successful?

Twitter Assignment for ENGL 449

The social networking site Twitter has gained tremendous currency over the past few years as a place where academics and professionals can learn and share ideas. To spark our class conversations and keep them going throughout the week, everyone in the class will tweet a minimum of six times a week (three tweets per class). We will use the hashtag #ENG449 to keep track of the tweets. The only guidelines are that your tweets must be respectful and relevant to the class. Your tweets could include 1) a question or an observation about the reading 2) a quotation from the reading 3) a response to a tweet 4) a link to a relevant resource (scholarly article, film adaptation etc.). Each student will also be responsible for creating a Storify narrative of the tweets from one day’s class, due before the next class, which I will post to our course website, and which everyone can draw on to generate ideas for papers and to study for the final exam.

Because Twitter is public, I encourage you to put your best, most professional foot forward in your tweets. You can follow your classmates and me @kbourrier, but I also encourage you to follow people in your future career path. It will be easiest for everyone in the class to link Twitter identities with classroom identities if you are comfortable using your name and a picture of yourself as part of your Twitter handle, but this is not required. If you choose to be anonymous, let me know what your Twitter handle is so that I can give you credit for participation. Students who complete the Storify assignment, the minimum number of tweets (78) and whose tweets show engagement with the texts can expect to receive an A- (4/5), with an A+ (5/5) being reserved for exceptional engagement.

Adapted from Josh Eyler, Rice University: https://josheyler.wordpress.com/2013/04/18/teaching-with-twitter-or-adventures-in-student-engagement/