Commuting with the City Mouse

Steinhöwel's woodcut, Basel, 1501  

The following is the product of my most recent thinking regarding my new project tentatively titled, Veni, Vidi, Wiki: A Prehistory of Digital Textuality.  I'll be presenting this paper at UMass Boston's Research Center for Urban Cultural History (RCUCH) in a couple weeks and would love to workshop this a bit beforehand.

I think this paper speaks to concerns of our group, particularly the effects that the limits of textual environments have on discourse communities.  So please comment!

Here's the abstract (aka short version) if you don't have the patience for the rest:

Commuting with the City Mouse: Aesop's Fables and Academic Commentary

The instant message poses a formidable threat to literary interpretation.  While texting may contribute to recent demands for abbreviation, the desire for the instant message predates digital technology and has long plagued teachers' attempts to cultivate extended conversations about classroom texts.  The common readerly attraction to singularity and brevity often belies the interpretive multiplicity necessary for academic dialogue.  Perhaps no genre fully satisfies this appetite for the message more than the Aesopic fable.  Each brief fable is accompanied by a concise moral that readers can easily consume.  Yet, fabular interpretation has not always been so digestible.  In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries throughout Europe, Aesop's fables were standard classroom texts that offered more than a kernel of moral advice.  As staples of grammar and composition instruction, readers paraphrased and elaborated upon the fables in extensive commentaries, which served as medieval hypertexts that subsequent readers could read, associate with other classroom texts, and extend through marginal and interlineal glosses.  The medieval fable then offered the opportunity for practice in literary elaboration and collaborative constructions of knowledge, a far cry from the instant message we have to come to associate with Aesopica.  Furthermore, this model of medieval fabular reading is based on the same principles as user-friendly digital environments such as blogs and wikis, within which commentary can be produced at an unprecedented rate.  This paper suggests that these modes of digital elaboration and dialogue recall and remediate medieval fabular reading and writing practices.  While the restrictions of print culture reduced and often eliminated commentary, the digital network drastically expands the field of interpretation for literary texts.   In particular, the wiki offers a cyberspace within which students and teachers can compile commentary about course texts outside of the classroom.  Most importantly, the inscription of classroom dialogue onto this digital palimpsest can mitigate the challenges of maintaining cohesive academic communities on a commuter campus such as UMass Boston.  As a new form of fable commentary, wiki-writing can attenuate the desire for the instant message and develop a new respect for the virtues of collaborative elaboration.