#8.

Chapter 3 of O'Gorman, Marcel. E-Crit: Digital Media, Critical Theory, and the Humanities. Toronto, Ontario: Toronto UP, 2007. Print.

O’Gorman asks, “Just as Ramus’s scholarly method had a great influence in shaping a print apparatus that has persisted for five centuries, might it not be possible to invent scholarly methods to shape the digital apparatus?” (50). He continues by arguing that this trend of “transferring the practices of conventional scholarship… from one medium into a newer more efficient medium” is nothing new, and that the reluctance to accept new forms of scholarship isn’t new either. In my understanding, O’Gorman uses Blake’s works of composite art as a means to explore digitization. He argues that “Blake’s works of composite art might not arouse our senses of smell, taste, and touch, but he invites us to engage with his prints on something other than a visual level; his work compels us to react in ways that might altogether change the way in which we see and experience the world” (57). O’Gorman also brings us back to the image-text, asserting that it is an “enigmatic space in which word and picture meet but never reconcile, for they are bound in a dialectical relationship  in which ‘neither can be reduced to the other’s terms’” (62). He then discusses how he applied these notions in his classroom through a multimodal project, though he never really calls it that. He asks his students to “write with” Blake by giving them the freedom to interact with his text without context.

A main thing that I wondered regarding this “writing with Blake” project was that if his interpretation of what occurred—the different interpretations of Blake’s text—is fair/accurate. To be sure, students have very different educational and personal backgrounds. O’Gorman asserts “by creating exercises such as “Re-writing Blake,’ instructors are not asking students to write about the poet/painter; they are asking students to write with him” (66). My question is this: can the same goals be achieved if a handful of students have already read/are familiar with Blake’s work? How might that change the classroom dynamic?

I feel there are TONS of connections between O’Gorman’s work and the other course readings. This chapter is very much concerned with the construction and the interpretation of texts, which I see connecting to Lanham’s “at” versus “through” method as well as Slatin, who argued that it is up to the author to predict how a reader will look at a text and to guide them through it without being too predictable. I see Faigley and Kirschenbaum reflected when O’Gorman discusses how the Ramist spatilization “haunts our educational apparatus to this day; the same technological drive toward efficiency that spawned text-books on logic is now producing distance education and the ambitious electronic archiving projects that characterize much of humanities scholarship in the digital age” (50). I see a link between O’Gorman’s “Re-writing Blake” project and Shipka’s discussion of multimodality, and a link between his discussion of how Blake “teaches us not to trust our visual sense alone—an invaluable lesson for students bombarded daily by the words and images of a postmodern mediascape in which the imagetext is the dominant mode of communication” to George’s discussion of the value of visual arguments and Selfe/Hesse/Selfe’s discussion of aurality (66). O’Gorman’s interpretation of the “writing-with” strategy made me think of co-authorship issues and the authors that we’ve read that are concerned about them—Lanham, Slatin, and Bolter&Grusin.