Whitney Trettien

When I was an undergraduate, my American literature professor asked our class to close-read a novel. I don’t remember the text or her exact question, but I do remember my answer: I pointed to the paperback cover of the book and proposed that the touch of its cheap cardboard and shiny art influenced a readers’ understanding of what genre the novel would be before she had even opened it. In effect, I was judging the book by its cover and—in my blunderingly youthful way—trying to make the case for why such judgments should be part of a critical practice. Her reaction was swift and playful. “As a published author myself,” she quipped, “I can assure you that no writer has control over their cover art. It doesn’t tell us anything about the novel.” 

My professor was a celebrated scholar, an inspiring teacher, and a generous mentor; but on this point, I was pretty sure she was wrong. It took many years of graduate training in the history of books and media to understand fully why. What was at stake in this moment was not just the interpretation of this book’s cover but the agency of objects in knowledge production more broadly. Put another way, how do the dog-earred books and sticky notes, the piles of PDF print-outs and laptops that litter our classroom tables enter into and give shape to the ways we teach and learn?

As an instructor, my own pedagogy places these media technologies front and center. Nearly every class session, I focus discussion on something tangible, an object or image, in order to draw a disparate group of often tired and variously caffeinated bodies into a collective classroom experience. This might be a rare book or manuscript pulled from Penn’s special collections; a woodblock or copperplate that shows how images were reproduced; strings of wampum beads at the Penn Museum; a vintage computer or rare typewriter from my small collection of old technologies; a zine picked up during a site visit to the Soapbox Zine Library in West Philly; or even some source code I have pulled up on the screen. Initially, these objects animate students’ curiosity or even veneration, as they marvel at the age or sheer foreignness and opacity of the thing before them. It is my task an instructor, then—as I am constantly relearning through ongoing experimentation and failure—to turn this spark of wonder toward an investigatory research process and critical close reading. 

Here’s an example of how this works in my “Digital Lives of Books” course, a book history course that explores how digital technologies are transforming the way literature is written, read, and published. One day, students read the Stephen King story, “Word Processor of the Gods.” The story itself is, frankly, not terribly rich in its aesthetics or symbolism: it features a flailing, aging male author, writing in the 1980s, who finds that what he writes on his homebrew computer actually changes the circumstances of his own life. As Matthew Kirschenbaum has written, in a reading that inspired this assignment, the story shows an “awareness of the strange new ontology of word processing, the way it lifted written language into a symbolic, procedurally actionable realm, coupled with the inscrutable opacity of the physical apparatus working the magic.” On the day we read this story, I bring in a TRS-80 Model 100, one of the first portable word processors, released in 1983. I ask students to turn it on – always a minor struggle—then write something on it. This forces them to confront the command line, since the TRS-80 has no operating system. After puzzling out how to open a text file, a certain fascination takes hold as students type on the clunky keyboard. As they bumble around the machine, I ask them to start noticing things about the interface: for instance, there are no text formatting options. This leads into a discussion about binary code, computer memory, and the size of ASCII characters (8 bits). I then share with students the size of the TRS-80’s memory (24kb) and ask them to calculate how much text it could hold (roughly ten pages). This opens a discussion about why someone in 1983 might have found this $1,099 modem-enabled word processor useful, which brings the class collectively to higher-level historical thinking about the production and circulation of texts within a media ecology. 

About halfway through class, I ask students to delete their text file. This task is surprisingly difficult, even for savvy computer users, since the TRS-80 uses a rare (and controversially violent) “KILL” command, rather than “DELETE.” As I show them the command, I ask some students to find the etymology of “delete” in the Oxford English Dictionary while others research the history of the “kill” and “delete” commands—a process that usually brings us to a conversation about editing and the materiality of word processing across time. (The verb phrase “to delete” has been applied to text since the 1600s, but early computers lacked random-access storage and so did not need such commands; to “delete” a file was simply to throw away a punch card or magnetic tape reel.) This brings the class finally back to King’s short story and the socially-embedded nature of writing technologies, as well as popular literature’s imbrication with their rhetoric. It is my hope and aim that students use our experiences as we move across objects, texts, words, and historical documents to see their own entanglement in media technologies differently, with the critical reflexivity that comes from learning the deep histories of the present. 

My desire to show the applicability of these histories brings my class to different sites across campus, where students can see first-hand the labor of making texts and maintaining archives. All of my classes have visited the digitization lab in the basement of the library, where Mick Overgaard, Anna Levine, Chris Lippa and others have kindly shown how a book goes from the stacks to the Internet Archive website or Penn’s digital databases. We also visit Sarah Reidell and her crew in the conservation lab—a wonderland of media technologies old and new—and the Common Press, where Mary Tasillo helps students print their own broadsides. I am especially grateful to John Pollack and the generous experts in Kislak, who are essential teaching partners to anyone working with rare materials. These site visits underscore for students that books, images, and resources that make possible their education are supported by a vast network of labor and an experienced, skillful instructional team that extends well beyond the professors or TAs they see every day in the classroom. 

To teach is to create, with intention and care, a space where experiences can ignite changed thinking. It is to make objects, ideas, histories, or texts that seem flat, ordinary, or a historical shimmer with new depths. Sometimes this happens through a well-constructed assignment or module; more often it occurs by happenstance and chance, when a unique configuration of things, learners, and ideas collide. While my own undergraduate professor probably has no memory of her impishly offhand remark, it stuck a chord in me that resonated well beyond the space of the classroom. This is the best that pedagogy can do.

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Whitney Trettien is an assistant professor of English in SAS.

This essay continues the series that began in the fall of 1994 as the joint creation of the College of Arts and Sciences, the Center for Teaching and Learning and the Lindback Society for Distinguished Teaching. 

See https://almanac.upenn.edu/talk-about-teaching-and-learning-archive for previous essays.