By Caleb Milligan
What’s the best way to teach an American Literature survey course in what Jay David Bolter calls “the late age of print”?
The study of literature in the twenty-first century has much to adapt to. Multiple media platforms vie constantly for students’ attention, and print literature sometimes gets backed into a “high culture” corner by popular entertainment consumption. Pedagogical visions for what English departments “should do” relegate literary studies to what they “used to do.” Mark Bauerlein still insists that we are The Dumbest Generation because kids are on their phones and not reading canonical texts. Meanwhile, survey courses cram stories and poems into a vacuum divorced of the rest of mainstream culture. After all is said and done, students complete humanities requirements and never read again, while the academy either wants to forget literature or cling to it all the way to the grave. There must be a way to teach that reconciles with the rest of media culture, in order to make a case for print literature as a critically and creatively viable medium for the changing English classroom.
I suggest at least one way to make literature matter in cultures populist and academic disregarding it. Over the summer, I was privileged—and challenged—to teach my own American Literature survey course for the second summer semester, a mere six weeks. This accelerated “semester” makes it impossible to offer any kind of wide breadth, from “the contact period to the contemporary,” as ideal expectations suggest. In having to adjust the survey experience to a limited amount of time, I limited the survey to literature beginning around the turn of the twentieth century and after. I favored the novel as my representative writing genre in order to teach the codex book as a technology of its own. I taught each text we read and discussed around the developing media of its time as a literary reaction to changing technological culture. And I regularly referenced print literature as media—just like art, film, television, and the internet. By dethroning the literary canon as the only artistic tradition somehow separate from the rest of media, I say we can revitalize the book as an aesthetic mode, rather than the aesthetic meridian.
I want to explain here my course as the example of my idea put into classroom action. We began with McTeague (1899) by Frank Norris as our “book on the book’s terms.” The novel seems to satirize popular pulp fictions of the time to see what happens when a sordid and fast-paced plot is put to literary means. Therefore, I had students read a print genre inspired, rather straightforward novel with plot, climax, etc. to see what the book “was” when it was considered unchallenged as a storytelling medium. The students predictably enjoyed it because it told a simple and exciting story with easily identifiable themes. We read some criticism of the novel’s naturalism by Donald Pizer, and it all felt like an English class should to them. That all changed when we took our largest leap forward in chronology we would all semester with Nightwood (1936) by Djuna Barnes, a radically different type of novel from our one right before. No one knew what to make of its strangely plotless and poetic structure, but through these struggles I taught them what modernist novels reactionarily sought to do that could not be adaptable to film. We worked through a small portion of Friedrich Kittler’s theory to discuss what was “untranslatable” about Barnes’s novel. Now that film had been introduced as an alternative to the novel, we next read Wise Blood (1952) by Flannery O’Connor to see what happened when books treat film as not a “threat” but a subject that can be taken on by literature. By this point, the students seemed to be catching on to this different framing of the literature survey and were working with me. Exposing them to Guy Debord’s concept of the spectacle, we discussed movies as a “new religion” with theaters as their churches, never forgetting the textual irony that O’Connor was writing about this. Continuing the tension of writing about movies, we moved on to The Bluest Eye (1970) by Toni Morrison, which takes as a major topic how overwhelming white representation in classic cinema warps positive black identity. We nuanced these discussions about black writing as a way to dismantle white visual culture with bell hooks’s writing on how to “decolonize the mind.” Some of the positive gains in our class discussions came to a halt here when my overwhelmingly white classroom proved very hesitant to discuss these difficult issues of racism and media representation; nevertheless, we developed a vocabulary for these vital conversations beyond “black and white,” and I was proud of them. Upon completing our week with Morrison: first comes film, then comes television, and after that came White Noise (1985) by Don DeLillo. 
DeLillo’s novel is a “media saturated” postmodern satire, so for what my course sought to cover, it was an essential choice. We of course got into Jean Baudrillard’s illuminating idea of the simulacrum, and discussed it in relation to protagonist Jack Gladney’s media anxieties about film, television, and news media. We even updated the discussion by considering how DeLillo’s novel still feels prescient for how we think about the internet and game studies. My students responded very positively to DeLillo’s novel, and as a class were impressed that a book could take on so much other media in a way that still feels fresh. “So much media” took us then to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) by Junot Diaz, a novel replete with references to “nerd culture” via pulp novels, comic books, science fiction films, and more. Using Ed Finn’s notion that Oscar Wao could help us think forward about digital humanities, we discussed networks of culture, fandom, and imagination as extended by the Web and concluded: if only Oscar had had an internet connection. We furthermore discussed how immigrant identity gets rewritten by American media and how “the revenge of the nerd” through booming superhero film franchises are helping or hurting the trend. In covering our readings and discussions here, I have left out far more than I could write, but I hope I have given the impression that American literature can be taught as media alongside media in a way that students will respond to and learn.
I would insist that literature is not going anywhere. However, we have to keep it around by learning to teach it in ways that a changing culture will grasp. I do not think that teaching books as “plain ol’ books” will outright not benefit the student, but I would argue that if “we see print with new eyes,” as N. Katherine Hayles encourages, then our students will too—for the better. The American Literature survey course will not be predictable, but will become an experience that exposes students to all kinds of media, books included. We cannot insist that old models will serve just fine, while the medial ecology around us looks constantly forward to the new. If print literature as a textual technology is to have a case, we will make it by embracing new media. I firmly believe, with all due respect to Bolter, that we are far from any kind of “late age of print” actually—but for books not to go anywhere, the English classroom should seek new ways to keep them around.