You'll
agree that there is more than one kind of poetry in the true sense
of the word--that is to say, calling something into existence that
was not there before . . .
--Diotima in Plato's Symposium
Everybody
is contemporary with his period . . . and the whole business of
writing is the question of living in that contemporariness. . .
. The thing that is important is that nobody knows what the contemporariness
is. In other words, they don't know where they are going, but they
are on their way.
--Gertrude Stein, How Writing is Written
WHAT
FOR
The
largest challenge facing Liberal Arts and Sciences today is how to
deal with the rapidly changing and increasingly complex world that
all the phenomena under the label globalization have created. This
world is "multi-" many things: cultural, linguistic, ethnic, racial,
etc. Over the last few decades, on a daily basis, some "we" or another
has found itself face to face with not the other but with many others,
with not one language practice, but many. Educating for this world
is the most pressing challenge we face. CYBERGRAPHIA was begun with
the conviction that as education is the place where we confront and
instruct how to negotiate today's world, contemporary writing has
much to contribute to this discussion. CYBERGRAPHIA, thus, hopes to
initiate a web-based discussion on the challenges and productive possibilities
that arise when teaching contemporary writing.
The website's
roots are in a four day conference called "Poetry & Pedagogy:
The Challenge of the Contemporary," organized by Joan Retallack,
that the Institute for
Writing and Thinking held in 2000 that concentrated on how innovative,
thoughtfully performative, and critically aware practices of teaching
might arise when teaching contemporary writing.
HOW
TO Each
month for at least a year, CYBERGRAPHIA will feature a new piece of
contemporary writing and a discussion of some possible ways to use
this writing in the classroom. This is designed to be a sort of mini-anthology
introduction to the terrain of innovative contemporary writing. The
site features writing that might be overlooked by those new to contemporary
writing (much of the work featured here appeared in small print runs
or in ephemeral journals). The emphasis in CYBERGRAPHIA is not on
craft or expertise or canon formation. These works, ones that might
be called "avant garde" or "innovative," are featured because they
encourage active, generative, and speculative thinking; because they
stretch or reconfigure language in exciting ways. The pedagogical
discussion that accompanies each featured poem is provisional and
always being revised. It is presented as just one option, not the
only one. CYBERGRAPHIA draws heavily from the teaching strategies
of the Institute for Writing
and Thinking at Bard College which encourages collaborative learning
methods in which reading, writing, and thinking are active processes.
CYBERGRAPHIA encourages registered and unregistered users to provide
other pedagogical uses through the discussion forum. Featured works
and pedagogical discussions are archived.
In addition, CYBERGRAPHIA
has a workshop forum and five online interactive teaching tools available
to registered users. The tools are designed for faculty and students
to create, collaborate, and comment on poetry and prose. The emphasis
here is on ease of use. Users need only enter text in boxes to submit
their writing and basic HTML commands can be used in any text box.
The following
tools are available:
NOTEBOOK:
an online version of what composition theorists often call the "dialectical
notebook" or "double entry notebook." This version has three columns.
The user who creates the notebook can post comments in any column;
any registered user can post in any of the last two columns and
in the discussion forum at the bottom.
ANNOTATOR: a tool that allows users to create a hypertext of a primary
work. Registered faculty can enter the primary work and then commentary
can be added by any registered user line by line.
PUBLISHER: registered users can post writing which then gets "published"
as a web page.
SORTER: registered users enter text by paragraph which is then randomly
sorted.
ARCHIVE:
faculty can upload files here. All files are freely downloadable
by registered users.
Anyone registered
as a "faculty" user with CYBERGRAPHIA may create and delete
their own workshops and group particular student notebooks or annotations
or web pages, etc., under their workshop. Anyone registered as a "student"
user may create a notebook, annotate a text created by a faculty user,
publish a text, or sort an essay. Workshop archives, accessible only
to the registered faculty member and students, are available for at
least a year but this can be extended by request.
See also, CYBERGRAPHIA:
a user's manual.
Please note,
we've tried to privilege the exchange of ideas and open access as
much as possible. As a result, nothing that is posted on CYBERGRAPHIA
is private. Please respect other users. The discussion forums are
moderated and any unnecessary or inflammatory postings will be deleted.
