Teaching C21st Gothic writing in a digital age – a few starts

Teaching C21st Gothic writing in a digital age – a few starts Gina Wisker g.wisker@brighton.ac.uk

Importance of using the digital (social media, Youtube, blogs etc) in teaching C21st literature • My journey as an enthusiastic novice – through literature and other subjects • Nalo Hopkinson • Neil Gaiman • Some products and processes –for teaching learning and assessment

Engaging students and engaging a readership using social media and digital technologies • Keeping up • Step by step • Transferring • Its troublesome and rich (new, ever changing possibilities) • and enables creative thinking and producing , group and peer work, interaction, co construction of knowledge

Digital/Gothic • Importance of the digital to authors and readers and to students • Opportunities it offers are generally transformational and troublesome – uncanny – like the Gothic, they disturb familiar forms and expressions and offer parallel worlds as well as constructing knowledge • Gaiman, Hopkinson and others engage their readership and students with working in these forms so we experience, contribute , complete and are part of it

Novice teccy background • Trying to keep up through working with others • Using Youtube instead of a tape recorder • Publishing online –slayage -it lasts- (my most sourced writing ever!) • http://slayageonline.com/essays/slayage2/wisker.htm ‘vampires and schoolgirls:high school high jinks on the Hellmouth ‘ • The challenge- transfer (from my work with education - LSHTM and SEDA )teaching online- • posts and chats blogs wikis group interactions

The students and the authors lead

C21st Literary Creative writing – online support and engagement with readership • Nalo Hopkinson – Canadian Caribbean speculative fiction writer • uses liminal spaces of technology, • blogging and Facebook to communicate and share the developmental processes with her readership.

Nalo and liminal spaces - blogging • Writing/workshopping short stories with a group – support continued online in posts on Facebook • Her own blog testifies to • writing development • Everyday activities • Hobbies • Biography • Reading programmes • Extracts from performances • Website – keeps readers up to date

Specific responses- for my teaching • Email 2002-3- about writing development and aims- interactions prior to my meeting her • Emails –about use of blog, where to find information on stories and readings • Emails and guidance about what to discuss on her work for my class –provided the night before, and read out as a sense of ‘live’ C21st author in contact with readers • Sometimes I feel sending her emails and reading her blog or facebook is like stalking her.

nalo's blog • Writing progress, June 16, 2009 • Submitted by nalo on June 16, 2009 - 9:56am. • Novel-in-progress Taint is at 24,087 words as of this morning. I've been slowed down these past few days (that little matter of being carted to the hospital in an ambulance last Sunday didn't help, either). But I seem to be picking up speed again.

Read more • Selling my vintage sewing patterns • Submitted by nalo on June 14, 2009 - 3:39pm. • Almost all my worldly goods are in storage, and it's way too much stuff. So I'm selling some of my vintage and contemporary sewing patterns. I have hundreds of them, and honestly, there's no way I can sew all those garments in a lifetime. Whereas, should they bring me the cost of a train ticket to my next destination, that I can use. • Add new comment • I'm reading in Toronto, Wednesday, June 10 • Submitted by nalo on June 8, 2009 - 2:34pm.

Neil Gaiman • Working in the popular domain –uniting the popular , the high literary , the digital and the presence • Comic books/graphic novels the Sandman • Films • Short stories • Novels • Appearances • A blog since 2001

NG: I've been blogging since February of 2001. When I started blogging, it was dinosaur blog. It was me and a handful of tyrannosaurs. We'd be writing blog entries like, 'the tyrannosaurus is getting grumpy.' • These days there are 1.2 million people reading it. It's very, very weird. We have this enormous readership, as a result of which now I feel absolutely far too terrified and guilty to stop. I'd love to stop my blog at this point, but there's this idea that there will be 1.2 million people's worth of pissed-off-ness that I hadn't written anything today. The time mag interview p 5

http://www.deepmediaonline.com/deepmedia/2013/04/neil-gaiman-at-the-lbf.htmlhttp://www.deepmediaonline.com/deepmedia/2013/04/neil-gaiman-at-the-lbf.html • April 19, 2013 • More on the future of books: Neil Gaiman at the LBF

The digital world is already uncanny – unheimlich as is the Gothic –this defamiliarisation of familiar forms of engagement and expression naturally fit together, couple this with authors who work in fantasy and the Gothic, who expose and expresses and embody a layered uncanny world or more for us – and you have a perfect mix - • Gaiman has embraced this

Engaging students in co construction • Much of the tension and effectiveness is about co-construction – interaction, inventiveness, engagement - not necessarily of the close stalking sort and rather like ways in which Dickens readers would debate the ending and developments • You’re coming into their work – the gamers, the teens, the onliners – they’re going into the virtual worlds of the authors • And together they’re making something more than the look or the merchandising, as teachers and students this must relate to co-construction of knowledge and engagement aims as a part with the use of social networking to maintain student engagement and sense of community

Obviously we use digital elements anyway – • Podcasts • Websites • Youtube video clips • Powerpoints

Vampires: Dracula , Countess Dracula, Interview with the Vampireand gender

An example from a conference presentation/ teaching session

Neil Gaiman'sTranslatlantic comic horror translation- from H P Lovecraft to Monty Python, Pete and Dud .Or ‘Watch out for the Locals’ Paper at the International conference for the Fantastic in the Arts US 2013 Gina Wisker University of Brighton UK

‘For the world shall be cleansed with ice and floods, and I’ll thank you to keep to your own shelf in the refrigerator’ (Gaiman ,‘Only the end of the world again’.)

Neil Gaiman‘Only the end of the world again’ There was a note under my door from my landlady. It said that I owed her for two weeks’ rent. It said that all the answers were in the Book of Revelations. Itsaid that I made a lot of noise coming home in the early hours of this morning and that she’d thank me to be quieter in future. It said that when the Elder Gods rose up from the ocean, all the scum of the Earth, all the non believers, all the human garbage and the wastrels and deadbeats ,would be swept away and the world would be cleansed by ice and deep water. It said that she felt that she ought to remind me that she had assigned me a shelf in the refrigerator when I arrived and she’d thank me if in the future I‘d keep to it’ (he is in Innsmouth) • ‘She had a face like the stuff you don’t want to eat in a sushi counter, all suckers and spines and drifting anemone fronds’

Shoggoth’s old Peculiar ‘All British seaside resorts contain a number of Bed and Breakfast establishments who will be only too delighted to put you up in the ‘off-season’ was one such piece of advice. Ben had crossed it out and written ‘All British seaside resorts contain a number of Bed and Breakfast establishments, the owners of which take off to Spain or Provence or somewhere on the last day of September, locking the doors behind them as they go.’

“you know what eldritch means?” Ben shook his head. He seemed to be discussing literature with the two strangers in an English pub while drinking beer. He wandered for a moment if he had become someone else, while he wasn’t looking?’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvQq_tqB0jA • Pete and Dud in the pub 1969?

Gaiman based his stories on • 1) research and reading in HP Lovecraft • 2)Comic response • 3)The TV work of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore • To produce a nuanced comic Gothic response – this can be used as an example of ways in which students can also – source from previous work to indicate influence and intertextuality • Use online material as evidence and examples • Create from the previous and current work and produce their own online responses –video, Youtube,podcasts etc

Modes of engagement and assessment • We can produce • Podcasts, blogs, wikis, Youtube constructions , links to articles, films etc-everything from starightforwardly locating material online so they can gain managed access – a ‘booklist’ approach to constricting new responses in digital formats-

and in response – for assessment we can ask students to engage in for insstance........ • individual and group blogs as discussions, diary type capture of developing ideas and reflections • as constructions of knowledge • Wikis –in groups • Constructions of podcasts, Youtube or other video and comment products • Researched, evidence based explorations of the ways sources lead into new works-or works are constantly reconstructed and rewritten, re represented in different times (Dracula example) • How they are adapted and repositioned through personal and cultural response • Individual or group creative products

Teaching C21st Gothic writing in a digital age – a few starts