his project asks you to "illuminate" the text using the typographical palette offered by your word-processing program. If you use Word, you can import graphics and sound to produce a "multimedia module" without special software.Differing fonts, type styles and sizes, and formatting options allow you to gloss the text through layout and typography. In this way you can offer an interpretation of the text using visual cues, which we can then use as a starting point for class discussion of Chaucer's text. It will help you to "hear" the text even as you gloss it visually.
By illuminating a text in this way you can begin to see how texts are not just strings of words, but systems of meaningful signs, some of which are verbal and some not. You will be engaging, in other words, with the verbal and visual semiotics of the text. Having to gloss the text will allow you to grapple with the relations between the text's visual and aural texture (its "look and feel") and its meaning.
Implicit in the exercise is the idea of form as meaning. It will serve as a starting point for part of the next project--a historical discussion of the layouts in medieval manuscripts, and how the disposition of the text on the manuscript page was a part of the communicated meaning.
The fluidity or plasticity of electronic text presents significant problems for print-based notions of authorship and authority, and the legalities of copyright, intellectual property, and publishing that depend on them. But for our purposes in reconstructing the Middle Ages, it is a great boon because it can approximate some of the conditions of pre-print manuscript culture. Like the scribes of medieval manuscripts, each of whom produced a unique version of the text, you will manipulate the electronic text to create your own unique versions. While the notion of scribe as author is no longer strange to medievalists, the notion of the student's authorial role with respect to the text will require rethinking customary power relations among teacher, student, and text.
"Illuminate" the text using different fonts, pitches, type options, etc.
Extra credit for importing graphics or sound (e.g. annotate a line with the text read in Middle English). You'll have to submit this on diskette.
Print and submit a hard copy next Wednesday (1/31). ALSO bring your diskette to class--we'll work with them in class. Meet in the AML. Always save a copy on diskette and in hard copy in case of accident.
2. Read: Chaucer, "Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale," "Franklin's Prologue and Tale," and chapter 9 in Cook and Herzman.
3. Start thinking about what helps you learn unfamiliar material most effectively. What stimulates your interest? Holds your attention? Helps you make connections so you remember things? Keep notes on what works and what doesn't work in other classes as well as in this one. This will give you some ideas for putting together your own presentation.
1. From Ohio State's program Computers in Composition and Literature (courtesy of a handout that came to me in 1992):
selection from a Jasper Johns text
selection from Alice Walker, The Color Purple
2. From a seminar at Stanford, "Electronic Chaucer":
Monk's Portrait from General Prologue
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