On the Interactive Reader

The title of this post has a kind of tongue-in-cheek meaning for me because when I think of the Interactive Reader, I automatically think of the consumable versions of the English textbooks I use in my classroom.  Though I’ve been ostensibly using these for years (mostly as bookshelf dust catchers), I’ve never really considered the title proclamation of interactivity.  What makes the Interactive Reader interactive?  After taking a cursory glance inside one of them, I come up with the following reasons the textbook company might consider it appropriate to call the reader interactive:  1)  the kids are allowed to (gasp!) write in it; 2) the text encourages note-taking by providing carefully-structured questions along the margins, along with nice little spaces for answers; 3) it has Critical Thinking Activities at the end of each story/article, encouraging students to connect the texts with one another and with their own experiences.

I think that, in the context of reader interactivity and a reader’s ability to manipulate the text itself, the only thing notable in those three features is the students’ ability to write on the pages of the book without incurring the wrath of their teachers.  They are not given room to influence the text; they have no ability to manipulate it within the confines of the prescribed interactive features.  What the Interactive Reader strives to do, in other words, is to encourage students to engage with and think about the text.  I don’t necessarily object to this (ahem), though I prefer other methods of teaching reading skills.  Clearly, though, to call these texts interactive is not precisely correct.

Digital Collaboration

This entry is written primarily in response to Andrew Bennett’s chapter “Collaboration” in The Author (Routledge, 2005).

After pointing out that the Oxford English Dictionary identifies the first use of the word “collaborator” in 1802, Andrew Bennett surmises that the idea of authorial collaboration only became significant  within “what Jack Stillinger calls the Romantic ‘myth of the solitary genius'” (Stillinger 201, qtd. in Bennett 94).  Because authors were arguably not considered to be autonomous nor their works original before this time, the need to use a word like collaboration to describe situations in which more than one author (or authority) had a claim on the content of a text was simply not present.  In this chapter, Bennett explores the different ways in which the idea of multiple authorship has been theorized, criticized, and presented throughout the history of literary criticism since the seventeenth century.  Though he mentions several versions of collaboration including co-authorship, editing, plagiarism, and even reliance on social and psychological context, Bennett comes to the conclusion that attribution theory, though its focus is ostensibly on the various “voices” found within a given text, actually gives more importance to the idea of authorial intent than it perhaps intends.  For the moment, I agree.