Weeks 8–9: Lauren Redniss' "Thunder & Lightning: Weather Past, Present, and Future"

A two-page spread from Lauren Redniss' Thunder and Lightning: Weather Past, Present, Future.

If we've already experienced one sort of expressive leap from Maggie Nelson's Bluets (a very visual book without images) to Claudia Rankine's Citizen (a book full of visual arts and iconic images that also aims to mitigate the divide between the printed page and the moving image at times), then we're going exponentially farther with Lauren Redniss' Thunder and Lightning: Weather Past, Present, Future, a book that describes itself as "an uncatagorizable fusion of storytelling and visual art." Elsewhere, Redniss describes herself as an "author of visual non-fiction." That feels more apt than "graphic novelist," though some of the lessons we learned from Scott McCloud will serve us well here.

Thunder and Lightning is Redniss' third book and the follow-up to the much-beloved Radioactive, which told the story of Nobel-winning scientist Marie Curie. Her first book, Century Girl, traced the life of Doris Eaton Travis, the last living showgirl from the Zigfield Follies. In her MacArthur Foundation citation, the common threads linking these disparate projects, as well as the techniques that serve her well:

Lauren Redniss is an artist and writer seamlessly integrating artwork, written text, and design elements in works of visual nonfiction. Redniss undertakes archival research, interviews and reportage, and field expeditions to inform every aspect of a book's creation, from its text, to its format and page layout, to the design of the typeface, to the printing and drawing techniques used for the artwork. Her intimate, idiosyncratic perspective illuminates widely varying subjects.

In Thunder and Lightning this meticulous attention to detail carries over into her self-designed typeface (named Qaneg LR after the Eskimo word for "snow") and the various printmaking and coloring techniques used for the book's many images, which, in and of themselves, are inspired and directly reference naturalist's engravings of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Rather than take well-trod paths through weather phenomena, she offers us chapters focusing on abstract ideas like "chaos," "dominion," "war," "profit," and "pleasure," tying together oblique stories to make for a compelling narrative. We're a nation already torn about over the fundamental question of whether climate change is fact or fiction, along with the grim future prospects it might bring, therefore it's no stretch, especially when taking the historical longview (as Redniss does here), to view Thunder and Lightining as "the year's most political picture book" (as The Telegraph opines).

Here's the breakdown for our four days with the book. We'll also spend a little time towards the end of this segment laying out plans for the workshop sessions we'll begin after Spring Break. Also, please note that there are notes on each chapter starting on page 237, as well as notes on the typeface and printmaking techniques that will be useful foreknowledge in approaching the book:

• Friday, March 3: Ch. 1–3
• Monday, March 6: Ch. 4–7
• Wednesday, March 8: Ch. 8–10
• Friday, March 10: Ch. 11–12

Here are some supplemental resources that might be of interest to you:

• the New York Times offers two reviews of Redniss' book: one by Sadie Stein, the other by Jennifer Schuessler
• Smithsonian considers how Redniss "is rethinking biography": [link]
• Elle agrees, asserting that she "is inventing a new literary genre": [link]
• The Guardian (UK) hails the book as "thrillingly original": [link]
• the aforementioned Telegraph review: [link]

a 2011 TED Talk where Redniss discusses her creative process

Weeks 7–8: Claudia Rankine's "Citizen: An American Lyric"

We're following up Maggie Nelson's Bluets with a book that all too perfectly encapsulates our nation's fragmented zeitgeist and which, for that reason, is one of the most universally-lauded books in recent memory: Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric (Greywolf). Citizen was nominated for two of the three top literary prizes — the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award — winning the latter (FYI: the Pulitzer is the third); it also won the PEN Center USA award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, an NAACP Image Award, and the UK's Forward Prize. Finally, like our other two authors, Rankine is a 2016 recipient of the MacArthur Foundation's "Genius" Grant. She is using her $625,000 prize to found the Racial Imaginary Institute, which, per a recent article in the Guardian, will be:

a "presenting space and a think tank all at once" where artists and writers can really wrestle with race. She wants it to be a "space which allows us to show art, to curate dialogues, have readings, and talk about the ways in which the structure of white supremacy in American society influences our culture."

As the retrospective articles on 30 Rock that we read a few weeks ago attest, America briefly allowed itself to be comforted by the thought that we had reached a "post-racial" state after the groundbreaking election of President Barack Obama. The past eight years — marred by countless acts of racially-motivated violence, including the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, the Charleston Nine, Sandra Bland, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, and Cincinnati's own Samuel DuBose, among far too many others — has demonstrated that woefully, that's not the case. Taking that as a foundation, it's easy to understand why Rankine's book has be so eagerly embraced by audiences desperately searching for answers, or at least perspectives, in these troubled times. Rankine's NBA citation succinctly sums up exactly why everyone is talking about this book:

In Citizen, Claudia Rankine recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seemingly slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV — everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person’s ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society.

Born and raised in Jamaica, Rankine earned both a BA and MFA in the US and has published five volumes of poetry (which have become increasingly multimodal and genre-bending) over the past twenty years. With Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004) — an ambitious book that intermingled America's long history of racial injustice, post-9/11 terror paranoia, media manipulation, and the author's own struggles with depression in the face of all these things — Rankine gained widespread attention for her considerable talents. As its subtitle suggests, Citizen continues the mission of Don't Let Me Be Lonely, bringing her focus to present-day tragedies that have filled our news cycle in recent years.

Here's a breakdown for the three classes we'll spend with Citizen:

Friday, February 24: parts I–III
Monday, February 27: IV–V (up to Jena Six, ending on pg. 103)
Wednesday, March 1: V (Stop-and-Frisk)–end

And here are some supplemental materials that might be of interest:

• "Blackness Visible," Jonathan Farmer reviews Citizen in Slate
• "On Being Seen: An Interview with Claudia Rankine from Ferguson" by Alexandra Schwartz in The New Yorker
• Dan Chiasson discusses the book in The New Yorker
• Lauren Berlant interviews Rankine in BOMB
• Shaelyn Smith reviews the book in The Rumpus
• Timothy Liu reviews the book in Coldfront
• The Los Angeles Times reviews the book
• listen to Rankine read from Citizen on her PennSound author page
• Rankine is interviewed by David Naimon on Between the Covers, a literary radio program on Portland's KBOO-FM

Reminder: Late Papers Due Today

As I've mentioned several times during recent class meetings, this Friday, February 17th, is the last day that students scheduled as respondents during the first section of the semester to hand in late papers. If I don't have a paper in hand by our class meeting, then I'm afraid you'll receive an F for the assignment, which, it goes without saying, will make it difficult to do well in this class as a whole.

At present, I only have a little more than half of what I should have. Please consult the course information and policies at the link on the right if you have any further questions drop me a line.

Weeks 6–7: Maggie Nelson's "Bluets"

I am certainly not the only person to be blown away upon first encountering Maggie Nelson's Bluets (Wave Books, 2009) — an unassuming, slight book of tiny prose fragments whose minimalisms disguise an intoxicating complexity — and I hope your reaction will be similar to mine.

"Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color," the book begins, "Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession; suppose I shredded my napkin as we spoke. It began slowly. An appreciation, an affinity. Then, one day, it became more serious. Then (looking into an empty teacup, its bottom stained with thin brown excre­ment coiled into the shape of a sea horse) it became some­how personal." Thus we likewise begin our journey alongside Nelson through her love affair with the color blue, a process she tells us happened "as if falling under a spell, a spell I fought to stay un­der and get out from under, in turns," over the course of 240 brief number prose vignettes.

Along the way, she'll consider the color and its wider implications through a number of frames — from literature to the fine arts, music to film, philosophy to psychology,  science to religion, medicine to geography — all the while remaining deeply-rooted in Nelson's own personal experiences. In one regard, this is a book with a singular focus, but in reality that specificity merely serves as the nexus for an exploration of incredible breadth.

By the same token, as the central model for the sort of writing you'll be doing later in the term, I hope that the ambitious flexibility of Nelson's form will serve you as well as it does her in Bluets.

Here's our reading breakdown for our week with Bluets (n.b. the numbers here refer to the book's individual sections, not pages):

• Friday, Feb. 17: sections 1–89
• Monday, Feb. 20: sections 90–164
• Wednesday, Feb. 22: sections 165–240

And here are some supplemental resources related to the text:

• PennSound's Maggie Nelson author page — which houses two readings in which Nelson reads selections from Bluets
• Rob Schlegel reviews the book for Jacket2
• Gina Myers reviews the book for Bookslut
• Thomas Nelson discusses the book for Triquarterly
• Katie Schmid discusses the book on The Rumpus
• Charlotte Shane reviews the book for The Hairpin

Looking Forward to your Final Projects

It's only week six, but we're already taking time to look forward to your final projects. Why? Because we're at a crossroads between our first and second major sections of the semester and that's the ideal time to reflect on what we've already done and how it'll shape the work that follows.

Throughout this first phase of the term we've traced the evolution of English Studies from its origins to the multi-modal approach it takes in the 21st century. Now we're getting ready to look a little more closely at three much-lauded books that share a similar hybrid approach to their chosen subjects. In Maggie Nelson's Bluets, the focus seems like a simple one: the color blue. Yet, in her hands we discover a great complexity behind that singular topic. Claudia Rankine explores contemporary issues surrounding race in Citizen: An American Lyric, and while we know that won't be a simple topic, we marvel at the depth and breadth of her argument. Finally, while the main idea behind Lauren Redniss' Thunder & Lightning: Weather Past, Present, Future seems clear to us, the choices she makes in working through that field reveal a perspective all her own.

These books present a blueprint for the work you'll be doing once we return from spring break, when everyone will workshop two short pieces that work in a similar mode to Nelson, Rankine, and Redniss. Those two short pieces will be part of a longer final paper you'll write that will have similar aims, as I'll reiterate below.

So what should you be doing now?

1. If you haven't done so already, you should start cultivating a short list — two or three items maximum — of ideas that you think you'd be interested in writing through. They can be an abstract idea like Nelson's (a color, a quality, a virtue, etc.), a demographic categorization like Rankine's (gender, age, sexual orientation, class), or a discrete field like Redniss' (baseball, space travel, cooking, etc.). There are lots of possibilities here, and my desire is for you to find something you feel passionate about exploring in diverse ways, and about which you can produce some sort of argument or synthesized conclusion. If you're uncertain if your idea is too broad or narrow in scope, or if you're looking for guidance, please be in touch.
2. You should start thinking about specific cultural artifacts that will serve as facets of your argument, remembering all of the various media we've spent the past few weeks exploring. It'll take a lot of brainstorming and fine-tuning to get a final series of points that will work well together.
3. Keep these last two points in mind as you make your way through our next three books, and think analytically about the ways in which each author goes about constructing their own arguments.

What will the final look like?

I'll post more information about both the workshop round and the final as each approaches. For the workshop round you'll be submitting two pieces in the ballpark of 500 words each, and taken together those will be about half of your final, which should be about 2000 words minimum. If you want to think in five-paragraph essay form, you'll need to have at least three main sections that your essay is anchored by, though these should still be relatively broad sub-topics that can accommodate complex analysis using more than just one piece of evidence. Each of your workshop pieces might correspond to a rough draft of one of those sections. 

I'm not one to split hairs, but roughly speaking, I'd like at no more than 2/3 of your evidence to be literary (i.e. coming from a book), which means that the remaining 1/3 might be a film, or music, or a work of art, a specific object, a word, etc. Conversely, I'd like you to still have some sort of literary focus, so at least 1/3 of your source material should be literary.

The challenge here is two-fold: 1) finding a novel topic capacious enough to provide for all sorts of potential evidence, and 2) to find, analyze, and weave together your evidence in such a way that it produces some sort of cohesive conclusion. The latter might be harder than the former, but that's another very good reason to be paying attention to the way in which Nelson, Rankine, and Redniss construct their books.

Gah! Gah? Gaaaah!?

Yes, it's normal to have questions about this. I'm happy to provide answers today and along the way, and if you're thinking critically and conscientiously about the reading we'll be doing in the next phase of the class, a lot of things will become clearer.

February 15: Digital Humanities Tools for English Studies

No, it's not quite like this . . . It's more like sitting at your laptop until your butt falls asleep.

Digital humanities has been the new buzzword in the academic world for the past decade or so, and with good reason — while we tend to think of computer technology as being a tool of STEM fields, it also has tremendous potential to revolutionize fields such as our own. Over the past several years I've been involved with DH-centric efforts here at UC — including my work with the Elliston Project, our annual THATCamps, and as part of the advisory group behind our forthcoming Digital Scholarship Center — and through my work at UPenn as well (including PennSound, Jacket2, and the HiPSTAS project).

Originally, I'd intended to spend this day giving you a much more comprehensive overview of the realm of digital humanities, but I think it would be a better use of our time to provide you with a few practical tools you might find useful in your work this semester and throughout your time at UC.


Google Books: Simply put, this is the world's largest full-text database. A lot of the material is only available in limited preview or snippet form, but that can still help you find what page(s) what you're looking for will be on in the hard copy of the book. Simple keyword searching can help you track down certain scenes, phrases, quotes, ideas, etc. in an instant, especially when you didn't bother to take notes, outline, annotate the book, etc. Searching books on Amazon is a second option when the specific edition you want is locked down on Google. That information's still there, however, and that leads to our next tool. Beyond searching within one book, doing a more general search is a good way to find critical perspectives and/or information you might not have otherwise known about.


Google Ngram viewer: Google's Ngram viewer allows you to trace trends in usage in books over time from 1800 to 2000 (using the complete corpus of Google Books' archives) and make conclusions about what influences those trends. Here, for example, we can see the use of "Dylan" as it gets a boost from Dylan Thomas in the 1950s, a bigger boost from Bob Dylan in the 60s into the 70s, and then become the name of at least seven kids in your eighth grade class:

You can compare terms against one another (separating them with commas) and adjust the time frame as needed, and it'll also provide Google Books results broken down by time periods for you to browse. While the Ngram viewer works well for historical searches, it doesn't help much with more contemporary issues. For that, we'll need yet another tool.


Google Trends: The Google Trends database starts in 2004 and tracks information in more or less realtime. It can parse results accounting for web traffic vs. appearances in books and other printed media indexed in Google Books, and can similarly track interest over time, regional interest, and related search terms. Here, for example, you can see Google traffic for Sam Dubose and Ray Tensing from 2015 to the present:




The Wayback Machine: The Internet Archive is dedicated to the seemingly-impossible task of documenting the ever-changing landscape of the world wide web from relatively close to its cultural watershed moment in the mid-1990s to the present day. One of their more useful tools is The Wayback Machine, which allows users to browse multiple snapshot versions of a website as catalogued by its army of web crawlers. It's a wonderful way to get your hands on data that's otherwise inaccessible, whether the site just happens to be down temporarily or went offline years ago. It's also a wonderful tool that can be used to track changes that someone might or might not want you to know they've made.


Notetaking Apps: You need a way to keep track of your digital stuff. A lot of people like Evernote. I like Google Keep. It allows me to import entries straight from my browser and tag them as necessary to keep my info straight. Consider getting into the habit of using a resource like this sooner rather than later.

February 13: Studying Words

Before we get to today's readings I'd like to you take a little quiz. Specifically, the New York Times regional dialect quiz — based on the decade-old work of linguistics researchers Bert Vaux and Scott Golder — which went viral in late 2013 thanks to a novel presentation in a quiz format and some well-constructed heat maps that allowed users to drill down to local variations in speech. Given that we probably have some level of geographic variety in our class composition this should be a good way for you to start thinking about the relative flexibility of day-to-day speech conventions that we take for granted as absolute.

Regional differences in the term used for soft drinks.

That linguistic variability is intimately tied to our sense of English as a uniquely mutable and evolving language, and that's certainly not a new idea, as we discover when reading Walt Whitman's 1885 essay, "Slang in America" [PDF], which extends ideas present in his poetry from the very beginning (recall Whitman published Leaves of Grass with a brief glossary explaining to unfamiliar readers what terms like "pismire," "Paumanok," "Tuckahoe," and "quahog" meant).

This appreciation of regional and temporal variability frequently yields modern-day listicles like the BBC's recent "Lost in Translations: Words with Incredible Meanings," Slate's "The United Slang of America," The Guardian's "Basic Question: Did Sylvia Plath Write Like a 21st-Century Teenager?," "These Words You Use Every Day Have Racist/Prejudiced Pasts, And You Had No Idea" from The Huffington Post, and NPR's "16 'Spiffy' Words College Students Used in 1916," and certainly, pop-cultural pieces like that point us in the right direction of thinking more objectively about the origins and uses of language.

Still, these pieces aren't quite as critically robust as we might wish they were. I'd like to point out two examples of entities doing great ongoing writing about words and their history and use. First, from Slate's excellent "Lexicon Valley" column, here are a few recent articles:

• Jacob Brogan, "What is the F--kboy?" [link]
• Katy Waldman, "The Incredible Shrinking Zeitgeist: How Did This Great Word Lose Its Meaning?" [link]
• Katy Waldman, "Why We Be Loving the Habitual Be" [link]
• Heather Schwedel, "Does Donald Trump Talk Like a Woman?" [link]

Next, NPR's wonderful "Code Switch" column, which explores the "frontiers of race, culture, and ethnicity," has an occasional (and seemingly now-defunct) feature entitled "Word Watch," which offers up well-researched analyses of the racially-charged language we might not even realize surrounds us. A few examples from "Word Watch":

• Gene Denby, "The Secret History Of The Word 'Cracker'" [link]
• Kat Chow, "Running Late? Nah, Just On 'CPT'" [link]
• Lakshmi Gandhi, "What A Thug's Life Looked Like In 19th Century India" [link]
• Kat Chow, "How 'Ching Chong' Became The Go-To Slur For Mocking East Asians" [link]

So how might you try to do this sort of etymological writing on your own? First take stock of the techniques and approaches that the writers above have used — remember, good writers cite their sources so that you can follow their bread crumb trail. Dictionaries — whether hard copy or online; as august an institution as the OED or as wonderfully crass and spontaneous as Urban Dictionary — are your best friends, and even basic Google searches will often reveal the complicated histories and origins of words. Another marvelous tool is Green's Dictionary of Slang, an exhaustive archive of "five hundred years of the vulgar tongue," which is now available free online (after existing solely in a multi-volume print edition costing more than $1000). We'll talk about some other tools that might benefit you in our next class.

Finally, if etymology is your cup of tea, then I wholeheartedly recommend Helen Zaltzman's wonderful podcast, The Allusionist. Subtitled "Small Adventures in Language," this show takes brief, engaging looks into the words and phrases that help shape our world, and is always entertaining.