Ovid’s Metamorphoses
meets hypertext in Middlebrook course
BY DIANE MANUEL
Diane Middlebrook admits
that she's a print person.
"I still am linear, I
know this," Middlebrook told a noon-hour audience on
Feb. 12 at the conclusion of her talk on
"Incorporating New Technologies into the Teaching
Process."
"But once you've
started to work in this [technological] mode, it's a
transformation, a resocialization process," the
professor of English added. "I know that this is a
kind of tool for the teaching of literature and it's
tapping a lot of energies that I'm finding very
productive as a teacher."
Middlebrook spoke to an
audience of more than 70 students, faculty and staff who
crowded into a classroom at the Center for Educational
Research at Stanford to hear her talk in the
"Award-Winning Teachers on Teaching" series
sponsored by the Center for Teaching and Learning.
Middlebrook told listeners how she and graduate student
Miles Efron tapped hypertextual links and computerized
data to augment a new Introductory Seminars course.
"Students who came to
the course on Ovid's Metamorphoses were walking
into a longstanding desire of mine that had never found
an academic home before to dedicate myself for 10
weeks to my interest in and fascination with the
poem," Middlebrook said about the focus of the
freshman and sophomore seminar. "I chose Metamorphoses
because it is foundational in the Western literary
canon and yet feels contemporary, postmodern and
multicultural."
Noting that the
17,000-line poem never has been out of circulation in the
2,000 years since it was written, Middlebrook said,
"The kinds of questions the poem poses really do
provide an occasion for the acquisition of skills in
research in the humanities."
In addition to acquiring
the technical hypertext skills that currently are being
taught in the seminar, Middlebrook said, students should
"get fuzzy" in the course.
"They should make
imaginative contact with this poem," she said of her
pedagogical goal.
Referring to the Old
Testament story of Jacob, who would not loose his hold on
an angel until it had blessed him, Middlebrook said she
told students, "That angel won't speak to you until
you have been clever enough to get inside [the poem] or
get around it."
Middlebrook described the
poet's relevance to her seminar students, who she hoped
would find new approaches to timeless literary works like
Metamorphoses.
"Ovid was like
us," she said. "He was a latecomer to greatness
[who thought] everything that was really great had
already been written.
"Then he took those
things and endowed them with psychological and political
credibility in a highly urbane, affluent, secular
culture, rather like our own."
Efron, a graduate student
who assists Middlebrook with the seminar, used a laptop
computer to project slides of the template he designed
for the commentaries that students are assigned to write
about the story of Apollo and Daphne, one of the myths
that is considered in Metamorphoses.
In addition to exploring
the literary context of the poem, students also choose an
object or historical topic to research, such as a bow and
arrow, lyre or Mount Parnassus. They meet with William
McPheron, curator for English and American literature at
Green Library, to learn how to navigate the extensive
data base that has been produced by Academic Text
Service, and they also can spend two hours every Tuesday
in the flexible classroom at Meyer with Efron. The class
meets three hours each week with Middlebrook to discuss
the book.
Drawing on The Vulgate
Commentary on Ovid's Metamorphoses, which combines
interlinear glosses on grammar and rhetoric with
facing-page sentences, Efron developed a template whereby
students can introduce links to critical essays or maps,
much like they might use footnotes in a traditional
research paper.
"In that old book I
found medieval readers employing the technology of the
page to articulate their own experience with Ovidian
poetry," Efron said. "I felt we were on to
something."
Middlebrook and Efron
emphasized that no technological skills are required for
the course. Although one student is a UNIX consultant for
Sweet Hall, most students in the class use computers only
for e-mail and word processing.
"Students with whom
I've worked have a strong intuitive feel for this,"
he said. "They've worked with hypertext longer than
I have and it seems entirely natural to them. They don't
ask me the kinds of questions I had expected."
Middlebrook and Efron plan
to archive the commentaries that students write on a
persisting website.
"Linking textual and
artistic fragments hypertextually into a cogent critical
object is, I think, a genuinely new and useful way of
thinking about text," Efron suggested. "It's a
new and useful form of rhetoric."
The project has
"useful modularity," Efron added, which
"can function as a portfolio of student work which
can easily grow to accommodate the student as his or her
thoughts mature."
He envisioned students
returning to their work in succeeding quarters, to add
different nuances to the text or to create new links.
Middlebrook described her
own wish for the outcome of the course.
"My dream is that
four years from now, when this group of students are
seniors, one of them will be writing well, let's go
all the way a prize-winning honors thesis on these
same lines that they are laboring over today." SR
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