Undergraduates have gotten very good at finding ways not to read. Sure, they scan countless text messages and social-media posts, but they are increasingly reluctant to engage with course readings.
I have gradually decreased the length of my reading assignments — from long novels to short stories and poetry — yet students still balk. Somewhat counterintuitively, I’ve found that less is not more: Even small literary gems do not increase in perceived value despite their compactness, beauty, and accessibility. For many undergraduates, the very idea of reading assigned words on a page, or even on a screen, seems associated with a duty to be either raced through or avoided almost entirely by substituting ersatz renditions easily found online.
I often require students to write three paragraphs of analytical commentary for a reading assignment. Yet rather than actually read and analyze the text, some students instead spend their time combing the internet for summaries and then copying vague language they’ve clearly lifted from online sources. That happens no matter how short the reading.
In effect, they spend more time avoiding literature than it would have taken to read it.
In every course, I have several dedicated students who thoughtfully do the readings, but the number of nonreaders has increased over the years. That trend is most strikingly evident in a course I teach on literature and film. One student told me that pairing such a dynamic medium with the old-fashioned “words on the page” was an obvious recipe for disengagement with the less-dynamic medium.
Given that many students would rather binge-watch their favorite Netflix series than study, is there a way to get these new digital natives interested in actually doing the reading? In the cultural war between old-fashioned print and multitasking in the garden of digital delights, can we meet our students half way?
We already do that with our Power Point lectures and other visual and auditory material that we upload to course websites. Some of us offer undergraduates opportunities to create multimedia course projects rather than traditional term papers. But what if we invited students into course texts by creating and assigning amplified editions of some of the works we teach? Would they be willing to spend more time with literature if more digital material were available inside the work as they read it?
Since the 2010 release of the iPad and other tablets, a new genre of texts has emerged with added material such as video clips, voice-overs, maps, documents, photos, interviews, and performances to augment the reading experience. Enhanced e-books can be read on small portable e-devices or computers and offer readers paths into carefully selected multimedia material that increases knowledge and understanding of the text.
Major publishers such as Penguin and Faber and Faber (with Touch Press) have produced splendid enhanced editions of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land with many discretely placed extras that explain and augment the novel and poem. You can watch a video of Fiona Shaw performing Eliot’s dense masterpiece; listen to readings by Eliot, Alec Guinness, Jeremy Irons, and others; watch a video of Seamus Heaney speaking about the poem; see the manuscript with Eliot’s handwritten revisions and related photographs; and read the many explanatory notes. Immersion in Shaw’s exquisite performance makes the poem come alive, an inkling of our ancestors’ pleasurable experiences of oral performance.
However attached we are to our battered print copies of literary works, enhanced e-books like these might entice our students to spend more time engaging with reading assignments.
Enhanced e-books add varying degrees of augmented material. Open Road’s edition of William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness for example, discretely places audio, video, and other visual enhancements at the beginning and end of the novel to allow readers uninterrupted engagement with the text itself.
In contrast, Globe Education’s editions of Shakespeare plays, such as Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and Macbeth, include many amplifications on the pages of the dramatic texts: numerous photos and videos from the productions, audio clips with actors’ views on the characters they play, contextual information, and directors’ notes on scenes, among many other extras. While these numerous dynamic enhancements bring the plays to life for today’s readers, do they allow the slow thoughtful engagement with Shakespeare’s treasured words that reading a word-only text facilitates? Creators of enhanced e-books need to select, balance and carefully design the added material.
A stellar example of this new genre is Digital Dubliners, created by Joseph Nugent and his students at Boston College. Available in iBooks for reading on tablets and Mac computers, this edition of Joyce’s book includes video clips with students introducing each story, video “office hours” with Joyce scholars, maps, 3-D visuals, memorabilia, photos, glossed words and phrases, and many other augmentations. Collectively written and available as a free iBook, this superb digital text shares academic knowledge with a wider public and uses the 21st-century cultural vernacular to draw readers to a century-old literary masterpiece.
Enhanced e-books will also help students learn in other disciplines. E.O. Wilson’s Life on Earth and Al Gore’s Our Choice are dazzling contributions to the science classroom. The enhanced edition of Mario T. Garcia and Sal Castro’s Blowout! includes segments of audio interviews, video clips, and other historical documents that would usually be stored away in the historian’s private files after the book is written and published.
First-year medical students at the University of California at Irvine are given iPads with digital editions of many of their textbooks uploaded. In studying, they move between the iPad, computer screens, and the print versions of books. The enhanced digital editions allow them to traverse the course material in different ways, with learning augmented by 3-D images, videos, and other dynamic material. An initial assessment showed that the national board scores of the students at the end of the second year increased by 23 percent.
In a current graduate seminar I am teaching, “Theory and Practice of Multimedia Enhanced Books,” students are studying the nature of augmented e-books, the interplay and impact of the component parts, and the invitation they offer to new reading practices. Students also are producing their own enhanced editions of texts using the free iBooks Author and other compositional software.
In designing those editions, we analyze the effectiveness of various compositional strategies and work for an aesthetic whole in which the original text is not overwhelmed. In a recent article, “Crowdsourcing Latino Literary Study,” I suggested various enhanced e-book projects that we might undertake in my field of U.S. Latino/a literature.
Outside the classroom, professors might undertake such projects in their specialties to create enhanced editions of texts for their students to read.
Is the literary text itself diminished in an augmented e-book? Will students recede further into their avoidance of long-form reading and their diminishing skills of decoding literary language if we try to entice them through multimedia additions? Will they jump from enhancement to enhancement, telling themselves they have engaged with the literary work, when in fact they’ve only spent a few minutes with what they treat as an updated version of Spark Notes?
Perhaps a few will. But others will be seduced by this new form of “slow reading.” They will, in fact, spend more time with the new literary work precisely because it draws them in through several new paths. And without bold innovations such as these, we are likely to see an even greater erosion of engagement with literary texts outside the classroom.
Ellen McCracken is a professor in the department of Spanish and Portuguese and the comparative-literature program at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
