M y students’ eyes narrowed in suspicion when I asked, “At what age did you stop reading illustrated books?” It was a strategic question. We were launching a college course in canonical American novels (by authors like Mark Twain, Willa Cather, Jack London, and Edith Wharton), but one with a digital twist. Each student enrolled in “The E-Book American Novel” was to develop an enhanced e-book based on his or her interpretation of a major thematic line of argument in the paperback editions I had ordered.
Within a decade, today’s children will arrive in college classrooms with a lifetime of reflexive digital detours from books as we have known them. Children’s e-books today are replete with such bells and whistles as songs, videos, audio voices, and even personalized references to the child’s name, in the case of Nancy Tillman’s On the Night You Were Born. Many dismiss such books as the literary equivalent of empty calories. Both fiction and nonfiction will soon arrive electronically with a profusion of additional features that entice the reader to venture elsewhere mentally with the tap of a finger or a voice command. Today’s college classroom thus sits at a crossroads between the principally print past and a print-plus future. The opportunity to gauge the new pedagogical possibilities beckons instructors now, because while today’s collegians may be digital natives, as readers they are genealogically rooted in the printed book.
All those thoughts led to the conception of English 288W: “The E-Book American Novel,” which I taught for the first time last year. The course was meant to explore how the enhanced e-book might sharpen students’ learning skills both now and in their futures — and how it might serve the humanities. Each weekly three-hour meeting began with a traditional discussion of the scheduled text, then segued to the “e” presentations. Inserted at specified points in each novel, the students’ “e” enhancements were to strengthen and amplify a novel’s themes by drawing upon today’s digital resources — for example, film clips, archival documents, music, photo galleries, and short videos. Students had to justify their choices in weekly essays cast in the form of a “pitch” letter to an editor who must be persuaded to publish the student’s “e"-enhanced edition of the book. Each student had to provide three enhancements for a book each week.
I explained to students that I had recently entered the realm of the enhanced e-book myself. Guided by my editor, Charles Grench, who oversaw the development of my own traditional book and e-book on Jack London for the University of North Carolina Press, I selected archival film segments to support the book’s sociocultural arguments.
But my students didn’t seem as excited as I had been by the opportunity to travel back in time to see the very sights that inspired Jack London’s writings, including the devastating San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and the boxing ring where iconic prizefighters battled.
So I invited them to recall favorite books from their own childhoods. They mentioned beloved picture books, then chapter books, then print-only books for older readers. They had fond memories of Goodnight Moon, Where the Wild Things Are, and books by Beatrix Potter, Dr. Seuss, A.A. Milne, and others. I then asked, “What did it mean to you when pictorial images disappeared from your books?” Their basic answer was: maturity. The absence of visuals signified sophistication — advancement to the status of a grown-up reader who is imaginatively and intellectually bonded solely with the printed page. Comic books and graphic novels were still in their mix (Jeff Kinney’s Wimpy Kid series was a favorite), but serious reading, they agreed, demanded the monopoly of print.
It was time for a mini-lesson in the history of the book.
Googling “illuminated medieval manuscripts” brought the classroom alive with a colorful riot of vines, flowers, and animals entwined in and around words, letters, and blocks of hand-lettered lines of Latin for the literate. Students understood that these artful illustrations were meant for adults. Fast-forwarding to the late 1800s, I remarked that Mark Twain, convinced that sales of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn would hinge on the quality of the illustrations, closely policed the extensive artwork for the novel. Edith Wharton’s best-selling House of Mirth was also lavishly interleaved with detailed drawings depicting scenes in the story.
I distributed several early-20th-century volumes from my own shelves, each heavily illustrated — books like Jane Addams’s Twenty Years at Hull House and Jack London’s Before Adam. I wanted to call students’ attention to the centuries of published books meant for adult readers and customarily illustrated in accordance with the tastes and technologies of their eras (from hand-painted manuscripts of the Middle Ages to lithographs in books in the late 1800s). I then ask the students to consider how published books by a 21st-century Jane Addams or Jack London might be enhanced with today’s digital resources.
C ritics of e-books in the era of cellphones, iPads, Kindles, and Nooks object to the distraction (or randomness) of digital trekking when the reader departs from the page at the tap of the screen or link. Some pediatric experts have cautioned that too much exposure to digital material can affect children’s content retention and cognitive development, and can lead to parental abdication of guidance in an era when “the iPad can do it.”
A 2014 New York Times article found authors of children’s literature to be divided over the issue of e-books. Jacqueline Woodson, a National Book Award winner and the author of Brown Girl Dreaming, lamented the loss of a child’s tactile experience of the bound book. Lois Lowry, a Newbery Medal winner and the author of The Giver, embraced the idea of giving e-books to children. But all sided with the author Jon Scieszka’s caveat: Don’t succumb to the rush toward digital whiz-bangs and rat-a-tats.
Nor would I allow my students to succumb to “rat-a-tats.” They initially hewed to the traditional mode of book illustration, choosing, for instance, images of late Victorian townhouses to enhance William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham, a novel set in late-1800s Boston. But one student chose to play an orchestral segment from the “As You Like It” Overture by the American composer John Knowles Paine. The piece, composed in the same era as the Howells novel, features sonorous richness that evokes the tensions rife in one scene of familial and social crisis.
In the weeks after, students experimented with the digital sights and sounds of labor strikes, immigrants disembarking on both coasts, harnessed plow horses at work, and a storm thundering over Lake Michigan — all coordinated with crucial scenes in their assigned novels. We watched a film clip of Bing Crosby in the Hollywood version of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and heard Protestant hymns and Tchaikovsky’s “Song of the Lark” (keyed to Willa Cather’s novel of that title). Some selections were purposeful anachronisms: The height of a Ferris wheel, so awesome in the 1890s, was deemed not as thrilling in this day and age. Instead, to elicit the appropriate awe, a student showed a GoPro camera recording of a BASE jumper parachuting off Manhattan’s Freedom Tower.
This was high-level show-and-tell for our era. From personal experience, the students could judge whether an enhanced e-book served its rightful synergistic purpose or merely operated as a grab-bag of distractions. They explained the basis of every selected enhancement, described its function in expanding one’s understanding of the text, and argued for its importance in the proposed e-book. I know the course gave students an appreciation for the rich possibilities of ensemble learning. I hope it also provided them with e-book ground rules for their futures — and those of their children.
Cecelia Tichi is a professor of English and American studies at Vanderbilt University.
