Video-Texts: Technology and the Teaching of Literature

Abstract

quotations whose synthesis seems impossible. Looking for the word, any word, you punch radio station button after button, crossing the great plural plains of AM and FM offerings: rock, jazz, classical, all talk, all sports, and so-called easy listening. Unsatisfied, you pop in a homemade cassette whose contents are so edited, repeated, and erased that the label refers to last season's favorites: a farrago of styles, repetitions, thefts of the most harmless kind, inventions of the soundtrack that will be your morning's life. Voices and visions, for you also live in an empire of multiple perspectives and time-frames: you see through the windshield the future, the postmodern edifice complex with the juxtaposed facades of old and new; in the rear-view mirror, the familiar flow of the immediate past; and at your sides, the parallel universes (didn't Einstein learn something about relativity this way?) of the blurrily relative present. You are in your car, but your mind still moves with headlines from The Times, and with lines from last night's reading on distressed literature and the ex-centric canon. As you gear towards the classes you must teach today, you remember that you are to talk about Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and its discussions on deconstruction, the problematic nature of logocentrism, and the spread of indeterminacy, all in the guise of a medieval mystery story. You have