The Miscellany

Early Modern History - Politics

2011-05-17T11:51:00.000-04:00

Created as a video to introduce undergraduates to the overarching themes and movements within early modern English history. By no means is it comprehensive, but it was never meant to be. Just a bit of a primer, to supplement lectures.

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

For those who are interested, Part Four is available through the link below:

http://youtu.be/N2_ae998RXc

Part Four

Early Modern Authors and Playwrights

2011-02-09T10:54:00.000-05:00

Green, who had in both Academies ta’en

Degree of Master, yet could never gain

To be call’d more than Robin; who, had he

Profest aught save the Muse, serv’d and been free

After a seven-years prenticeship, might have

(With credit too) gone Robert to his grave.

Marlowe, renowned for his rare art and wit,

Could ne’er attain beyond the name of Kit,

Although his Hero and Leander did

Merit attention rather. Famous Kyd

Was called but Tom. Tom Watson, though he wrote

Able to make Apollo’s self to dote

Upon his Muse, for all that he could strive,

Yet never could to his full name arrive.

Tom Nash (in his time of not small esteem)

Could not a second syllable redeem.

Excellent Beaumont, in the foremost rank

Of rar’st wits, was never more than Frank.

Mellifluous Shakespeare, whose enchanting quill

Commanded mirth or passion, was but Will;

And famous Jonson, though his learned pen

Be dipt in Castaly is still but Ben.

Fletcher add Webster, of that learned pack

None of the mean’st, yet neither was but Jack.

Dekker’s but Tom; nor May nor Middleton;

And he’s now but Jack Ford that once was John.

Heywood, Thomas (Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels (?))

Review of Donmar King Lear

2011-02-04T10:50:00.000-05:00

This is by no means a formal review in any sense of the term. These are just some things jotted down after seeing it through the wonderful NT Live program at my local theatre. I don't know if anyone will be interested, but here it is:

First off, that was amazing. I had high expectations of Jacobi, of course, and every one of my expectations he met. The madness scenes were so delightfully paternal. It is as though the only time that he could manage to feel compassion for others or want to take care of them in any way was during his madness. Also, he managed to make some of the most high-rhetoric lines in Shakespeare sound almost colloquial and natural. An achievement unto itself. His relationship with Cordelia was touching and not because of the actress playing Cord (Pippa Bennett-Lee). (Truth be told, I wasn’t very fond of her. She was far too declamatory for my tastes.) But Jacobi invested so much emotionally in the relationship that the recognition scene in act 5 actually made me cry. And when he came back on (Howl, howl…), that was some of the most heart wrenching classical theatre I’ve ever seen. There’s nothing to fault about his performance. When the introduction claimed that this was the Lear for a generation, I thought, ‘Of course this is this generation’s Lear… hype, meaningless hype.’ Thing is, I think they were right.

The set design I was skeptical about at first. I have seen so many variations of the black box that it is now beginning to seem lazy to my eyes. Also, as a onetime actor, it presents challenges to an actor that I never really liked. (I always want to have something in my hands.) But the simplicity of the design worked very well overall. In such a small space, it would have undoubtedly have had the effect of drawing the audience into the show, as though you were at a rehearsal rather than a performance. The actual intimacy of the space was counteracted by the parallel white of the boards that gave an impression of height that the space really doesn’t have. It seemed to be larger than it was. The lighting and sound design was never obtrusive, and indeed the sotto voce “Blow winds” really worked I thought. Instead of external rage, you could really see into the mind of someone whose heart is breaking (and who might very well be having a stroke!).

Michael Hadley Photo from Rialtoentertainment.com

Kent, played by Michael Hadley was a real stand out among the supporting cast. I have always sympathized with Gloucester – poor deluded and suicidal Gloucester – than with Kent. He’s always seemed too much of a fairy tale character for me to really hook into. But Hadley’s performance was stellar. Here’s a man who takes his duty very seriously. I’m so glad that they kept in the lines about Kent’s eating fish and then eating meat when he’s in disguise. I know it is hard to play up things like his position as a Christian in a pagan world in a modern production, but I’m still glad that those were there. There was one point in act three, when Gloucester came in to usher the king and his motley troop back to some shelter, where Kent just leaned forward and stretched out his back. You just got this sense of incredible exhaustion. Talking about it with a friend later, she exclaimed how Kent was a soldier. Both literally and figuratively. He’s tired of putting up with all this shit from other people, but he keeps doing it. Brilliant performance.

Gina McKee and Justine Mitchell, photo from NT website

The other two great stars of the show, I thought, were Goneril and Regan (Gina McKee and Justine Mitchell). Given how many times I have read that play, I thought I saw most of their characters already. I thought that I had a grasp on what kind of people they were. But clearly the image in my mind was flat and washed out because when those two spoke, they breathed a new life into the characters that I had never known was there. The archness – almost like a Disney witch, but never so flat – of Gina McKee as Goneril was withering. And Regan’s journey over the course of the play – from subdued follower of other’s plans to lustful hunger and then her death – I had always known but never seen so tragically. They were fascinating. I wished that they had more stage time, which was something I never thought that I would say.

There were, of course, some less than stellar performances, and by that I’m not damning with faint praise. There were no outrageously bad performances. Well, Cornwall wasn’t hot, but we will get to that. No, by less than stellar, I mean just that. Edmund (Alec Newman), for instance, did a very passable job… but… See, I have very particular views on Edmund. I used to do “Thou, Nature” as my audition speech back in the day. And though he did a fine job, he was simply outclassed by the sheer energy and commitment of the performances around him. One of the things about the character that I thought was irksome was in the first scene. Gloucester accepted Edmund right from the beginning and had a paternal relationship with him from the moment they walked on stage. This, to me, is a misreading of the beginning of their relationship. Gloucester has got in trouble in the past for having sex out of wedlock. Edmund is a bastard son that almost cost him quite a bit, perhaps even his life – Lear intimates as much later. Gloucester even says that he has blushed to admit he is his son. Why start them off as sniveling son and respectful father? Why not – as I believe is indicated in the lines – have Gloucester only barely accepting his boy and then, on force of evidence, believing that he has had it wrong this whole time? It makes the journeys for Gloucester, Edmund and Edgar so much more interesting.

Gwilym Lee photo from rialtoentertainment.com

Speaking of Edgar (Gwilym Lee)… one of the strange things I thought about the part of Edgar (who for the most part was really quite good in the role: athletic, desperate, noble…) was his inability, refusal or poor direction in not adopting radically different accents for the radically different characters that he has to take on. Lord knows that there is an imaginative license necessary to make theatre work. For instance, a friend of mine wished that Jacobi hadn’t been so obviously breathing after Lear was dead. I didn’t care, because the imagination demanded that he was dead. But that said, when Edgar talks to his own father in his own voice, you can maybe *maybe* get over that. Gloucester is blind, he’s suicidal, he’s probably not paying attention to the voice of the guy who is taking him to Dover. But when the guy who has lead him to Dover sounds exactly the same as the “fisherman” who supposedly witnessed his fall? Now that is stretching imagination a bit. Maybe it is my interest in radio drama and voice work, but… seriously? Couldn’t he have put on a stronger accent? I noted that he had changed it a little, but it seemed so slight a change in the vowels that it was hard to credit.

The Fool, played by Ron Cook, was fine. The relationship between Lear and the Fool was one of two old drinking buddies in a way, two men who have known each other for a long, long time. I’ve always seen the Fool in more youthful, acrobatic, musical and (if I may coin a word) prestidigitary terms. I was happy to have my impression of the Fool challenged, but I’m not sure how great an impression it made. It’s possible that, like Edmund, he was just having an off-energy night or was simply being outclassed by Jacobi and Hadley, but I’m not sure.

The only person on the stage who I actually disliked was Cornwall. I’m never sure if, when I dislike an actor who is playing a loathsome character, it is because I dislike the actor’s interpretation of the character or that interpretation is wonderful because I dislike the character so much. I think this time I will actually lean on the side of disapproving of the actor because he seemed to be acting in a style that had nothing to do with anything else on stage. Oh, everything was there. Hips thrust forward, swaggering walk, dismissive tone… but it all sounded like he should be in a modern piece, not in a work of classical drama. The words were too much for him. The physical presence was right, but he couldn’t get across the meaning of the words. I think the reason why I believe it was the actor not the character that I dislike is that when the actor came back on as a messenger in Act Five, he tried to aurally upstage Kent. It may have been a youthful slip or nerves, but I’m still a bit leery.

Goodness, this has gone on far longer than I intended.


Brian Blessed - has he played Lear?		Does anyone know?

One thing I thought afterwards was - Lear was supposed to be a massive, larger than life warrior figure in his youth. You know who I would love to see at Lear? Brian Blessed. He's the only classical actor that I know who I can imagine in his younger days having actually hefted a battle axe (Flash Gordon notwithstanding), and he could really pull off the early scenes. I wonder how he would deal with the tender scenes with Cordelia, mind you.That would be really interesting.

I could go on. I really hope the NT decides to make these performances available to educators at some point in the future because that was one of the best pieces of theatre I have ever seen in my life. I never get so emotionally invested in a piece that I cry, but Jacobi drew it out of me. It was almost enough to forgive him for thinking that de Vere wrote Shakespeare. Silly Jacobi. Nevertheless – what did YOU think?

-AB

Diogenes and Socrates

2010-12-11T16:45:00.003-05:00

Last night I went to a party filled with grad students and recent graduates who are just starting the contract academic staff run around. Inevitably, the conversation turned to the bleak economic climate in which we find ourselves and the positively desperate position of most humanities departments these days as we are pushed again and again to justify our own existence. What is the purpose of the study of philosophy? What does the study of history give to the world? Why should anyone bother to study literature?

Not this Academy

Obviously there are a lot of interrelated problems here – from the growing lack of discipline specific objects of study (a philosopher may study Shakespeare as much as a literary theorist can turn to Husserl), to the reactionary resistance of the academy to any change to its organizational status quo – but one thing that repeatedly comes up in conversations of this sort is some variation on the refrain, “We teach critical thinking skills.”

Don’t get me wrong. In what follows, I don’t mean to side with the perceived others who doubt the value of the continued existence of the humanities or even argue that we should move to a more quantitative rubric against which to measure the humanities. Though it is theoretically possible to count up the economic value & impact of, say, the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, it is deeply reductionist to do so. No, in what follows, I want to point to the difficulty of using the concept of “critical thinking skills” to justify our own existence as humanists[1].

“Critical thinking skills” is a notoriously slippery term to define, which I think is one of the reasons why it is brought out first in conversations of this sort. It seems to refer to a set of skills that anyone who participates in the conversation feels that they have and that they can impart to others. Exactly what those skills comprise can be unique to each individual participant in the conversation, unless the term is interrogated, which, often, it is not. One person may see numeracy as a critical thinking skill whereas another may see situating an object of study within a larger discursive frame as a critical thinking skill. Without going into the meaning of the term for each individual, the term becomes at best a cipher for what those individual participants in the conversation see as the fundamental value of their discipline. At worst, when two people or groups have radically different individual definitions of “critical thinking skills,” the term becomes a buzz phrase bandied about that makes it seem as though knowledge is being created, yet the very ambiguity of the term denies that possibility.

So then, what are they? These “critical thinking skills” that we supposedly teach as humanists? And not only do we teach them, but in order to use them to justify our own disciplinary existence, we must teach them better than others. Well, they can’t be things like numeracy, because clearly accounting, mathematics, engineering, logic and other disciplines teach those skills far better than we do. After all, there are many humanists I know who have problems even doing basic long division. I’m one of them. Clearly, that isn’t what we mean when we say “critical thinking skills.”

Literacy

Numeracy

One of the things that we do as humanists is to situate our objects of study within a discursive framework, showing how the figure and the ground interact to produce an object of knowledge. We teach our students to “think big” and to look at an object of study – a work of art, a play, a text, a statue, what have you – in terms of its ideological, political, historical, etc. situation and situatedness. We look at the big pictures and in doing so have to be self reflexive regarding our own disciplinary attitudes towards the objects of study and the methods of study. We resist any totalizing model of our methodologies or objects of study because that totalizing model reifies us, the humanist, into an unchanging object. Our resistance is itself a form of humility because it makes every statement about the situatedness of the object of study a conditional statement. If we use these terms and we apply these methods, then we get this result. But we can always use other terms of analysis, other methodologies, other objects of study. Our terms are only bound by our imaginations. Indeed, if this is what we do as humanists (and in a blog post I am necessarily giving what can only be a thumbnail sketch of this position), then what we do is we resist.

The Scientific Method in a Nutshell

Part of the problem of this model is that it sounds remarkably close to the scientific method insofar as the scientific method presumes that any model of the universe, though it may be presented as a totalizing explanation, can only be at best a limited guess based on the available evidence. There is a built-in humility to the scientific method that requires scientists to always append their statements with a silent, “but I could be – and probably am – wrong. At least, I’m certainly incomplete.” Humanists likewise present our statements on our objects of study, where we situate Love’s Labours Lost for instance within the discourse of genre and irony, with an inherent resistance to the very terms that we are using to describe the objects. (“Genre” and “irony” are both inherently fraught as terms of literary analysis, to the point that many scholars would love to abandon them altogether.) It isn’t quite the same as the scientific method, but every humanist must silently append each statement of knowledge with, “but it can also be otherwise.”

Didn't think I'd bring him in, did you?

Another objection to the model of the humanities as a form of self-reflexive analysis on our own disciplinary methods and models is that it is not unique to the humanities. Physicists do it. Theologians do it. If you want to do well in business, you are expected not to simply follow the methodologies laid out for you by the past, but to innovate through reflection on your discipline. Richard Branson would still be poor if he hadn’t essentially built a better mousetrap. We are not the only ones who are self reflexive.

So if what we teach when we say we teach “critical thinking skills” comes out on the one hand as humility and on the other hand as self-reflexive analysis of the terms of our discipline, then there really isn’t much that we do that is different from anyone else. I haven’t yet dealt with the other major term in my thumbnail definition of what it is humanities does, however – “resistance.”


Croix de Lorriane

By “resistance,” I don’t think that necessarily implies the model of speaking truth back to power. Though some people might actually hold the view that humanists are indeed in the vanguard of resisting the hegemonic oppressions of patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism, etc., I think that that view is largely precluded by the very fact that those who hold the view have the opportunity to speak their view in the first place. That is, if they can speak the truth back to power, they must themselves hold some power to begin with, in order to speak. The academy, despite all of the cuts in recent decades, holds an incredibly privileged position in our culture and to say that we are somehow without power or that we are not a part of the mechanisms of power and oppression is, at best, ignorant and, at worst, lunacy.

No, by “resistance” I think that it makes more sense to point to the place of the academy as a part of a democratic state. Thank you, Hannah McGregor for pointing this out. That is, if the critical thinking skills that the humanities teach are “resistance” in some form or another, it is a form of resistance that is essential for the proper functioning of a democratic state. We teach rational beings the skills to approach texts (be they Shakespearean plays or newscasts from Fox) with not only curiosity but a bit of scepticism and cynicism. Not the cynicism of Diogenes, mind you; more the scepticism of Socrates.

Diogenes the Cynic

In pairing the two classical philosophers, I am actually recalling Plato’s own description of Diogenes as “Socrates gone mad.” Socrates in his dialogues taught people not to simply accept the traditions and beliefs of their ancestors, but to think on their own. His questioning of his interlocutors was skeptical but never nihilistic. He always produced new methods of knowing and objects of knowledge through his interrogation of traditionally held ideas. On the other hand, Diogenes utterly rejected the traditions and beliefs of those around him as at best fallen and at worst perverse. Though none of his writings survive, the image of Diogenes in his barrel is an indication of his particular mode of resistance. He utterly rejected the mores of his culture, whereas Socrates interrogated those mores and, in doing so, taught people to think.

Socrates

Critical thinking skills indeed.

So I think that most of us would prefer to think of what we do as humanists as falling into the shadow of Socrates rather than Diogenes. We want to think of ourselves as teaching resistant forms of thought that nourish the democratic state, because, after all, democracy only runs well when the forms of resistance are explicit but contained. I think also that one of the reasons why we would prefer to associate ourselves with Socrates rather than Diogenes is that Socrates is a martyr for rational thought and the model of humanities as a form of resistance positions the self as a rational being. Socrates died for reason and we see ourselves as rational, resisting beings within a democratic state.

You can probably already see where I am going with this.

We’re not rational. Indeed, by arguing that we are rational, and that is what makes humanities worthwhile, we are doing exactly what we said that we didn’t do in that thumbnail sketch I offered off of the top – we are reifying ourselves and presenting a hegemonic view of the self-in-inquiry. You could call this, I guess, an ontological objection to the idea of “critical thinking skills” as resistance.

Further, Socrates was put to death in a democratic state. Diogenes wasn’t. I don’t know many academics in the western world who have been publicly put to death by their state for teaching “critical thinking skills.” Obviously the simple equation between the two periods is a bit facetious, but it is a telling analogy. That is, to say that we are providing models for and mechanisms of resistance through the humanities, then either we mustn’t be doing a very good job of it because no form of resistance has resulted in such drastic oppression as Socrates met with, or our democracy can accommodate a great deal more resistance than Athenian democracy and we aren’t providing it with the amount of resistance it needs to be a properly functioning democracy. Either way, the problem lies not in the stars but in ourselves. The academy is not the centre of resistance and the vanguard of revolutionary change that I think many humanists think of it as. Indeed, by the time something gets into the academy, or the academy gets a hold of an idea, it dies or is on its way to death. We’re preservationists, not revolutionaries. We’re Diogenes – a civic nuisance who clips coins and makes obscene comments in the agora – not Socrates – who corrupts the youth of Athens by teaching them to question the gods. One can easily argue that the analogy does not hold because what we have is a democratic system unlike what they had in Athens; that our system accommodates more freedom of thought and expression than was available in Athens. The problem here is that teaching people new modes of thought ceases to be resistance if our culture can accommodate these new modes of thinking without blinking. Indeed, the freedom of thought and expression, which is necessary for modern democracy, which provides for resistance to that same freedom, can only be resisted by an attempt to curtail freedom of thought and expression. Either you must argue that we do not have true freedom of thought, in which case our democracy is similar to Athenian democracy, and our work is genuinely resistant, but for some reason no one is being killed for that resistance (which is internally incoherent), or you must argue that we do have true freedom of thought, that our democracy is dissimilar to Athenian democracy and our work is not genuinely resistant.

Resisting who? Resisting what?

Not the darling of humanists

If “critical thinking skills” DO mean “resistance” in some form or another, and we genuinely want to teach people these much vaunted skills, we need to ask ourselves what forms of resistance actually matter. (I’m looking at you, Wikileaks.) If it was really all about resistance in the academy, I would find a lot more people in the hallowed halls who approve of Sarah Palin, who think that the Holocaust was all a bunch of hooey[2] and who want to suggest that gravity works by suction[3]. They aren’t in the academy. Humanities scholars tend to speak with one voice. If “critical thinking skills” were another way of point to “resistance,” then where are the conservatives? Where are the people arguing for the increased hegemony of white, North American, heterosexual males? They aren’t here. And again we fail at self-reflexive study.

I guess one of the things that I am trying to say is that I don’t think that an appeal to democracy is going to help us to understand what it is we mean when we try to justify the existence of the humanities.

Again, it isn’t that I don’t believe that the humanities should exist. I am an early modern drama scholar – I love what I do and I want to keep doing it. Nor is it that I think that what we do has no value. If I didn’t think it had value, I wouldn’t be doing it. Rather, I think that the simple minded appeal to “critical thinking skills” as a way to justify our own existence is deeply problematic. If we are to convince people outside of the academy that what we do has value, then we have to approach the issue without using catch phrases and buzzwords that simply make us feel better for having chosen a career in which others don’t see the value.

We’re not raging against the dying of the light.

We’re not übermensch.

We’re not Socrates.

At best, I’m Diogenes screaming “Fuck” in the middle of the agora. It may get me a stern talking to by the police, but I don’t think anyone will accuse me of being at the vanguard of decisive social change.

[1] A term I loathe, but which, for the sake of argument, I use to mean anyone who is engaged in a humanities discipline (i.e. Philosophy, Literature, Arts).

[2] Just to be clear: The Holocaust happened, no matter what Mahmoud Ahmadinejad thinks.

[3] Gravity doesn’t suck. Just ask Newton.

Sustainability, History and Math

2010-11-09T15:50:00.002-05:00

Preamble

For the past few weeks, I have been working on a project in Ontario, Canada that is looking into the future sustainability of digital projects in Canada as a part of the federal governments policy on Canadas Digital Advantage.

Because the project is based in Canada and addressing specifically Canadian concerns, we are coming to conclusions regarding sustainability that are radically different than, say, our American or British colleagues might. For example, one of the holes in our knowledge on the digital academys influence economy comes from the sheer lack of quantitative studies regarding the cross pollination between what are (or start as) academic projects and the broader economy. That is, no one has done any studies on the Canadian milieu, looking at specifically Canadian projects and how much those digital projects have contributed to the Canadian economy.

The present project, which is funded by SSHRC (the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council), is working on an incredibly, almost laughably, short time frame. Though we expect to have a white paper ready for December 1, 2010, we are only really scratching the surface of what is out there in terms of scholarship on sustainability and are more often than not discovering that what is not out there is just as interesting as what is.

But that isnt exactly what I want to talk about

Neurotic Imaginings

All while doing this project on sustainability, I have had a recurrent image in my head.

See, in my other life I am an early modernist. Actually, I think of myself primarily as an early modernist who has only a tangential interest in DH and the possibilities that it offers.

Im not so hip as to be a DH evangelical, but I do realize that the future of our discipline will involve closer integration with the digital world, to the point that those who do not stay at least partially abreast will be as antiquated in the future as bibliographic index card catalogue users are today.

Thus, sustainability is a problem not because things will be lost it is inevitable that things will be lost but because we have the opportunity to intervene in the process of forgetting, hopefully for the better.

The image that keeps coming into my mind in this project is here.

This is a game from the medieval period called Rithmomachia. For those of you with small Latin and less Greek, , means number and the suffix derived from , meaning battle.

The game itself is devilishly complex to a modern mind if only because it relies on knowledge of the relationships between whole numbers. Gameplay involved moving pieces that designated whole number across a board that was twice as long but just as wide as a chess board. One player could take the pieces of the other player by arranging the pieces/numbers in an arithmetic, geometrical or musical harmony (or any combination of them).

It was called the Philosophers Game partially because it was only played by the erudite and partially because Rithmomachia was supposedly created by Pythagoras, though that genealogy is highly doubtful.

Throughout the early modern period, the game was associated with hermetic magic and was played by some of the more well known figures of the European renaissance.

Of course, we dont know about it anymore. It has been totally forgotten by the culture in general and by all but those few interested scholars. Why?

Well, you see, there was another game that was introduced to Europe at about the same time as we start seeing descriptions of Rithmomachia and that game was Chess.

Both games are roughly as old as each other and both games were equally popular in the later middle ages, but only one of them has continued in cultural memory. You can argue that the reason for that is that Rithmomachia is just inherently more difficult as a game describing musical harmonies of numbers is not as easy as, say, your pawn can open with a two space move or a one space move.

I am not convinced by that, however.

I think that the real reason for Chess living in our cultural memory and Rithmomachia as being forgotten comes down to the fact that the first universities took on Rithmomachia as a strategy by which to teach basic numeracy skills.

Its a strategy we are seeing today in the move to bring games (video games and otherwise) into the library system and into the classroom, and it is perfectly sound insofar as it does work.

If you engage students, through games, through active learning principles, then students are more likely to retain the information or skills that you are trying to teach. So I cannot fault the medieval scholastics who decided that they would put Rithmomachia into the curriculum. They were only doing what modern scholars are trying to do by using Mass Effect as a way to explicate narrative non-linearity. The theory, such as it was (and is), is sound.

The thing is, as the years turned into decades and the decades turned into centuries, the university ossified, and with it, so did the game.

Ossifciation

Universities are inherently conservative institutions as bureaucracies, they are specifically designed to make it difficult to change things.

When you have an institution such as a university taking on a new technology, like a game or a communications system, not only will it be difficult to integrate into the prevailing administrative structure, but there is always the threat that once it has become integrated into that administrative system, it will ossify.

The administration of knowledge will weave its way in and around the new technology of knowing to the point that it becomes either culturally irrelevant and forgotten (Rithmomachia) or culturally irrelevant and clung to out of a mere sense of tradition (Im looking at you, robe and mortarboard).

The point is that the cultural amnesia regarding Rithmomachia brings up some of the most fundamental aspects of sustainability insofar as we have to ask, how much can we trust universities (these incredibly conservative institutions) to sustain digital projects that are by definition ongoing sources of knowledge?

The Oxford English Dictionary is one of the longest running continuously developing projects in the academy, but it is predicated on a very conservative model of knowing that there are words out there as objects of definition and that they will be described.

No one would possibly suggest that the OED is not invested in what Bakhtin called the centripetal force, that works to bring language and meaning together under an objective umbrella. Despite its yearly updates and continual re-editing, the OED is presenting an ossified image of the English Language and that is partly to do with the fact that it is housed under the auspices of a university.

Post-amble

So if we are looking to investigate long term sustainability, we have to ask the question of what are we willing to trade off?

If we want sustainability within the present institutional settings, then we have to accept the possibility that eventually, our beloved digital tool or project (be that project as genuinely useful as the Walt Whitman Archive or EEBO), will ossify and be forgotten.

If we dont change the university culture a culture that has existed for a thousand years then we are likely to simply end up with projects that are snapshots of what was rather than producers of the new knew.

If we do change the university culture, then that is a project that extends well beyond the individual institution or individual nation and demands a rethink of what it is we do in the academy, from the ground up.

Of course, in the writing of a small white paper, due in such a short time, I doubt that we will come up with anything that will possibly answer how the university as an institution can be rebuilt.

So which is it? Or perhaps I am being reductive?

[Cross Posted on HASTAC and Sustaining Digital Scholarship for Sustainable Culture]

Quick Thoughts on Blogging

2008-09-21T13:35:00.003-04:00

Right, I'll admit it - I find this whole enterprise remarkably creepy.

The internet has gone through a few clearly defined phases in its short and storied history:

First it was used primarily by the military and highly technocratic scientists as CERN, MIT and other well funded institutions. Putting computers together to solve a problem seemed like a good idea at the time... I, personally, compare this to the very early days of Marconi wireless transmissions (ca. 1897-1918).

Then, as home computing became bigger and bigger, techno-geeks everywhere wanted on to bulletin boards and text based interactivity became the height of the computing experience. Phone lines weren't prepared for this technological innovation, and people who were online were viewed with some suspicion. What are they doing on there? What do they know that we don't? I compare this to the heady, crazy days of free-for-all radio transmission (ca.1919-1926), when everyone with a operator's set and a transmitter thought that they should broadcast to the world! That, of course, was put to an end in the US in 1927, with the creation of the FRC.

By the time grunge was beginning to realize that it no longer belonged in clubs, pictures found their way onto the net and a new level of interactivity was achieved. The pornographer's wet dream had been achieved: how to get filthy images to hundreds of thousands of horny teenaged boys of all ages without forcing them to come down to a central distribution hub where they would feel shame and self disgust at even entering the doors? With this new so-called "internet," pornographers developed a business model that was later picked up by such dot com success stories as Amazon. (Not that I have anything against Amazon, I'm just saying is all...) It's here that the history of radio and the history of the net start to seriously diverge. The business model of early network radio was utterly different than the successful business model employed by the successful dot coms.

Then, after the dot com bubble burst, after Bart Simpson became of age to join the army, and around the time Shock and Awe became a nauseatingly familiar part of our lexicon, Web 2.0 appeared. Here, the culture of the net changed again. If you wanted to put your favourite pictures of Snookums the Cat to share with the world, instead of having to learn html or xml coding you could just put yourself together one of these handy dandy little "blogs" and there you go. This led, inevitably, to such cultural monoliths as lolCatz, the phenomenon of Wikis, Facebook, Myspace and the idea that now the Net was democratized. Now no one has to look at the geeks on their phone lines wondering what they were doing or how they were doing it.

Now, I'm not going to say anything particularly new here: Those who believe that the net is now somehow better because of Web 2.0 are crazy. This is not because too many people are putting up lame pictures of cats (though I think that there's only so many cat pictures that anyone can possibly care about); nor is this because Facebook, Windows Messenger and other programs are evil for keeping your information long after you've gone offline. Rather, one of the fundamental aspects of modern culture as it has developed since the 1500s is being ripped out from underneath us and that is the quality of conscience.

What I am here calling "conscience" can be termed many ways - interiority, privacy, subjectivity... The point is that the modern conception of the self is changing from one where the individual is capable of smiling and murdering whiles s/he smiles (My thanks to Shakespeare), to one where the individual is the sum total of their external markers. What group have you joined on Facebook? What pages have you given your thumbs up to on StumbleUpon? What car do you drive?

This is a logical outgrowth of certain kinds of marketing, to be sure, where the individual is described in terms of the tribes that they belong to. This movement towards reductionism is something that we should be cautious of as a culture. (For more on tribes, check out this article.)

The most insidious aspect of the crisis of conscience that I see at play in modern internet culture is the blog. This is why I am so torn about having one, and why I feel it is incumbent on me to rail so strongly against the medium I am myself employing. The blog encourages people to put their conceptions of who they are online for all to see. We have all read the horrible poetry that people write in their personal blogs. I shudder to remember it. Encouraging the individual to put their self conceptions out into the world for comment and judgment is a form of governance by proxy. It is the panopticon taken to bizarre new heights.

That said, the shift has already happened. The reductionist objectivism of the blog is indeed happening, no matter what I think of it. Non-participation in a cultural occurance is not resistance, it is ignorance. As such, there has to be a way to do some culture jamming here. There has to be a way to anti-blog.

I don't care that your blog says you have moved to China and these are your nice pictures of the Forbidden City. I don't care that you have blogged that you have fallen in love with a new girl/boy and written a bad sonnet about it. I don't care that your blog is a hit, I don't care if it is not written by anyone. What I do care about is that you feel that you have to tell the whole world about your inner life - that you seek their approval - that you aren't going outside for some Vitamin D.

I do, however, see some hope. There are many excellent blogs out there. Feministing and feministe are excellent sites, for example. Nevertheless, my worries remain whenever I hear people talk about the liberatory power of the internet, or the political revolution that is made possible through new technologies. It is as though they haven't thought about the reactionary politics at play in some of the most basic tools of modern net discourse. I'm not sure what to make of it - but there you are.

Shakespeare on the Radio 1920-1940s

2008-09-21T12:01:00.006-04:00

In my never ending search for more information regarding early radio's interaction with Shakespeare, I've complied a partial list of programs that were broadcast from the earliest days of network radio to about 1940. I have a few bits of info about radio adaptations of Shakespeare past 1940, but I find that period less interesting.

These are "direct" adaptations of Shakespeare, so nothing like Jack Benny's 1936 Minstrel Show version of Romeo and Juliet is included here. It isn't that those aren't interesting, but that is just not what I'm interested in right now.

Series	Play	Date (dd/mm/yyyy)

Precursor to Radio Guild? (NBC)	The Tempest	1928
CBC	The Tempest	22/04/1929
CBC	Taming of the Shrew	11/06/1929
Radio Guild	Romeo & Juliet	11/06/1929
Radio Guild	As You Like It	15/01/1930
CBC	Merchant of Venice	15/06/1930
An Hour with Shakespeare (CBC[?]/NBC)	Othello	06/07/1930
An Hour with Shakespeare (CBC[?]/NBC)	Hamlet Pt 1	03/08/1930
An Hour with Shakespeare (CBC[?]/NBC)	Hamlet Pt 2	10/08/1930
An Hour with Shakespeare (CBC[?]/NBC)	MacBeth	17/08/1930
An Hour with Shakespeare (CBC[?]/NBC)	King Lear	07/09/1930
An Hour with Shakespeare (CBC[?]/NBC)	Othello	14/09/1930
An Hour with Shakespeare (CBC[?]/NBC)	Richard III	21/09/1930
Scenes from Shakespeare (CBC/NBC)	Much Ado About Nothing Pt 1	12/10/1930
Scenes from Shakespeare (CBC/NBC)	Much Ado About Nothing Pt 2	19/10/1930
Scenes from Shakespeare (CBC/NBC)	Julius Caesar Pt 1	26/10/1930
Radio Guild	Julius Caesar	21/11/1930
Radio Guild	Romeo & Juliet	16/01/1931
Radio Guild	Hamlet Pt 1	20/03/1931
Radio Guild	Hamlet Pt 2	27/03/1931
Radio Guild	MacBeth	17/04/1931
Radio Guild	Midsummer Night's Dream	23/10/1931
Radio Guild	Julius Caesar	30/10/1931
Radio Guild	Hamlet Pt 1	06/11/1931
Radio Guild	Hamlet Pt 2	13/11/1932
Radio Guild	Romeo & Juliet	31/11/1932
Radio Guild	Henry V	07/11/1932
Radio Guild	As You Like It	14/11/1932
Radio Guild	Richard III	21/11/1932
Radio Guild	Julius Caesar	16/10/1933
Radio Guild	The Tempest	23/04/1934
CBC	Scenes from Shakespeare	25/04/1934
Radio Guild	Midsummer Night's Dream	13/08/1934
Radio Guild	Othello	17/09/1934
Radio Guild (CBC/NBC)	As You Like It	22/10/1934
Radio Guild	MacBeth	19/11/1934
Radio Guild	Twelfth Night	31/12/1934
Radio Guild	Henry IV, Pt 1	04/03/1935
Radio Guild	Midsummer Night's Dream	29/07/1935
Radio Guild	King John	11/07/1935
Radio Guild	Much Ado About Nothing	17/10/1935
Radio Guild	Richard II	14/11/1935
Radio Guild	1 Henry IV Pt 1	21/11/1935
Radio Guild	1 Henry IV Pt 2	05/12/1935
Radio Guild	2 Henry IV Pt 1	12/12/1935
Radio Guild	2 Henry IV Pt 2	19/12/1935
Radio Guild	Henry V Pt 1	26/12/1935
Radio Guild	Henry V Pt 2	02/01/1936
Radio Guild	Henry VI Pt 1	09/01/1936
Radio Guild	Henry VI Pt 2	16/01/1936
Radio Guild	Henry VI Pt 3	23/01/1936
Radio Guild	Richard III Pt 1	30/01/1936
CBC	Richard III Pt 2	06/02/1936
Radio Guild	King Henry VIII	13/02/1936
Columbia Workshop	Hamlet Pt 1	19/09/1936
Columbia Workshop	Hamlet Pt 2	14/11/1936
Radio Guild/CBC	Twelfth Night	27/11/1936
Columbia Workshop	MacBeth	28/02/1937
Radio Guild	Shakespeare	23/04/1937
Theater Guild on the Air	MacBeth	11/05/1937
Streamlined Shakespeare (NBC)	Hamlet	21/06/1937
Streamlined Shakespeare (NBC)	Richard III	28/06/1937
Streamlined Shakespeare (NBC)	MacBeth	05/07/1937
Streamlined Shakespeare (NBC)	The Tempest	12/07/1937
Shakespearean Cycle (CBS)	Hamlet	12/07/1937
Streamlined Shakespeare (NBC)	Twelfth Night	19/07/1937
Shakespearean Cycle (CBS)	Much Ado About Nothing	19/07/1937
Streamlined Shakespeare (NBC)	Taming of the Shrew	26/07/1937
Shakespearean Cycle (CBS)	Julius Caesar	26/07/1937
Shakespearean Cycle (CBS)	Taming of the Shrew	02/08/1937
Shakespearean Cycle (CBS)	Henry IV	23/08/1937
Radio Guild (CBC/NBC)	Coriolanus	04/10/1937
Radio Guild	Anthony and Cleopatra	12/11/1937
CBC	Anthony and Cleopatra	13/11/1937
Great Plays	Midsummer Night's Dream	26/03/1938
CBC	A Tribute to Shakespeare	23/04/1938
Radio Guild	Julius Caesar	22/04/1938
Great Plays	Midsummer Night's Dream	26/03/1938
CBC	Merchant of Venice	10/09/1938
Mercury Summer Theatre	Julius Caesar	11/09/1938
Great Plays	Midsummer Night's Dream	13/11/1938
CBC	King Lear	13/11/1938
Great Plays	Julius Caesar	20/11/1938
Great Plays	Othello	27/11/1938
CBC	Shakespeare's England	05/11/1939
Great Plays	Romeo & Juliet	12/11/1939
Great Plays	Much Ado About Nothing	19/11/1939
Great Plays	MacBeth	26/11/1939
Columbia Workshop	As You Like It	07/12/1939
CBC	Shakespeare's England	10/12/1939
Columbia Workshop	Taming of the Shrew	21/03/1940
Great Plays	Love's Labours Lost	10/11/1940
Great Plays	Merry Wives of Windsor	17/11/1940
Great Plays	The Tempest	20/11/1940
Great Plays	Taming of the Shrew	28/12/1941
CBC	The Falstaff Scenes from 1 Henry IV	03/02/1944
Columbia Workshop	Richard III	02/06/1946
Theater Guild on the Air	MacBeth	11/05/1947
Theater Guild on the Air	Romeo & Juliet	08/02/1948
CBC	1 Henry IV, First Half	nd
CBC	2 Henry IV, Second Half	nd
CBC	King John	nd
CBC	King Henry VIII	nd
CBC	Midsummer Night's Dream	nd
CBC	Twelfth Night	1964
CBC	Midsummer Night's Dream	nd
CBC	Thanks to Mr. Shakespeare	nd

Teaching Assistant Advisory Council - Jigsaw Groups

2008-09-17T10:42:00.005-04:00

So, among my other endeavours, I am a member of the Teaching Assistant Advisory Council (TAAC), a body run through Teaching Support Services here at the University of Guelph. I was deeply involved in Grad Day orientation and TA Day presentations, offering an introductory speech before the student body and two presentations on Preparation for Your First Day of Class and Top Tips for TAs.

Top Tips for TAs did not go so well, but the Preparation for Your First Day went quite well. Spent too much time giving theory - not enough tips. Live and learn I guess.

Anyhow, TAAC is creating a newsletter for all TAs to be distributed electronically (Save those trees), which will deal with recent articles on education, offer interviews with experienced teachers/TAs, offer strategies and keep people generally up to date about the whole TA experience here at Guelph.

I am the general editor of the newsletter and I have the pleasure of writing about a strategy for group work called the Jigsaw Method. My article is as follows:

The Jigsaw Method is ideal for students who take responsibility for their own learning to teach each other about various aspects of a given problem or issue. One caveat though: this method is not for the disorganized TA. Divide the class into small groups (3-5 students). Each of these group will become experts on a given problem, a section of the text, or an issue under discussion. For example, the Blue group will work together to answer a certain question posed to them. Then, halfway through the session, each of the groups will split up and form into groups composed of a different expert from every previous group. That is, the Blue group members will all join different groups where they will have to teach the other students what the Blue group has learned about the particular aspect of the problem they were assigned. Ideally, this allows students to cover a great deal of information very quickly, learning from their peers in an interactive environment.

Though this was originally developed for elementary school classrooms by Elliot Aronson in the early 1970s, it has been applied in university settings and the workplace because of its versatile, interactive, interdependent learning model. It empowers students and encourages co-operation all at once.

Of course, what you see above is just a first draft - I'll have to shorten it, while still making it seem clear and half intelligent. But the basic idea is there. I may ask the graphic designer guy we have to make up a picture to illustrate the idea. The only thing I can find online is somewhat obscure. Nevertheless, I think it makes sense....

Secondary Area of Study Reading List

2008-09-14T19:13:00.005-04:00

At the University of Guelph, in order to complete a PhD, rather than use an exam based candidacy process, students compile a portfolio of work that they have completed to show that they are competent in a given area. For the secondary area of study, students are to create a list of books that they will master, create two courses, write an article length paper and present on that paper in a conference style presentation.

This posting is just a copy of my list of books. I've chosen an odd topic for my paper - the representations of Shakespearean drama on the American radio between 1920-1940. I've avoided looking at them as adaptations - for example, the Jack Benny Minstrel Show version of Romeo and Juliet in 1936 - but focused on the straight Shakespeare that was done. There was quite a bit of it!

As I have chosen an odd topic, and I am primarily an English Literature scholar rather than a media studies scholar (I hate academic lines in the sand, but I'll do what I must for this assignment), I have compiled a list that shows literature's interaction with radio throughout the modernist period. As far as I am concerned, this list is to show basic familiarity with the major works of canonical modernism; basic familiarity with radio's adaptation of "literature"; basic familiarity of the popular forms of literature circulating in the early 20th Century.

Any comments on what follows, in terms of choices, recommendations or anything else, please add to what you see.

If anyone is interested, I could write a little about what I thought of each of these books in a future posting.

Ph.D Reading List (SAS)
Andrew Bretz

Modernism & Radio Studies

Auden, W. H. and Christopher Isherwood. The Dog Beneath the Skin or Where is Francis: A Play in Three Acts. London: Faber and Faber, 1935.
Barnes, Djuna. Nightwood. New York: New Directions, 1961.
Beckett, Samuel. Murphy. New York: Grove, 1957.
Brecht, Berthold. Mother Courage and Her Children. London: Methuen, 1983.
Chesterton, G. K. The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare. Markham, ON: Penguin, 1986.
Christie, Agatha. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. New York: Berkeley Books, 2004.
Conrad, Joseph and Ford Madox Ford. The Nature of a Crime. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1924.
Eliot, T.S. “The Waste Land.” Modern Poems. Ed. Richard Ellmann and Robert
O’Clair. 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1989. 282-94.
--. “Murder in the Cathedral.” The Complete Plays. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1969.
Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. New York: Random House, 1956.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Last Tycoon, an Unfinished Novel, Together with The Great Gatsby. New York, NY: Scribner, 1951.
Forster, E.M. Howard’s End. New York: Vintage Books, 1961.
Greene, Graham. The Power and the Glory. New York: Viking P, 1940.
Hammett, Dashiell. The Glass Key. New York: Vintage Books, 1972.
Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1954.
--. For Whom the Bell Tolls. Philadelphia: Blakiston, 1940.
Hughes, Langston. The Weary Blues. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926.
Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: Penguin Books, 1993.
Lawrence, D.H. Sons and Lovers. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.
Lovecraft, H. P. At the Mountains of Madness. New York: Modern Library, 2005.
MacLeish, Archibald. Conquistador. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1933.
Millay, Edna St. Vincent. Collected Sonnets. New York: Harper Row, 1988.
O’Brien, Flann. The Third Policeman. Normal: Dalkey Archive, 1999.
O’Casey, Sean. “Shadow of a Gunman.” Two Plays: Juno and the Paycock, The Shadow of a Gunman. London: MacMillan, 1925.
Odetts, Clifford. “Waiting for Lefty.” Three Plays: Awake and Sing, Waiting for Lefty, Till the Day I Die. New York, NY: Random House, 1935.
O’Neill, Eugene. Long Day’s Journey into Night. New Haven: Yale UP, 1989.
Orwell, George. Homage to Catalonia. London: Secker and Warburg, 1997.
Porter, Katherine Anne. Flowering Judas and Other Stories. New York: Modern Library, 1958.
Pound, Ezra. Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. London: Ovid, 1920.
--. The Cantos of Ezra Pound (I-LXXXIV). New York, NY: Harcourt Brace World, 1950.
Pratt, E.J. Brebeuf and his Brethren. Toronto: Macmillan, 1974.
Stein, Gertrude. Tender Buttons. Mineola: Dover, 1997.
Steinbeck, John. Tortilla Flat. Toronto, ON: Bantam Books, 1965.
Wilder, Thornton. “Our Town.” Three Plays. New York: Perennial Library, 1985.
Williams, William Carlos. The Complete Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, 1906-1938. Norfolk, CN: New Directions, 1938.
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.
Wright, Richard. Native Son. New York: Modern Library, 1940.
Yeats, William Butler. Selected poems. Modern Poems. Ed. Richard Ellmann and Robert O’Clair. 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1989. 69-98.
Archer, Gleason L. The History of Radio to 1926. New York : Arno Press, 1971.
Avery, Todd. Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics and the BBC, 1922-1938. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006.
Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York, NY: Herder and Herder, 1972.
Baker, Houston A. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968.
Bentley, Eric. “This is the New Criticism” Kenyon Review. 8: Autumn 1946, 672-4.
Brooks, Cleanth and Robert Penn Warren. Understanding Poetry. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988.
Cantril, Hadley and Gordon W. Allport. The Psychology of Radio. The History of Broadcasting: Radio to Television. New York: Arno Press, 1971.
Communication in History: Technology, Culture, Society. Eds. David Crowley and Paul Heyer. New York, London: Longman, 1991.
Culture, Communication, And Dependency: The Tradition Of H. A. Innis. Eds. William H. Melody, Liora Salter, Paul Heyer. Norwood, N.J. : Ablex Pub. Corp., 1981.
Crisell, Andrew. Understanding Radio. London: Routledge, 1994.
Crook, Tim. Radio Drama: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge, 1999.
DiPietro, Cary. Shakespeare and Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006.
Douglas, Susan. Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 2004.
Dunning, John. On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old Time Radio. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.
Eliot, T.S. The Sacred Wood: Essays in Poetry and Criticism. London: Methuen, 1920.
Fortner, Robert S. Radio, Morality and Culture: Britain, Canada and the United States, 1919-1945. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 2005.
Godfrey, Donald G. Methods of Historical Analysis in Electronic Media. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006.
Grady, Hugh. The Modernist Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991.
Halpern, Richard. Shakespeare Among the Moderns. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1997.
Heyer, Paul. Communications and History: Theories of Media, Knowledge and Civilization. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988.
---. The Medium and the Magician: Orson Welles, the Radio Years, 1934-1952. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005.
Hilmes, Michele. Radio Voices: American Broadcasting 1922-1952. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997.
---. Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural History of Radio. London: Routledge, 2001.
Innis, Harold Adams. Empire and Communications. Rev. Ed. Victoria, BC: Press Porcépic, 1986.
---. Bias of Communication. Intro. Marshall McLuhan. Toronto : University of Toronto Press, 1954.
Levinson, Michael. A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908-1922. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984.
Matheson, Hilda. Broadcasting. London: T. Butterworth, Ltd, 1933.
McLuhan, Marhsall. Understanding Media. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.
Miller, Edward D. Emergency Broadcasting and 1930s American Radio. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2003.
Obler, Arch. “The Art of Radio Writing,” Fourteen Radio Plays. New York, Random House, 1940.
Radio and its Future. Ed. Martin Codel. New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, (1930) 1971.
Shakespeare and Modern Theatre: The Performance of Modernity. Ed. Michael Bristol. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Summers, Harrison B. ed. Radio Censorship. The History of Broadcasting: Radio to Television. New York: Arno Press, 1971.
Stamps, Charles Henry. The Concept of the Mass Audience in American Broadcasting. New York: Arno Press, 1979.
Stein, Gertrude. “Poetry and Grammar.” Lectures in America. New York: Random House, 1935.
Wollaeger, Mark. Modernism, Media and Propaganda. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2006.
Barrymore, John Dir. “Taming of the Shrew.” Streamlined Shakespeare. By William Shakespeare. Perf. John Barrymore. NBC Radio. July 26, 1937.
--. “Hamlet.” Streamlined Shakespeare. By William Shakespeare. Perf. John Barrymore, Brandon Hurst, Hans Conreid. NBC Radio.June 21, 1937.
--. “MacBeth.” Streamlined Shakespeare. By William Shakespeare. Perf. John Barrymore, Elaine Barrie. NBC Radio. July 5, 1937.
--. “Richard III.” Streamlined Shakespeare. By William Shakespeare. Perf. John Barrymore, Elaine Barrie. NBC Radio. June 28, 1937.
--. “The Tempest.” Streamlined Shakespeare. By William Shakespeare. Perf. John Barrymore, Walter Brennan, Robert Warwick, Elaine Barrie. NBC Radio. July 12, 1937.
--. “Twelfth Night.” Streamlined Shakespeare. By William Shakespeare. Perf. John Barrymore. NBC Radio. July 19, 1937.
Corwin, Norman, Dir. We Hold These Truths. Perf. James Stewart, Edward Arnold, Lionel Barrymore, Bob Burns, Dane Clark, Walter Huston, Marjorie Main, Edward G. Robinson, Rudy Vallee, Orson Welles. CBS Radio, NBC Radio, ABC Radio. Dec 15, 1941.
--. On a Note of Triumph. Narr. Martin Gabel. Perf. Ludwig Donath, Peggy Rae, Joan Lorring, Elliott Lewis, Merton Koplin, Lucille Meredith, Raymond Lawrence, Alex Hartford, George Sorel, Dick Nelson, Bob Bruce, Joe Worthy, Lurene Tuttle, Regina Wallace, June Foray, Pat McGeehan, Harry Bartell, Jim Nusser, Peter Witt, Fred Essler, Norbert Muller, Ramsey Hill, Irene Tedrow, Eula Beal, Johnny Bond. CBS Radio, NBC Radio, ABC Radio. May 8, 1945.
“Flowering Judas and Pale Horse, Pale Rider.” NBC University Theater. By Katherine Anne Porter. Adapt. Clarice A. Ross. Comm. Irwin Edmund. Perf. Alma Laughton, Lillian Byer, Georgia Ellis, Larry Dobkin. NBC Radio. January 29, 1950.
“Hamlet.” Theater Guild on the Air. By William Shakespeare. Perf. John Geilgud, Dorothy McGuire, Pamela Brown. NBC Radio. Mar 4, 1951.
“Henry IV.” Shakespearean Cycle. By William Shakespeare. Narr. Conway Turrell. Perf. Walter Huston, Brian Ahern, Walter Connelly, Humphrey Bogart, Dame May Whitty. CBS Radio. August 23, 1937.
“Howard’s End.” Theater Guild on the Air. By E. M. Forster. Adapt. Horton Heath. Comm. John Keiran. Perf. Alma Laughton, Eileen Erskine, Queeny Leonard. March 26, 1950.
“Julius Caesar.” Shakespearean Cycle. By William Shakespeare. Narr. Conway Turrell Perf. Claude Rains, Thomas Mitchell, Walter Abel, Reginald Denny. CBS Radio. July 26, 1937.
“MacBeth.” Theater Guild on the Air. By William Shakespeare. Perf. Judith Anderson, Maurice Evans. May 11, 1947.
MacLeish, Archibald. “The Fall of the City.” Columbia Workshop. Perf. Orson Welles, CBS Radio. April 11, 1937.
--. Air Raid: A Verse Play for Radio. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1938.
“Mrs. Dalloway.” NBC University Theater. By Virginia Woolf. Adapt. Clarice A. Ross. Comm. Katherine Anne Porter. Perf. Marion Richmond. Doris Lloyd, Charles Davis, Leonard Whitbread. NBC Radio. April 2, 1950.
“Much Ado About Nothing.” Shakespearean Cycle. By William Shakespeare. Narr. Conway Turrell. Perf. Leslie Howard, Rosalind Russell. CBS Radio. July 19, 1937.
“Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” NBC University Theater. By James Joyce. Adapt. Braynard Duffield and Emerson Crocker. Comm. Thomas Quinn Curtis. Perf. Tom Dillon, Dan O’Hurley. NBC Radio. April 23, 1950.
“Sons and Lovers.” NBC University Theater. By D. H. Lawrence. Adapt. Clarice A. Ross. Comm. Diana Trilling. Perf. Ramsay Hill, Eric Hawford, Perry Kilbourne, Norma Varden. NBC Radio. April 30, 1950.
“Taming of the Shrew.” Shakespearean Cycle. By William Shakespeare. Adapt. Gilbert Seldes. Narr. Conway Turrell. Perf. Edward G. Robinson, Frida Inniscourt. CBS Radio. August 2, 1937
Webster, Margaret, Dir. “As You Like It.” Columbia Workshop. By William Shakespeare. CBS Radio. December 7, 1939.
Welles, Orson, dir. “War of the Worlds.” By H. G. Wells. Adapt. Howard Koch. The Mercury Theater of the Air. CBS Radio. WCBS, New York. October 30, 1938.
--. “The Glass Key.” Campbell Playhouse. By Dashiell Hammett. Perf. Orson Welles. March 10, 1939.
--. “Hamlet, Part One.” Columbia Workshop. By William Shakespeare. Perf. Orson Welles, Alexander Scorby, Rosamond Pinchot, Edgerton Paul, Sidney Smith. CBS Radio. September 19, 1936.
--. “Hamlet, Part Two.” Columbia Workshop. By William Shakespeare. Perf. Orson Welles, Joseph Cotton, Virginia Welles, Laura Strob, Whitford Cane, Sidney Smith, Edgerton Paul, Edward Jerome. CBS Radio. November 14, 1936.
--. “Julius Caesar.” Mercury Summer Theater. Rehearsal. By William Shakespeare. Perf. Orson Welles. September 11, 1938.
--. “The Man Who Was Thursday.” Mercury Summer Theater. By G. K. Chesterton. Perf. Orson Welles. CBS Radio. September 5, 1938.
--. “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.” Campbell Playhouse. By Agatha Christie. Perf. Orson Welles. CBS Radio. November 12, 1939.
--. “Scenes from King Lear.” Mercury Summer Theater. By William Shakespeare. CBS Radio. September 13, 1946.
Auden, W. H. “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.” “Musee de Beaux Arts.” “If I Could Tell You.” Poetry Speaks. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks MediaFusion, 2001.
Eliot, T. S. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” “La Figlia Che Piange.” Poetry Speaks. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks MediaFusion, 2001.
H.D. “From Helen in Egypt” Poetry Speaks. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks MediaFusion, 2001.
Hughes, Langston. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” “Mother to Son.” “The Weary Blues.” “Harlem.” Poetry Speaks. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks MediaFusion, 2001.
Millay, Edna St. Vincent. “Recuerdo.” “I Shall Forget You Presently” “Childhood is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies.” Poetry Speaks. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks MediaFusion, 2001.
Pound, Ezra. “Cantico Del Sole.” “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly II, IV, and V” “Canto XLV” Poetry Speaks. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks MediaFusion, 2001.
Stein, Gertrude. “Christian Berard.” “She Bowed to Her Brother.” Poetry Speaks. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks MediaFusion, 2001.
--. “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso.” In Their Own Voices: A Century of Recorded Poetry. Los Angeles : Rhino/Word Beat, 1996.
Williams, William Carlos. “Queen Anne’s Lace.” “To Elsie.” “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Poetry Speaks. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks MediaFusion, 2001.
Yeats, William Butler. “Yeats on “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.”” “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” “Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931.” Poetry Speaks. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks MediaFusion, 2001.