Fostering Critical Social Consciousness Through "Text-to-Software" Connections in Dystopian Literature

• In Event: 28.072 - Literary Study as Transformative Practice in a Post-Truth Age

Abstract

Purpose: This presentation addresses the often canonized dystopian literature of middle and secondary settings in light of the current post-truth sociopolitical context. The framework is oriented toward middle and secondary classrooms. These classrooms and texts are especially important to consider because while times have changed in terms of the technologies that drive meaning making processes in daily lived experience, canonized dystopias such as Brave New World, 1984 and Handmaid's Tale remain tied to middle and high school curricula. For teachers who use these books (either by choice or necessity), the pedagogical framework provides a way to take up canonical dystopias to interrogate the digitally mediated environments contributing to the so-called post-truth era.

Theoretical Framework: The presentation outlines a text-to-software interpretive frame. This frame draws on software studies (Berry, 2011; Kitchen & Dodge, 2011; Manovich, 2013), critical software studies (Lynch, 2015a, 2015b), and critical digital literacies (Ávila & Pandya, 2013). These areas of scholarship emphasize the "softwarization" (Manovich 2001, 2013) of daily life and provide guidance for interrogating the ever-present digital landscape and its role in maintaining - and less often, disrupting - societal power hierarchies. The term text-to-software is a play on a common three-part heuristic for reading, i.e., text-to-text, text-to-self, and text-to-world. The connection to software permeates the other types of connection, encouraging readers to consider the text, self, and world in relation to software.

Mode of Inquiry: Two questions drive this approach: (a) How might canonical dystopias speak across time in ways that inform contemporary conversations about living in a software-driven world?, and (b) How might students be positioned in ways that allow them to take the lead on interpreting canonical dystopias? These questions are inspired by the interrelated tenets of culturally relevant (Ladson-Billings, 1995), responsive (Gay, 2002), and sustaining (Paris, 2012) pedagogies. These pedagogies emphasize the need for teachers to position students as classroom intellectuals whose knowledges, experiences, and cultural backgrounds are viewed as assets for making meaning of course content. Thus, student experiences with software-based technologies are viewed as the primary engine for fostering critical consciousness about the presence of software in a post-truth world.

Materials: Using Brave New World as a focal text, two text-to-software heuristics are presented. Both take up concepts within software studies (e.g., the inescapability of software), encourage student dialogue, and bridge literature to student lived experiences.

Conclusions: Canonized dystopian literature has enormous staying power that will almost certainly continue far into the 21st century and beyond, so it is especially important to think of novels like Brave New World through new literary interpretive frames to engage students in culturally relevant education.

Scholarly Significance: As software drives more and more meaning-making environments (e.g., through Twitter, Facebook, Google), scholarship on literary response should engage directly in the work of software theory. This pedagogical framework moves in this direction by taking up tenets of software theory in order to make (new) meaning of (old) texts.

Author

• Mark A. Sulzer, University of Cincinnati