(or: about divides and disciplines)
*
I started my freshman year feeling curiously empty. For about eight months prior, I’d been applying to at least ten universities and five scholarships, which meant painting myself with a different set of aspirations for every reader – a journalist, an artist, a publisher, a civil servant. Now that I’d ended up on a path with no bonds, job commitments, or even a predetermined major, I didn’t know what to do with that freedom. I suddenly had no idea what I wanted to do.
So when I went to FASS Open House about a month before classes started, I drifted towards the English Literature presentation in noncommittal fashion. It was pretty much the only subject I enjoyed in JC so I figured it might be a good idea, though I also had my eye on a strange major called Communications and New Media which at least sounded fun and practical even if I didn’t know what it meant. The professor booted up his Powerpoint and I started zoning out – alliteration, personfication, the usual.
But then he said something with unexpected conviction – that the internet was killing literature.
Of course, those weren’t his exact words. I think he was talking about how the Internet lowers publishing barriers which have led to worse overall quality in a saturated market, which is really quite a valid concern that has been around since the 18th century (though I only know that now because I’ve taken classes on the printing boom in the 18th century). But killing literature – that’s how I remember that talk, because my freshman self was completely stunned. As someone who read stories and webcomics online just as much, if not more, as I read physical books, his remark completely went against my own sense of what literature was. The professor admitted that he was being a bit of an “elitist” when I approached him after the presentation, but I still couldn’t believe that he could even begin to think that way.
From then on, I had a mission of sorts. I would double major in English Literature and Communications & New Media, write a thesis about electronic literature, and prove him wrong. The internet wasn’t killing literature. It was becoming literature.
*
It’s hilarious in retrospect to think that my entire undergraduate career was founded on this concentrated nugget of spite. I had other reasons for choosing CNM too, of course, but that professor’s remark stayed at the forefront of my mind for years, and has since crystallised into a genuine research passion of mine. I really do believe the internet is becoming literature, and it’s simply because of what I see before me – new genres that spring out of the digital medium such as hypercomics (read this commentary on my favourite one) and interactive storytelling (see NUS’ very own Narrative and Play lab), and new ways in which readers become more than readers. They write theories about their favourite shows and post it on Tumblr and everywhere they can think of; they livestream themselves playing video games and hence ‘publish’ their individualised narratives created within the game (you can thank academic Astrid Ensslin, p. 45 for this observation); they write sprawling fanfictions of such astounding quality that they can easily rival their published counterparts. Indeed, we live in a time when technology has not only revolutionised how we interact with others, but how we experience stories. Narrative texts can hardly be viewed in isolation, but as conversations within an expanding body of texts that build upon and transcend the original. And hence academic research must evolve to recognise how narrative has metamorphosised in a digital world – where the boundaries separating writer, player and reader are becoming increasingly blurred.
I took those last few lines above from my honours thesis proposal, by the way, which I submitted in mid-November 2016 under the topic of transmedial narratology – a fancy term discussed by Jan-Noël Thon and Marie-Laure Ryan which basically means that narratives transcend forms of media, like how book-movie adaptations transcend both books and movies. My preliminary argument is that “transmedial” can be thought of as transcending authors and reader/authors as well as mediums, as I’ve explained above, and it has since been approved as a co-supervised thesis that itself transcends my two majors under Dr. Ismail S Talib and Dr. Alex Mitchell. Honestly, I still can’t believe that other people are getting on board with this weird idea. It’s quite exciting.
But it took me a long time to get here. My first few years in university were spent complaining about how compartmentalised my majors were – why I had to learn two different citation formats for CNM and EN (English literature), why I couldn’t double-count Photographic and Video Storytelling in CNM as a literature module when screenwriting really wasn’t that different from EN’s playwriting course, and why NUS’ Film Production minor requirements were scattered across at least three different departments while its partner university, NYU Tisch, could neatly fit its film program into a single school. Of course, CNM and EN are different for several valuable reasons: they’re born out of separate academic traditions, and you can’t exactly approach people and poetry with the same tools. But to me, academic traditions and administrative complications were (and still are) nothing but foreign, and all I knew was what I saw – that filmmaking was far from splintered in real life, and that stories that weren’t books weren’t always bad.
And I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. My EN classmates and I would hang around after class and gripe about why we couldn’t study graphic novels, much in the same way we griped about why we didn’t have more classes in Singaporean literature (I talk about this more in my second post). It felt like a shame, and it felt like something needed to change. For me, I expressed this sentiment by engaging in as much bureaucratic rebellion as I could.
*
My undergraduate life has been a life of doing everything wrong, and a large part of that has been on purpose. I make it a point to bend assignment requirements as much as possible to produce something the professor doesn’t expect, mostly because I think it’s more interesting that way. I have ‘close-read’ an art exhibition for a literature class. I have written a creative assignment entirely in Singlish to trick my professor into thinking it was a post-apocalyptic language (read my second post for details). I have submitted a graphic design assignment that was limited to black strips on a white paper square with all my strips extending beyond the square, making a square four times its original size.
I think my rebellious streak came to a head in my two self-designed Independent Study Modules under NUS’ University Scholars’ Programme, where I protested departmental comparmentalisation with sheer bureaucratic wrongness. Both my ISMs were administrative headaches – although they were each cross-listed to one of my majors, the CNM one was supervised by a USP professor, while the EN one was supervised by an English Language professor (whom a CNM professor had in turn recommended to me). I also chose topics and methodologies that were as strange as possible, finding ways to overlap my two majors within my main research interest in electronic fiction.
From the introductions to both ISMs, you can see how I variously tried to position myself at the edges of academic tradition. Although my CNM paper feels CNM-ish due to its focus on technology, you could also see it as a writer-centric approach to literature much akin to literary scholars that analyse authors’ intentions through their prefaces and commentaries (here’s an example, though literary biographies basically do the same thing), while I also adopted a very non-academic writing style as an attempt at self-reflexivity (see my second post on how this challenges disciplinary norms), acknowledging my observational presence and personal relationship with the participant. Similarly, my EN paper introduced its new media-ish primary text Undertale as something with the potential to “reframe narratological paradigms”, while also touching on the game’s fanfiction as a gateway into fan culture studies, which I thought no one in NUS was studying at the time (I have since been proved wrong, however). Needless to say, I felt really cool while writing these papers, and was constantly surprised by how receptive my professors were to my unconventional projects.
Even so, I admit that it wasn’t exactly hard to categorise my papers into their respective disciplines. Aether-Writing remains within CNM because of its interview-based methodology (though perhaps also because its participants are not renowned ‘literary’ writers, but amateurs!), and Under the Tale roots itself in narratological frameworks and typologies, along with the close reading that literary studies are known for. Although these were certainly appropriate methodologies for the papers in their own right, I sometimes wonder if I could have gone further in my rebellion if I really tried – interviewing writers for a literature assignment, for example. Yet comparing these two papers in my head has since led me to a different conclusion: that interviews and close reading are essentially the same thing.
The similarities between the paragraphs above are obvious even from their visual features – both are sprinkled with double inverted commas, indicating ad verbatim quotes. This in turn points to intrinsic similarities in the papers’ investigative methods, in that both involve extracting linguistic data from either the interview (CNM) or the primary game text (EN) and critically scrutinising the connotations and significance of each phrase. I’m amazed I didn’t realise these parallels earlier, given that the usual way to deal with interviews is to produce a written transcript based on your audio recordings. In other words, to analyse an interview is quite literally to close read its transcript.
So I wasn’t being that revolutionary after all. Rather, my act of rebellion continued to operate within the compartmentalisations that I was trying to rebel against. My preoccupation with the EN-CNM divide had prevented me from recognising even their most basic connection – that whatever subject you map your project to or whatever journal you end up publishing your paper in, writing is just writing.
*
My research leading up to honours thesis has since taken me well beyond the names “English Literature” and “Communications and New Media”. Within literature, for example, lies a vast repository of sub-disciplines ranging from literary history and eco-criticism to formalism and narratology. In fact, narratology itself has split into so many fields that scholars have published taxonomies of narratological taxonomies. As for CNM, it’s a departmental construct that pretty much only exists within NUS – each university defines their purview differently, whether it’s “mass communications” at NTU or “modern culture and media” at Brown. Fan studies itself is a cultural studies-based offshoot of fandom research across several disciplines, drawing on a wide variety of methodologies. USP’s Dr. Barbara Ryan, for example, studies fandom from a literary historical perspective, while fan studies’ ‘founding’ scholar Henry Jenkins had his roots in sci-fi literary studies.
Clearly academia is way more diversified than I first thought, standing on the bottom rung of the academic ladder. Now that I’m climbing up little by little, I can see that the academic world is in fact full of rebellion – always evolving, always changing. But it’s also a towering institution with centuries of history, so scholars have no choice but to articulate new ideas in terms of existing institutional categories. That’s why when ludology (game studies) first gained prominence in the early 2000s, it was accompanied by a brief war with the narratologists about whether games and narratives were mutually exclusive – a war which even the ludologists have since declared obsolete (such as prominent ludologist Espen Aarseth).
Academia might be an ivory tower, but it’s made out of people trying to storm it. Perhaps the edifice is held in place by people who are already comfortable where they are, but the people who are climbing up have to knock out holes in the walls to find their place – no matter how difficult it might be.
Since I began this post by recounting an encounter with one of my professors, it seems fitting that I end it with another. A few weeks before submitting my HT proposal, I met my CNM film lecturer on my train journey home after school, during which he told me about what he wanted to do for his PhD, although he had no idea how to pull it off. It turned out to align almost exactly with my own research interest: the intersection between digital media and literature in non-linear narrative. I tried to offer solutions, listing all the things I’d done to get my thesis in order – professors to approach and angles to pursue – but of course, he knew all about that. His CNM postgraduate requirements were just too stringent for him to hop between departments like I had. He had no choice but to work within the constraints of his degree programme, with no room for any bureaucratic trickery.
As an undergraduate and a young person, my freedom to do things wrong has been a great privilege. I hence consider it an obligation to exploit this privilege as much as possible – refusing to accept academic norms at face value, and instead forcibly applying my greenhornness to them in order to refine my own perspectives and possibly change others. This is the attitude I’ve since taken towards western-centrism, which is not only another spire on the ivory tower that its climbers are trying to destroy, but a concept that suffuses everything I know about literature, writing, and myself.