Students who major in English today are familiar with a wide range of literary texts across a variety of media: print literature all the way from Chaucer to Toni Morrison, children’s and Young Adult literature that includes images and film, graphic novels, texts created on and for the Internet, and even narrative and poetry on social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Graduate and undergraduate students are excited to study old and new texts across this entire range of media. As a consequence, what constitutes “literature” itself has expanded to include the textual elements of visual and digital media such as films, video games, websites, and what is generally called “digital literature” : for example interactive fictions and animated poems.
Increasingly, our graduates and undergraduates have also expressed their desire to integrate work across media into their research and writing projects, from seminar papers and honors theses to dissertations. Students who work on medieval texts are eager to access extensive online archives, while students focused on contemporary culture are keen to include Twitter poetry and online narrative. A slowly but steadily growing number of our students are also keen to work across criticism and creative writing, often by integrating nontextual media into their writing (photography, video, digital animation).
In response to this demand, instructors in our department have increasingly incorporated digital media into their teaching of literature, whether this be medieval poetry, Shakespeare’s plays, or the contemporary novel. Our students have responded eagerly. Leia Yen (‘19) wrote a born-digital honors thesis “Digital Syria” under Professor Danny Snelson’s supervision. Yen became UCLA’s first-ever transfer student to win a Marshall Scholarship in 2020.
Students of literature, especially but not only on the graduate level, are expected to have some basic literacy in digital media, notably in the creation of personal websites and the use of technology in the classroom. With the increasing interest in “alt-ac” (alternative academic) jobs for English graduate students as website editors, curators, archivists, creators of podcasts and other media objects, the ability to provide initial training in working with computers aligns with the English Department’s commitment to and investment in professionalization.
