Literary scholars face a new and often baffling reality in the classroom: students spend more time looking at glowing screens than reading printed text. The social lives of these students take place in cyberspace instead of the student pub. Their favorite narratives exist in video games, not books. How do teachers who grew up in a different world engage these students without watering down pedagogy? Clint Burnham and Paul Budra have assembled a group of specialists in visual poetry, graphic novels, digital humanities, role-playing games, television studies, and, yes, even the middle-brow novel, to address this question. Contributors give a brief description of their subject, investigate how it confronts traditional notions of the literary, and ask what contemporary literary theory can illuminate about their text before explaining how their subject can be taught in the 21st-century classroom.

Paul Budra is with the Department of English at Simon Fraser University.

Paul Budra's profile page

Clint Burnham is widely published as a critical theorist, poet, and author of books on digital culture. He is the author of book-length studies of Steve McCaffery and Fredric Jameson, a novel titled Smoke Show (2005), and several books of poetry, including The Benjamin Sonnets (2009). His most recent critical book is The Only Poetry That Matters: Reading the Kootenay School of Writing (2012). His most recent art writing includes a catalogue essay on Canadian photographer Kelly Wood; an essay on Edward Burtynsky in the c Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture collection from McGill-Queens. During a residency at the Urban Subjects Collective in Vienna in 2014–15, he wrote books on Slavoj Žižek and digital culture, and on Fredric Jameson and Wolf of Wall Street.Burnham is an associate member of the SFU Department of Geography and a member of SFU’s Centre for Global Political Economy. He is a founding member of the Vancouver Lacan Salon.

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Andreas Kitzmann is an associate professor in the Department of Humanities at York University.

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C.W. Marshall's profile page

Daniel Keyes' profile page

Philip A. Klobucar's profile page

Tanis MacDonald is the author of two books of poetry: Fortune (2003) and Holding Ground (2000), and is the winner of the 2003 Bliss Carman Poetry Prize. She has published articles on the poetry of P.K. Page, Lorna Crozier, and Anne Carson. She teaches English at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario.

Di Brandt’s poetry titles include questions I asked my mother (1987), Agnes in the sky (1990), Jerusalem, beloved (1995), and most recently, Now You Care (2004). She has received numerous awards for her poetry, including the CAA National Poetry Prize, the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award, and the Gerald Lampert Award. Di Brandt recently returned to the Manitoba prairies, her home, after a decade away, to take up a Canada Research Chair in Creative Writing at Brandon University.

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Tiffany Potter teaches eighteenth-century British and American literature at the University of British Columbia. Her most recent book is the edited collection Women, Popular Culture, and the Eighteenth Century.

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Kirsten C. Uszkalo is a specialist in seventeenth-century literature, early modern cultural studies, and women's writing. She is the author of numerous scholarly articles on witchcraft, possession, and digital culture. She is the lead of the Witches in Early Modern England Project and the founding editor of Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies in the Preternatural (Penn State University Press). Her first book, Bewitched and Bedeviled (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) uses cognitive science and neuroscience to understand possession phenomenon in early modern England. She is currently teaching digital humanities at Athabasca University.

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Darren J. Harkness' profile page

Alessandro Porco is a poet, critic, and scholar from Toronto, Canada. He earned his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo. His research focuses on twentieth-century poetry and poetics. Porco lives in Wilmington, where he is an Assistant Professor of English at UNCW.

Jerrold Levy was born and raised in New York City. He is the grandson of poet Mina Loy and son of art dealer Julien Levy. He attended Black Mountain College from 1947 to 1950, studying under Ilya Bolotowsky, Merce Cunningham, and Charles Olson. In 1959, Levy received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago.

Richard Negro grew up in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, a suburb located twenty-five miles outside New York City. He attended Black Mountain College from 1947 to 1950 and was a star pupil of physicist Natasha Goldowski and poet M.C. Richards. He later studied physics at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Alessandro Porco is a poet, critic, and scholar from Toronto, Canada. He earned his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo. His research focuses on twentieth-century poetry and poetics. Porco lives in Wilmington, North Carolina, where he is an Assistant Professor of English at UNCW.

Alessandro Porco's profile page

The theoretical treatments are interesting and provocative, but what gives the book an added dimenstion is its consideration of pedagogy—the question of how to integrate this new content in the classroom.

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