Virtual Encounters: Using an Electronic Mailing List in the Literature Classroom

Virtual Encounters: Using an Electronic Mailing List in the Literature ClassroomAuthor(s): Laura MandellSource: Profession, (1997), pp. 126-132Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25595614 .

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Virtual Encounters:

Using an Electronic Mailing List in the Literature Classroom

LAURA MANDELL

This semester, I am teaching online a literature course called The Early Romantic Period, 1789 to 1816. Teaching online can mean many things, but in this case the class still meets in a classroom to discuss literature, and

we still use a printed text for most of the class readings. There are really

only a few things online about the course; the syllabus, the handouts, and

all the assignments are mounted on a Web page.1 While I give students

paper copies of the syllabus, they must go to the computer to find out and

then do their assignments. Their assignments are rather traditional re

sponses to class readings. What is not traditional about these assignments is that they do not get turned in to me on paper. They are posted to the

class list by electronic mailing list,2 so that everyone in the class, myself in

cluded, receives a copy of each student's response in the form of an e-mail

message. I e-mail students back individually with a discussion of their re

sponse and a grade. Other students respond to some of the work of their

peers publicly, on the class mailing list, and sometimes I do too, or I'll post

afterthoughts and addenda there about the class discussion. We all thus re

ceive e-mail messages containing response assignments as well as further

thoughts and comments about those assignments or about the class discus

sion. There are a few other kinds of assignments, having to do with per

forming research on the Internet, and the students' final assignment is to

build a Web page rather than to write a research paper, but what I discuss

The author is Assistant Professor of English at Miami University, Oxford.

Profession 1997 126



LAURA MANDELL ||| 127

here are some wonderful things happening in this class because of our

using an electronic mailing list.

Using an electronic mailing list to conduct a portion of what goes on

in class is changing the topography of my classroom. At my university,

many students feel the need to pose as anti-intellectuals in order to fit into

a society dominated by Greek life; the pressures to conform here are in

tense. In classroom discussion this pose is expressed in such statements as

"Let's let everyone tirink what they want to think privately and personally?

discussing this is a waste of time" and "Reading this was difficult and so it is

worthless?guffaw." I believe that using an electronic mailing list has

helped forestall this ritual, which, after all, is only an act. Nonetheless, let me suggest some reasons that the list might be making our face-to-face dis

cussions shamelessly intellectual.

E-mail is a virtual space, a blank and (for my students) black screen: no

one's body appears in the part of my classroom that exists in this space. There is of course a body, but it is not clad in J. Crew; the only body that

can be used to command attention on e-mail is words. And the embodied

words on e-mail differ from the spoken ones in class, because using the

computer to talk allows for a much more extended and precise discussion.

E-mail therefore privileges the students who are working hardest at articu

lation. Of course, the very articulate students are always secretly admired.

In class, they often appear to be unapproachable stars who sometimes dom

inate discussion without necessarily bringing their peers along with them.

Since these hardworking students willfully disregard the pressure to con

form, to dumb down, most students do not wish publicly to identify with

them or approve of their intellectual agility. But on the electronic mailing list, the articulate students function differently: they are saying things that

other students want to say. Their intelligence is no longer mysterious, ei

ther; each student can now see in a kind of frozen moment the process of

articulation. Once emulation is possible, it is desirable. The electronic mail

ing list is turning the hardest-working, most articulate students in my class into intellectual Olympic heroes, people other students wish to resemble.

The list also allows students to recognize that they are as smart as those classmates who are willing to speak up and who can articulate intelligent

thoughts on the spur of the moment. One of my very shy students said to me at the end of an office visit that, in his posting to the list, he had come

up with some of the same ideas as another, talkative, and quite obviously very intelligent student in class; he flushed with pride after pointing this out to me. In virtual reality, it is possible for this shy student to speak (write)3 as if he were as intellectually secure as those who find it easy to

speak up in class.



128 HI USING AN ELECTRONIC MAILING LIST IN THE LITERATURE CLASSROOM

In addition to changing the social structure of my classroom, posting

response assignments has changed the quality of the work itself. It is a

wonderful thing to have students post their assignments to one another:

switching the audience of their work from me to the class itself has im

proved their writing a thousandfold. Instead of using what they think is

academic prose, they are actually trying to be understood. The possibility of instant gratification?if they check their e-mail, their graded assign

ments might be there?gets students into e-mail and writing to one an

other. I have told them that their grades on these assignments can be raised

by any additional posting they do to the list, so there is a great deal of dis

cussion that gets carried on by e-mail. But the postings have become less

and less identifiable in terms of which assignment is being completed or

which grade is being raised. Often a student who has received the highest

possible grade will continue to post comments to the list. An electronic

mailing list can indeed transform working for a grade into an extended, written conversation.

Using the list has also changed what I do in response to students' work.

It is of course possible to print out students' assignments submitted to me

electronically and then to do everything one ordinarily does with assign ments in paper form. But I have been trying to force myself to respond in

kind, to e-mail students (privately, not on the list) with comments and their

grades. In this form, I cannot do those oppressive things like strike through words with red pen or change the grammar in a sentence; I have to write

out the rule and let students make the change. To respond to their assign ments, I hit the reply button, which means that each line of the student's

assignment is preceded by an angle bracket (>); I can then interlace his or

her writing with my own comments, which are not preceded by a bracket.

What effects will this form of commenting have? Will it change the way that the work of writing looks and feels?

I of course use cut-and-paste techniques to make comments that I find

myself repeating to each student anyway and have quickly got into the bad

habit of sometimes misunderstanding what a student has written so that

my prefabricated comments will apply and I can get to bed at a reasonable

hour. Imagine my surprise on receiving a comment back from a student

who hit the very same reply button: "That's not what I said; what I said was

this." Of course students have always discussed paper comments with pro

fessors, but there is a scene and a ritual to it: an appointment or a meeting

during office hours. Assignments that talk back almost instantly to your comments are very disconcerting, almost painful. But the problems of not

being able to use a red pen and of receiving an instant "You didn't under



LAURA MANDELL III 129

stand me," as uncomfortable as they feel, are problems with the potential for good.

Some of my responses to students' assignments take place publicly, in

the form of e-mail messages sent to the list in which I pick up on a strand

of discussion. Teachers always do write content comments on papers? "What you say here leads to me to this question"?but those comments

have no effect outside the teacher-student relationship. Sometimes, how

ever, teachers might say in classroom discussions, "That reminds me of

what you said in your paper," bringing private work into a public forum.

But on the mailing list, making students' private work available as a way of

furthering public class discussion happens frequently. In a virtual commu

nity, private ideas are more valuable to students for being publicly usable.

There is another facet of my public responses (responses in the form of a note that the list distributes to the class) to things said in class or by stu

dents in their assignments: I think this is the first time I have ever appeared to students as writing. I write comments on papers, I write handouts. But

this is different. This is writing that is thinking, writing of the kind one

would produce for a paper. I do not know what results this appearance will

have, but I have seen one rather incredible effect of it. One day I arrived at

class to discuss some abolition treatises written during the early Romantic

period. An African American woman, Stephanie, was introduced to me by one of my students. Stephanie asked if she could sit in on the class, and I of course assented. There is only one black person in this class of thirty-seven

people?diversity is not my university's strong suit (Hale 1)?so with

Stephanie sitting in, there would be two out of thirty-eight. Fortunately for

us, Stephanie spoke up a lot during our class, asking us questions about our

relation to slavery and racism. She dominated; we were in the hot seat. She made us think hard about our relation to the material we were reading. It was an incredible class and a new experience for me to have an undergrad uate student want to sit in on a class she was not taking. After the class was

over, the student who brought Stephanie with her told me that Stephanie came because she had read a message I had posted to the mailing list.

My message performed one of the things I cannot always manage to do in class when the task of simply figuring out what an author is saying is

paramount. The message said, in effect, "But aren't things really more

complicated than the way we have been discussing them?" Seeing intellec tual problems in their full complexity has always been liberating for me

personally (it liberated me from feeling oppressed by mainstream views to which I could not assent), and the recognition of complexity in my message was empowering in some way to Stephanie. I was reminded by this expe rience of what is indeed so sustaining for me about intellectual life in



130 III USING AN ELECTRONIC MAILING LIST IN THE LITERATURE CLASSROOM

general: bringing to bear on problems an awareness of complexity that has

healing effects.4 It has always been possible in a classroom to strive simulta

neously for clarity and complexity, but an electronic mailing list provides us

with yet another surface on which to do so, another space and more time.

I have saved the best thing for last. Because I use an electronic mailing list, I walk into class knowing what students are thinking about the reading

we are about to discuss. Good teachers always get at what their students

are thinking, and so reading their responses to the assigned literature the

day before we discuss it in class feels like cheating, like looking into their

minds beforehand through a kind of ESP. For me, the special advantage of

using a mailing list is that I have discovered some of the impulses in me

that work toward stifling class discussion and students' thinking; but be

cause I have identified these impulses in advance, I can work them out be

fore getting to class. Let me give an example. The readings for a unit on the French Revolution controversy in En

gland are excerpts from Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in

France-, Mary Wollstonecraft's answer to Burke, her first pamphlet on rights entitled Vindication of the Rights of Men-, and Thomas Paine's Rights of Man.

Wednesday evening, the night before class, I plan an introductory minilec

ture. I will talk about feudal social structures and how Burke's notion of

chivalry nostalgically envisions a firmly hierarchical society; then I will ask

students to discuss how Wollstonecraft and Paine go about dismantling Burke's conception. On Wednesday evening, students are working on the

mailing-list response assignment due by the time class meets: "What one

or two ideas about government presented in the readings for class today did you find most interesting, and why?" Thursday morning, before

class, I get my e-mail and begin reading their assignments. After three of

them, it is clear that many of the students see Paine and Wollstonecraft as

communists. Communists?! That would be my response if I elicited such a

comment in class discussion, and it is my response while reading. I am

overwhelmed with the fear that students will leave class today seeing Thomas Paine as a communist?it is not that I see the term as pejorative, it

is just that it is historically inaccurate to apply it to Paine, and I do not want

to teach them a factual error. If I were in class at this moment, I would

launch into a lecture about the difference between the 1790s, when Paine

and Wollstonecraft were writing, and the 1850s (roughly), when Karl Marx

was writing; about how the attempt to break out of aristocratic and monar

chical social and political organizations might look more radical to us today than it actually was . . . and so on. The rhetorical effect of this lecture

would be to say to the students who have ventured ideas about Paine's com



LAURA MANDELL ||| 131

munism, "You are wrong." And behind that statement would be another, the inevitable conclusion: "Don't speak; don't bring up your wrong ideas."

To respond to their misconception, I decide to use some passages from

The Communist Manifesto: in class together, we will distinguish between democratic and communist views. I decide also to type up passages from

the Declaration of Independence. As I am typing, passages in both The

Communist Manifesto and the Declaration of Independence begin to reso

nate in ways I didn't expect: I begin to think to myself that communism can

be seen as a sort of radical democracy, a notion substantiated by Chantal

Mouffe. I begin to realize that the overlap between radical democracy and

properly communist views is a problem that needs to be figured out.

Thursday morning, class time, I arrive with my handout and an idea:

Let's ask ourselves, I say to the students, if Paine and Wollstonecraft are ad

vocating communism or democracy. It is the best discussion we have ever

had in this class, and I would venture to say that, considering the scrutiny with which they try to distinguish specifically communist from specifically democratic sentiments in Wollstonecraft's and Paine's texts, these students know more about Paine and Wollstonecraft than I could ever have wished. Because the mailing list alerted me in advance, I brought materials to keep the discussion precise, to avoid simply listening to students repeat cliches about democracy and communism. But what I really owe to the mailing list is the time I had to unravel my own resistance to the way the students re

sponded to the material we were reading. It is not the way I would have

approached the texts, and I am not terribly sympathetic to the political at

titudes behind the students' approach. But their questions, no matter what the bias, reflect valid ways of thinking, and I was able to get myself to think

with the students before we met. That is a lot to be able to do. I certainly do not wish to suggest that teachers have not always been

able to accomplish the things I am doing with an electronic mailing list.

They have; I know they have, because I was in their classrooms as a stu dent. While a medium can constrict possibilities of expression, those possi bilities are still infinite. Ian Hacking has said that a Restoration libertine could not be a homosexual, could not have had such a sense of identity, since that sense is built out of late-nineteenth-century medical discourses and various forms of resistance to them; he has said, further, that none of us can be nineteenth-century gargons de cafe. Our possibilities for being in

any given historical moment, Hacking says, are "bounded," but they are nonetheless "inexhaustible" (229). So my attempt to participate in the new

computer revolution consists merely in exploring some of the possibilities of being a teacher in this medium, possibilities that will themselves, I am

sure, seem familiar to everyone even if the medium itself seems strange.



132 II USING AN ELECTRONIC MAILING LIST IN THE LITERATURE CLASSROOM

My explorations so far have convinced me that virtual encounters in the lit erature classroom have the potential, at least, for intensifying intellectual

work by fueling its mutuality.

NOTES =

1 You may see this class and the various Web pages linked to it at <http://www.muohio .edu/~mandellc/eng441 >.

2An electronic mailing list is a computer program that takes an e-mail message that

has been addressed to a list and distributes it to everyone subscribed to that list; sub scribers share a special interest (in this case, they are members of my class; but there are

special interest lists available all over the Internet). For a full explanation of these lists, see <gopher://dept.english.upenn.edu/70/00/Lists/lists.int>. For another discussion of

the use of electronic mailing lists in a classroom, see McBride and Dickstein.

3Kyle Keeney calls this new body on e-mail a "text voice."

"^That complexity might be healing to African Americans engaged in liberationist

movements is argued by bell hooks (61-62).

WORKS CITED

Hacking, Ian. "Making Up People." Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individual

ity, and the Self in Western Thought. Ed. Thomas C. Heller et al. Stanford: Stanford

UP, 1986. 222-36. Hale, Christine. "Does Miami Have Diversity?" MiamiMitamsa Jan.-Feb. 1996: 1+.

hooks, bell. "Theory as Liberatory Practice." Teaching to Transgress: Education as the

Practice of Freedom. New York: Roudedge, 1994. 59-76.

Keeney, Kyle. "Resituating the Classroom." Computers and Texts 12 Quly 1996). <http://

info.ox.ac.uk/ctitext/publish/comtxt/ctl2/keeney.html>.

McBride, Kari Boyd, and Ruth Dickstein. "Making Connections with a Listserv." Com

puters and Texts 12 (July 1996). <http://info.ox.ac.uk/ctitext/publish/comtxt/ctl2/ mcbride.html>.

Mouffe, Chantal. "Radical Democracy: Modern or Postmodern?" Universal Abandon?

The Politics of Postmodernism. Ed. Andrew Ross. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.31-45.



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Virtual Encounters: Using an Electronic Mailing List in the Literature Classroom