Writing Literature and Technology: Online Writing and Conversational Learning

When I delivered the plenary address at the 2004 Louisiana Association of College Composition (LACC), I explored a variety of ways that writing could be used to teach literature, suggesting a writing-intensive or writing-across-the-literature-curriculum approach derived from writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) concepts—concepts generally applied to disciplines other than English, such as biology or history. I also described how such an approach strengthens students’ academic writing as well as their understanding of subject matter, thus proposing an integrated approach to reading, writing, and learning. In other words, when we fully incorporate writing into our literature courses—or teach literature in a composition course—we face the same issues that professors in chemistry or engineering face: how to cover the content—especially when the content of literature courses includes a canon that is continually expanding to include women’s voices, ethnic voices, recent discoveries, cultural studies, and newly recognized genres. This article, an earlier version of which was presented at the European Association for Teachers of Academic Writing Annual Convention, 2005, in Athens, Greece, describes one collaborative writing, literature, and translation project implemented shortly after I delivered the LACC address in Monroe, thus extending that conversation regarding the use of electronic discussion boards in educational contexts, in this case to connect in written conversation three teachers and their students in different parts of the world in a discussion about literature. Art Youn