Other members of our class have already commented smartly on what we all gained—as readers and writers—in re-mediating Richardson’s Clarissa into a blog-like structure, working as readers and writers within the blog that was the class itself, reading and responding to important theoretical essays on the nature of blogs, and then bringing all of that creative and analytical work to bear during our weekly meetings. I’d like to comment more narrowly on the three kinds of immediacy we seem to have experienced in our actual reading of and involvement with the novel, in blogging about that experience, and in the in-person conversations enabled by the classroom situation.

That Clarissa was felt by all of us with a surprising immediacy is confirmed by the vivid emotional nature of many of our comments on the novel—and I imagine such strong reactions were a surprise to most of us, given the medium through which Richardson chooses to tell the novel’s story: letters. But Richardson’s genius in creating deep and nuanced voices for every correspondent involved in the story’s telling brought that story to life with startling vividness and reality. And so the story’s own inherent drama comes through very powerfully. But, as the title of my piece is meant to remind, everything in the novel is obviously mediated by the language of fiction (one we’re all experienced in engaging) and by a particular historical form (the epistolary novel, with which we’re far less experienced). Recognizing those means by which Richardson draws us in so powerfully is helpful in drawing the contrasts—rather than the connections—between novel and blog.

We commonly consider blogs as far more immediate—given their fluidity and the constant interactivity between “author” and “reader” that they create. Several of my fellow participants commented on that feeling of immediacy that arose as we responded to each other’s postings (both the blog re-framing of Clarissa itself and the questions asked in connection with that re-framing). But the blog is, of course, also a heavily mediated site of exchange, and its immediacies—created by technical affordances that allow what seems like a more quickly unfolding “real-world” conversation (very unlike the “conversation” created in our head and heart as we read the static text of the novel) have limitations we may not even register as such.

For me, the deepest immediacy of the course was that experienced in our weekly conversations—often emotional, vividly analytical, and full of surprise and reversals and discovery. This is fairly natural to a class that is sharing an experience as compelling as the reading of Clarissa. But of course, this conversation is also mediated—by the work involved in the first two immediacies of private reading and public blogging—as well as by being structured by the academic setting. I think that our alertness to all the ways in which our course’s many experiences were mediated gives us both a sharper sense of those ways in which the various media we experienced actually work. Perhaps even more importantly, a sharper sense as well of how importantly they can contribute to each other. As others have recognized, what Clarissa granted to us privately, and what the course’s blog structure granted us as a blogging community, were both crucial to the final immediacy we experience in every lively class of the semester.