Immersed in the scholarship of rhetoric and composition for the past several years, I began this seminar on Clarissa feeling out of practice in the study of literature. I admit to having some reservations about reading this 1500-page novel as a re-initiation into that study, so it came as a surprise when I found myself so invested in Clarissa’s world. This investment was partly a result of the fact that Clarissa is an unexpectedly engrossing novel. But the investment was also heightened because the ways we read and wrote about the novel helped us tap into a set of reading and writing practices that deepened our reading and enabled us to reshape and write back to the novel. This semester-long project afforded us several insights that relate to our field’s goal to make greater connections between our work as scholars and our work with undergraduate as well as graduate students.
As part of studying the novel, remediating Clarissa provided us with reading and writing practices that are more conventional in blogs than in academic writing and discourse. We read individually during the week, then we read the novel as excerpted by the members of the seminar, according to what was most remarkable or salient in that particular volume’s letters. Similarly, one’s personal blog represents a narrative construction of one’s life and identity while readers recognize that a larger, more complex narrative occurs off the interface. The members of our seminar came to appreciate the narrative construction of Clarissa that took shape on the blog. We soon realized that we were able to adopt blog conventions around response in our reading of the text. By commenting on individual letters as if on a blog, we collapsed barriers that typically exist across time and between readers and writers.
We were also invited to become part of Clarissa’s life. In fact, as readers we seemed as likely to respond in order to vent our private thoughts and frustrations while reading the novel as we were to engage in deep, critical analyses of individual passages, or of Richardson’s rendering of Clarissa’s struggles. In this sense we moved between the personal and the academic—categories that the blog asked us to challenge. Since the space of the blog permitted a rich variety of responses to the novel, the boundaries of academic and personal writing blurred. Though our responses to the letters developed from our years as readers and writers in the academy, the blog invited us to value ourselves as readers who responded affectively to Clarissa’s life and death. As a result, our embodied responses to the novel (whether we cried or expressed anger or grief) became available—and were validated—as academic responses.
Many lessons became apparent by the end of our project. Remediating Clarissa as a blog resulted in a collaboratively constructed arrangement of letters that now constitutes a new reading of the novel. Our digital, “abridged” version represents the ways that we challenged ourselves to think about narrative, writing, and the self in a 18th century novel—and from a 21st century perspective. In addition, remediating the novel and commenting as blog readers gave us some sense of agency: rather than solemnly reading in appreciation of a great work of literature, we were able to interact with and respond to the novel as affected readers and as interested academics.
In reflection, I also notice my personal takeaways as a learner. Remediating Clarissa as a blog made the text more accessible to me as an out-of-practice reader of literature. I imagine that my experience may be similar to other graduate or undergraduate students for whom novels, such as 18th century epistolary novels, constitute an unfamiliar genre. I do not want to suggest that the implications of this remediation project are only that literature can be made fun or interesting through the use of digital media. Clarissa is a fascinating novel in itself; but such a remediation can reinvigorate texts that have become reified, by time or anything else.
Finally, remediating the novel enabled me not only to appreciate Clarissa as a compelling and beautifully rendered novel, but also to build on my understanding of rhetoric and writing during a time when our field pursues many questions and inquiries around the affordances of digital media.