Remediating Clarissa as a blog changed the acts of both writing and reading for me—highlighting affordances of collaboration in digital spaces, some of which I had experienced previously (but not nearly as in-depth or for as lengthy a time as the entire read of Clarissa), and some of which were new to me as a first-semester PhD student returning to a very different version of graduate education in English than I had exited 5 years prior.

ClarissaBlogs first changed the act of writing for me through the dialogic structure of a blog. With a different student curating a volume of the novel each week, I encountered different patterns in editing and posting, and I also found letters online that I may or may not have focused on in my own reading of the novel (since there were always numerous letters and countless possible angles of approach). In short, of course, this changed what I wrote, pushing me to focus on passages in writing which may not have been the same ones I focused on while reading, and sending me running to my novel to read or re-read the context of a particular letter. Inevitably, this altered my attention to moments in the text that I might have otherwise dismissed or skimmed over, providing a richer (though more time-consuming) read. As we proceeded later in the semester, remediating Clarissa as a blog also shaped the common themes we attuned to and ultimately tagged (sometimes retrospectively), which changed the shape of our conversations and the blog itself.

Remediating Clarissa also changed the act of reading for me, through accountability and affiliation, in ways that differed from previous literature (or other) courses or shared reading experiences. Altering the traditional read(alone)-write(alone)-discuss(together) format, we read the novel on our own, then responded online to posts of selected letters, and then commented on each other’s responses before coming to class to discuss the volume face-to-face. So we were, in a sense, reading the book together, and paying close attention to the letters selected by one of our peers, and then reading and responding to each other’s thoughts and comments on these. All of this was particularly beneficial for such a lengthy work that requires so much time, attention, and careful attunement—to all 1499 pages of it.

Structuring our reading this way changed the affective dimensions of time and accountability for me. I was accountable first to everyone online through asynchronous posting and commenting—and then accountable for oral discussion in class every Tuesday night as well. But ClarissaBlogs was available every night, and I would often visit once on Sunday (the first deadline) and again on Monday and Tuesday (before class). And I often received text messages from classmates who were drawing my attention to particular posts that I had not replied to—sending me back to the blog far more than the “required” number of times. We could also then trace these multimedia affiliations into our face-to-face interactions during class discussions—which we would often begin with explicit references to our posts and comments, most often before class officially began. We could intuit, for example, who had liked the volume better than others, who had wept along with Clarissa that week, and who had responded (most) vehemently to Lovelace’s latest set of libertine machinations. Remediating the novel online not only guided our written responses, but also prompted and shaped the trajectories of our face-to-face discussions—all of which became part of my experience of reading the text.

What was lost? I didn’t write about all the letters in a volume that I wanted to; I could’ve added them, but there was little time for extras when there was so much already posted. Instead, we discussed the letters that did get posted and asked why others weren’t, and we got to read through someone else’s eyes what they saw as vital to the novel’s development. These rhetorical choices in reading, posting, and responding shaped our in-class discussions. But this conversation intersected in fruitful ways with our discussion of our experience as 21^st century readers of a text that made tremendous demands on its 18^th century readers—and how we are similarly constructed (or not) as audiences in digital environments. In short, we didn’t have a conventional literature course—and so we didn’t produce a traditional analysis as a product either. The course became less about Clarissa the novel and more about our reading of it—which we could argue any good literature course does; this one just left traces as evidence.

And so what was gained? We read Clarissa together while reading, writing, and revising ClarissaBlogs together—while engaging in robust conversations about how we read each other, how others read us, how we read 18^th century England, how we read 21^st century bloggers, and how we read narrative theory about reading ourselves. We also experienced the intellectual challenge of conceiving of ourselves as working on a project while we worked through what that project was—an experience that can only be learned while engaging in the practice of doing it and which was, I am certain, a stellar (re)introduction for me into graduate education in English. And I got to share it with fellow students and professors with whom I experienced the challenges and rewards of working through something together in a medium that allowed for flexibility and change as we revised our thinking, our writing, and our aims both for ClarissaBlogs and for our reading(s) of it.