After this Introduction, the reader will find the following sections:
The next section, Letters as Blogs, contains two subsections: Clarissa’s Blog and Lovelace’s Blog. These subsections contain a selection of letters from Clarissa, but remediated as blogs. (Letters are shortened and titled and appear in reverse chronology.) We have divided the letters into two blogs because most of the correspondence is either between Clarissa and her friend Anna Howe, or between Lovelace and his friend John Belford. We followed the Project Gutenberg division of the book into nine volumes. Each seminar participant was responsible for curating one volume. This curation consisted of selecting which letters to excerpt, initiating responses to those letters, and summarizing the responses in relation to our key analytical terms: narrative, writing, and the self. (See Summary below). Thus, each part of the blogs is itself an interpretation of Clarissa. Each person’s reading of Clarissa—reflected in which letters were selected and edited—was constructed from his or her own experience, a transaction between the reader and the text (Rosenblatt, 1978).
Because we do not expect all our readers to have read Clarissa, we have provided a section entitled Summary of Clarissa, which we believe will allow readers unfamiliar with the novel to understand our argument. On this page, readers will also find a drop-down menu that offers a précis of our responses to Clarissa’s and Lovelace’s blogs in terms of our key analytical terms: narrative, writing, and the self.
We follow this with a section entitled Blogs We Follow, where we analyze narrative, writing and the self in six blogs; each entry offers an investigation of how a particular blog functions as a technology of the self. These analyses are meant to be read as stand-alone texts. They demonstrate how the contemporary technology of personal blogs fosters self-construction through narrative.
In the next section, Narrative, Writing, and the Self, we elaborate our argument in four sub-sections: Remediating Clarissa as a Blog, Clarissa, Narrative, Writing, and the Self, Lovelace, Narrative, Writing, and the Self, and Blogs, Narrative, Writing, and the Self. Unlike the entries analyzing blogs (in the section above), these sub-sections are made up of a series of blog posts. While connected in topic, they develop different ideas and together resemble less a coherent seamless argument than a dialogic, blog-like elaboration of ideas. The section ends with a set of Conclusions to the webtext as a whole.
Finally, we offer Notes and References.