" 'O, wonder! ... O brave new world!' indeed"

"The Brave New World of Academic Publishing:
Clemson and Beyond"
Wayne K. Chapman

It occurred to me, when I chose the title of this talk, that I would be standing before a small gathering of people--just after eight in the morning--and marveling, like Miranda in Shakespeare's The Tempest,

O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world
That has such people in't!

By brave, she meant handsome. I commend you, too, for your courage on such a morning. I suspect most people associate the anti-Utopian satire of Alduous Huxley with the words brave new world, which I use to convey an obvious and not altogether original theme to today's proceedings. To wonder that innocents, like Miranda, associate with experiences of the new, we might temper our enthusiasm for new technology in the future of publishing with just a penny's weight of doubt. At no time since Shakespeare's, as one of our festival speakers observed recently, has there been quite the dynamic and uncertainty as exists today in authoring, licensing, and propagating texts to readers. The tumult of the Nasdaq seems no tempest in a teapot for serious-minded investors. Unless you haven't noticed, there is a revolution going on.

Let me not be tedious by recalling some twenty months of progress at Clemson toward creation of a publication platform housed in the College of Architecture, Arts and Humanities. In short, before there was a Center for Electronic and Digital Publishing, there was Jim Barker's charge to a hand-picked task force to envision Clemson as a publishing house for the new century. The directive included a copy of the college's Guiding Principles and Peter Girler's article from The Chronicle of Higher Education, "Scholarly Publishing in an Electronic Age: 8 Views of the Future" (June 25, 1999; B7-9), which raised questions from different perspectives and encouraged debate, of which a great deal seemed to be going on and, of course, still goes on today. Subsequently, dozens of such enclosures and attachments circulated with the work of the task force, somewhat entropically and in proportion to the volume of research that members conducted while writing an institutional charter for CEDP. We laid the foundations of a digital press but acknowledge that profound disagreements are being voiced in the public debate on new media. Consider for a moment how the revolution already affects the way we think, teach, and write critically in my field.

Last semester, in an introductory graduate course, I asked my students to consider the various approaches to literature we had been reviewing and how information technology affects each of those approaches, sometimes radically. To conclude the semester with a speculative paper on "New Technology and the Scholarship/Criticism of the Future," I gave them a little exposition on the distinction between "scholarship" and "criticism," the last involving acts of judgment on literary texts. Then I gave them a kind of relativity theory that has grown out of my teaching and practice as a scholarly critic and critical scholar. (Scholarly criticism, for example, resembles almost anything written by Harold Bloom or Stanley Fish; in critical scholarship, on the other hand, we have the "critical" editions of major authors and so-called "definitive" biographies by Richard Ellmann on Joyce, Roy Foster on Yeats, Joseph Blotner on Faulkner, and so forth.)

On the effect of "new technology" on some type of literary scholarship or criticism, my students get Chapman's Law. They assume that "new technology" means the internet and electronic and digital media accessed by computers as agents of revolution in the way information ("text") is produced ("authored") and consumed by the culture (or "context"). I assert that each of those three variables (text, author, context) is radically affected by the technological revolution. In short, I hold that all approaches to the study of literature so far devised are salient in some way and yet betray an interest in one or two of the three variables to the exclusion of one or both of the others.

And this is what we find: first, formalist criticism allows that almost nothing is relevent but the text; but now text is multifoliate (hyper-), time-based, and unstable (its state in each visit online is an edition). So what has happened to the concept of the "definitive text"?

Second, psychological criticism, worrying to the old New Critics because of its violation of their injunction against the intentional fallacy, tends to put authors in gunsights, texts being triggers. However, does such criticism really have the stuff to deal with global, not merely corporate authority, or texts produced collaboratively on the World Wide Web in chat rooms, discussion groups, or by e-mail?

Third, to myth criticism, which looks for universals and thus shifts the focus from obsessive interest in authors and texts to the broadest context of humanity, what is the World Wide Web but another expression of the Zeitgeist for the mystically inclined proponents of C. G. Jung and Joseph Campbell?

Fourth, feminist critics might have their feet on solid ground for their synthesis of eclecticism and politics, attending to consequential issues of textuality, authority, and cultural context although, respectively, limited to écriture feminine, marginalized woman, and Patriarchy. Richard Lanham's "time-based typography," demonstrated in this year's Presidential Colloquium, might make Gertrude Stein proud but is hardly a gendered phenomenon and, again, is constructed globally and in more than one dimension.

Fifth, cultural studies, a repository of several types of historicism (including my own), usually combines with another approach--feminist, queer, textual-genetic, Marxist--because context is not enough. Literature, finally, does have something to do with texts and people who make them. So what will the future hold for students of popular culture who find their subject on the internet? Texts, authors, cultural context. Energy, mass, the speed of light.

Trying to imagine what life will be like in the profession of literature in a few years and, consequently, in the classroom and the world of the publishing scholar/critic, I tell my students that we need a General Theory of Criticism like the General Theory of Relativity--a unified theory. I give them a humble kind of relativity, one not yet unified theoretically because of the need to work out how the fundamentals are changing.

"O, wonder! . . . O brave new world!" indeed. Though Prospero abjures natural magic and vows to drown his book, it probably never occurred to the author that printed books, the great technological advance of the middle ages as literacy increased with the rise of university education, might one day seem doomed. This perception is everyone's problem in Academia right now, not just those of us in humanities. In the April 2001 issue of Harper's Magazine, Michael Korda puts it bluntly: "The larger and more disturbing question is whether the book itself has a future" (84); envisioning ironic "salvation" in the technology that is threatening all but a few of the largest publishing syndicates, Korda thinks there is an "awesome potential" in electronic publishing to do "the whole business of scholarly publishing, and . . . of publishing first novels, poetry, and essays" that tend to sell in small numbers.

As almost any publishing scholar will tell you around this time of year, after filling out Schedule E accompanying U.S. Tax Form 1040, Academic books will never give Stephen King, Michael Crichton, Mary Higgins Clark, or perhaps many coffee-table books a run for their money. And this is the irony inherent in a paradox: that readers of popular literature, well into the future, will afford throwaway conventional books from media conglomerates whereas consumers such as university libraries and their patrons will continue to face economic hardships directly proportional to the shelf life, endurance, or significance of knowledge produced by higher education for the public good and in pursuit of new knowledge for the sake of itself. To extend this paradox is to acknowledge that new technology is part of the knowledge that research universities now produce, especially technologically-oriented public universities like this one. Hence, with many people who have written on the future of the book in relation to the role of public research universities, I am hedging my bets. I believe, for example, that CEDP is well-advised in aiming its first work self-reflexively at the paradox, at the dilemma, at the revolution. "Guests . . . gather to celebrate the birth of CU Digital Press," the notice of this event reads in the community calendar. And that we are. And brave, too, in light of the historically unprecedented dimension of the budget crisis we suddenly face in South Carolina.

However, unlike the state crisis, CEDP and the trademark digital press it superintends are intentional consequences of twenty months of deliberation by scores of faculty and administrators. Miniscule at the outset and intending to stay small, we in CEDP plan to survive the way the smart mouse did when the comet, or whatever it was, came and erased the dinosaurs. We are not going to go away because the universities are not returning to the hedgerows and slates of their own humble beginnings. And I wonder, for wondering aloud is the aim of our assembly, if new technology as new knowledge at Clemson University does not give our fledgling venture into publishing a competitive edge. The cost of new technology is there, and we frankly acknowledge it. Universities heavily invest in it and are advised to apply information technology to maximize the benefit of this investment. This is smart like the mouse that prospered when the dinosaur perished. We envision students and faculty engaged in production and dissemination of "the best that has been built, created, performed, and written," as stipulated in our mission statement. We observe high standards, and we disclose our "Editorial Policies and Procedures" on our public website.

In our first year and without a budget for administration and personnel, we are nevertheless producing the deliverables required by our strategic plan. Three books per annum and three years in, we will achieve affiliate membership in the Association of American University Presses. We are beginning with most of our weight behind two hypermedia anthologies: appropriately enough The Idea of the University, edited by Donna Winchell and William Maker, the organizers of this year's Presidential Colloquium, and an e-volume called New Technology and the Future of Publishing, edited by Catherine Paul. Certainly, love of the Upstate and architectural heritage are manifest in the public service booklet that Clemson's distinguished physicist Donald Clayton has written on the historic residential district of Seneca, which will appear in both digital and off-print formats this summer. (An advanced proof copy of this monograph is also available for inspection in the lobby.) These inaugural publications are underwritten by President Barker and Interim Provost Helms and indebted to Professor Clayton for his resourcefulness. The press program stands on strong shoulders: The South Carolina Review, The Upstart Crow: A Shakepeare Journal, and Mirare: In Search of Ideas. Increasingly, these publications will impart more of their presence in electronic and digital media. For example, theme-based issues of The South Carolina Review are planned to join the new monographs of the digital press from electronic state in journal archives. Furthermore, the President's Seminar, called "Place: An Interdisciplinary Study of the Function of Setting," will furnish the fall 2001 issue of the Review with a brave (as in handsome) unit of essays.

For the January 2001 issue of the ADE Bulletin ("ADE" stands for "Association of Departments of English"), Steven Jones writes an insightful essay entitled "Net Work in the Virtual Department: The Romantic Circles Experiment." I am pleased to say that Professor Jones is one of our contributors. I think his distinction between "virtual" and "real" organizations on the World Wide Web may be too subtle. For the organization that we are putting together on the website of the Center for Electronic and Digital Publishing is actual. Organization, by definition, is inferentially determined by the structure and function of elements in a systematized whole. Having written much of the text for the CEDP website and having negotiated the structures and functions of the corporate whole of which I am a part, I am certain that what we are creating, by analogy to Jones's commendable experiment, is real. The place that we are constructing for our trademark publications is virtual only in the sense that the medium differs from print and seems ephemeral because the collaborating material agents of the organization (the Editor and Advisory Board) are not necessarily proximate. My point is really made for those skeptics who wish to be converted and need to hear that academic publishing in new media is not simulated but real publishing. We in Academia already know how to do this work and have the traditions of the university presses to adapt to changes in the delivery of new knowledge to a now global audience.

You and I are not the Iowa Board of Regents. We are not gathered to find solutions to avert crisis in scholarly communication in South Carolina. Nor do we tackle the topic as a joint congress of the Association of American Universities and the Association of Research Libraries has, issuing broadly a list of nine "changes in the relationships among publishers, universities, disciplinary societies, and faculty members" in the report "Principles for Emerging Systems of Scholarly Publishing," abstracted in The Chronicle of Higher Education in June 2000 (A16). The importance of such meetings is as patent as they are timely.

Briefly, here's the agenda: I have only to close to bring on the first session, on "Libraries and the Digital World." I think the logic is obvious in the progression. Libraries are strategic to any university and central as repositories of knowledge. In the humanities, in fact, they are laboratories of learning. After coffee, we turn to "Digital Publishing and Professional Communication" and matter dear to Clemson as the 2000-2001 Public University of the Year for integrating technology and communication across the curriculum. After lunch, a spectrum of issues related to a sampling of disciplines in the College of Architecture, Arts and Humanities will be discussed, beginning with "Literary Studies and Digital Publishing" and followed by "Digital Publishing in the Arts and Humanities." We will conclude with observations and discussion on the day as a whole, hoping that some BIG IDEAS do precipitate from so much stimulation. The featured speakers are distinguished and working, one way or another, on the cutting edge of their respective fields. For now, I refer you to the program for their names. My tribute to them comes later.

Finally, a word about what is happening in the lobby and elsewhere and a note on our sponsors. Besides coffee and the papered CEDP table, you'll find a display prepared by Jo Ann Paschall, Director Emeritus of Nexus Press, on the limited-edition, high-quality tradition of printing that is not lost with the acquisition of a letterpress for Clemson's print studio. Paschall is also presenting a lecture on "artist's books" to the art faculty and students as part of this Colloquium. The display, in the lobby in front of the Self Auditorium, is counterpointed by examples of work printed on demand by the Xerox Corporation, including, by the way, the first 500 copies of our program. Thanks to my daughter Charis for laying it out in the program Page Maker 6.0.

Thanks, too, to the following co-sponsoring agencies and affiliated persons: the Strom Thurmond Institute (especially Bob Becker, who first suggested the idea of a meeting, and Dixie Goswami, who gave us last, when we needed it most, her signature enthusiasm and support from The Breadloaf Rural Teacher Network); the University Vending Committee (every last anonymous one of them); the South Carolina Humanities Council (particularly Bob Ellis, one of our own who directs the grant program in Columbia); the Clemson University Libraries (Dean Joseph Boykin); the Pearce Center for Professional Communication (Kathleen Yancey); the English Department (Martin Jacobi); and the South Carolina Film Institute (Barton Palmer).

Note: A transcription of Michael Lentine was not available to us, and therefore, has been regretfully left out of the anthology. WKC

WORKS CITED

Girler, Peter. "Scholarly Publishing in an Electronic Age: 8 Views of the Future." The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 25, 1999: B7-9.

Jones, Steven. Net Work in the Virtual Department: The Romantic Circles Experiment." ADE Bulletin, No. 127, Winter 2001: 51-4.

Korda, Michael. "Out of Print: Publishing's Future, Seen from the Inside." Harper's Magazine, April 2001: 82-5.

Magner, Denise K. "Seeking a Radical Change in the Role of Publishing: Universities Seek to Fix a 'Broken System' and to Change the Way Professors Are Evaluated." The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 16, 2000: A16-17. [Full text of the joint AAU/ARL report may be still be available at http://www.arl.org/scomm/tempe.html.]