We’ll put our heads together and choose a text to “play,” beginning next week. There are no hard and fast rules on what makes for a good text, but in my view here are some general criteria:

• size matters: there’s a lot of work (well, play) in order to read the text and understand it, plus do enough research on your character in order to play them competently. So novella-length is good. Also, a modest number of main characters is much better than a Tolstoyan dramatis personae.
• rich history helps: the play really cooks when you can activate the penumbra around a text rather than just enact what happens within its pages. So texts that have interesting reception histories or performance histories or controversies around them are a good fit.
• lively voices: since you’re basically ventriloquizing characters, authors, readers, etc., one hopes for fun, lively characters to inhabit.

A few suggestions:

• At the risk of tedium, my earlier suggestion of Sinclair Lewis’s novel imagining a dystopian fascist USA, It Can’t Happen Here, would be great. I dimly remember that it was turned into a play that was widely performed in the 1930s and would be interesting to delve into.
• How about Jonathan Franzens’ The Corrections, given that it sparked the notorious Oprah Affair and occasioned all kinds of discussions about literature, media, and commerce?
• A novel with a coterie of famous readers around it might be cool, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein?

I’m sure you’ll have your own ideas, and we can have 2 or 3 games going on different texts if we like.

Finally, a few examples:

• These 720ers played Nella Larsen’s 1920s Harlem Renaissance novel of passing, Quicksand.
• And these Hunter undergrads played a cycle of Charles Chesnutt’s revisionary plantation fiction stories, The Conjure Tales.
• Finally, these 720ers played Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

Interesting piece on the 1980s Choose Your Own Adventure series of children’s books that touches on some of the overlap between print and screen-based media we discussed last night, insofar as the CYOI series anticipates some of the 1990s giddy fascination with “hypertext media” and the contemporary proximity between cinema, video games, and the novel.

BTW if it isn’t obvious, this is your space too: feel free to post anything course-relevant on the blog as we move through the course.

Katharina asked the very useful question last week, after I suggested that one or both groups might choose a substitute for the planned Billy Budd: what makes for a good text to play via Ivanhoe? Here are some thoughts on that score:

• you can “play” virtually any fictional narrative (or even historical event, legal debate, etc.): as long as there are an array of different personae to inhabit, the play will work.
• shorter is better: in my experience, the game works best in groups of 4-7, to allow for a range of different personae and to give a sense of the text as a whole. As I joked in class, Russian “doorstop” novels have too many characters and too much plot complexity to work well. Novella-length is great, given the time constraints.
• public-domain is always nice but less necessary here: we are transforming these texts and thus can “publish” our work in the open under “fair use.” So the only downside is the expense, potentially, of getting your hands on an in-copyright text.
• interesting publication history: if you dig deeply enough, almost any text has a rich publication history on some level, but it’s nice to think about texts that occasioned some kind of vivid debate, or had unusual itineraries through the publication process, or otherwise teach us something about the production/consumption/distribution of texts.
• As I mentioned in class, the Bedford Cultural Edition series has a few 19thC texts that have rich publication histories, are of manageable length, and are chock-full of the kinds of cultural materials that would enhance your play.

For an example, check out the site in which my honors course at Hunter played Charles Chesnutt’s The Conjure Tales last term. As you can see, both teams played the same text but with different emphases and different “paratextual” characters. The fun of the game emerges through the interactions, in which players, much as in improvised music or theater or dance, have to listen to one another in order for their expressions to mesh with the whole. Of course your play will look very different, but I think these students did great things with the project.