"Oh, teach me how I should forget to think"

The Pedagogical Problems of Pleasure and Rigor in Social Media and Shakespeare

Authors

Kyle DiRoberto University of Arizona South

Abstract

Cluster: Modes and Models of (In)Attention

This paper investigates the anxiety exhibited by some academics over the use of new media in teaching Shakespeare. New media, some critics claim, impoverish academic studies, undermining communication skills and cognition by introducing the pollution of the market and the ideas of a populace deluded by pleasure-seeking into the realm of education. I question the bias that rejects the pleasure of new media, paying particular attention to laments about the decline of academic authority into "edutainment" and "infotainment," and I argue that the importance of new media lies, in part, in its ability to facilitate new modes of communication, to accommodate new constructions of identity and to contest older less objective views of language, knowledge, and selves.

Author Biography

Kyle DiRoberto, University of Arizona South

Kyle DiRoberto is an Assistant Professor and director of the outreach program in English for the University of Arizona, South Campus. The title of her dissertation is "Grotesque Transformations and the Discourse of Conversion in Robert Greene's Work and Shakespeare's Falstaff." She has contributed two chapters to volumes of medieval and early modern scholarship: "Representations of the Plowman and the Prostitute in Puritan and Anti-Puritan Satire: Or the Rhetoric of Plainness and the Reformation of the Popular in the Harvey Nashe Quarrel," in Rural Space in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: The Spatial Turn in Premodern Studies (De Gruyter 2012) and "Sacred Parody in Robert Green's Groatsworth of Wit", in Laughter in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: Epistemology of a Fundamental Human Behavior, Its Meaning, and Consequences (De Gruyter 2010).