Flash Points
Flash points: Reading electronic literature as a metaphor for creativity.
The article examines how digital media and writing come together in pedagogical practices. If creativity can be prompted in such intimately felt moments by an interface or digital media experience, can the creation of electronic or digital literature also act as a model for learning within the humanities and the arts more generally, as the use of digital tools spreads?
“Flash point” here stands merely for “sudden realization”, the dawn of comprehension that students experience when they begin to understand a previously-opaque text. One looks in vain for anything here that pertains specifically to the digital, and much of the essay would work without change as a defense for teaching students to construe Latin hexameters.
Update: Anthony Grafton, “Can The Colleges Be Saved?"
In class and outside it, in casual conversations with other students and in intensive bouts of reading deep in the bowels of the library, a light still goes on for no reason anyone can supply, and a young person or a whole class suddenly sees a poem or a work of art illuminated in a new way.