William Kuskin - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by William Kuskin

The information age is widely understood as a technological revolution, a progressive advancement... more The information age is widely understood as a technological revolution, a progressive advancement of capitalism into a post-industrial age. Kuskin argues that the transition from manuscript to print and from print to silicon chip run parallel: both demonstrate that labor is made invisible, erased, by capitalists for political reasons. This observation undermines the notion of a break from history to recall the enduring role of labor in cultural production.

JEGP, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 2011

The Medieval Review, 2013

Professor William Kuskin - Professor of English, Vice Provost and Associate Vice Chancellor for S... more Professor William Kuskin - Professor of English, Vice Provost and Associate Vice Chancellor for Strategic Initiatives University of Colorado Boulder. E-mail: William.Kuskin@Colorado.edu

Symbolic Caxton is a book not to be missed by any who study late medieval and/or early modern cul... more Symbolic Caxton is a book not to be missed by any who study late medieval and/or early modern culture. Kuskin analyzes the conflation of material and intellectual reproduction in late medieval, early modern England, focusing on Caxton's press. A veritable wealth of ...

Recorded video lectures are a core instructional tool in MOOCs. Students value video lectures and... more Recorded video lectures are a core instructional tool in MOOCs. Students value video lectures and rank rewatching them as an important activity they use to prepare for assessments. Platforms promote rewatching video lectures as an essential instrument of preparation. Despite the widespread use of this strategy, we understand very little about how rewatching video lectures impacts students’ performance. In this study, we assess the overall effect of rewatching video lectures on students’ performance retaking assessments, and the individual differences among items within the assessment. We use a cross-classification multilevel logistic approach with fixed and random effects of rewatching video lectures and apply the approach to four courses on the Coursera platform. We found that the overall effect varies over courses and among items within an assessment: it can take positive, null, and negative values. Our conclusion is caution: the generalized recommendation that students rewatch vi...

English Language Notes

In t r o d u c t i o n : C o n t i n u i t y in L i t e r a r y F o r m a n d H i s t o r y W i l... more In t r o d u c t i o n : C o n t i n u i t y in L i t e r a r y F o r m a n d H i s t o r y W i l l i a m K u s k i n L iterature is a synthetic art. In this, it stands som ewhat at odds w ith academic organization overall, which seeks to discipline such synthesis, to parse knowledge and codify human expression according to gram matical law, to invest authority discretely and in doing so set the boundary lines of taste and import. Such an agon is par ticularly clear in the grow ing body of scholarship on cartoons, comics, and graphic novels. For the critical response to this material has been to isolate it, to delim it its parameters through a series o f definitions, a list of noteworthy texts, and a lexicon of terms. Graphia: Literary Criticism and the Graphic Novel argues otherwise. Graphic stories highlight the synthetic nature o f literary production. In doing so, their poetics bring the com plex interplay o f material and rhetorical form s that define the literary object into great focus, and thus reinvigorate the current discussion of literary method by recalling the essentially interdiscipli nary nature o f literary analysis.1 Graphia contextualizes comics and graphic novels w ithin the medium o f the literary book in order to demonstrate their inherent difference, and thus decontextualize literature overall. The current critical work on comics and graphic novels coalesces around three main claims: that the artform originates in the early nineteenth century, that it is best read structurally, and that it constitutes a new medium. In each case, these claims center around the concepts o f rupture and rebirth.2 For example, though there has been some debate as to the founda tional roles of W illiam Hogarth (1697-1764) and Richard Felton Outcault (1863-1928), comics criticism currently recognizes RodolpheTöpffer (1799-1846), a Genovese schoolmaster and university lecturer w ho wrote seven complete illustrated books, as "re inve ntin g" Hogarth's tableaus in term s of sequential narrative, and thus as the father of the graphic novel.3 This history parallels the second m ajor theme, term inology, which begins w ith W ill Eisner's 1978 publication o f A Contract with God and his subsequent popularization of the term graphic novel.1 1 Alm ost every m onograph on comics has sought to define this term and w ith it a tax onom y fo r reading.6 Though differing in detail, these taxonom ies assert the reader's im ag inative involvem ent in a structural relationship between the individual panel and the sequencing o f such panels as they constitute the strip, pamphlet, book, and album. Essentially, then, these first tw o points, the story o f origins and the story o f the panels, grap ple w ith the same problem-how to understand fragm entation and continuity w ithin tim e

Studies in the Age of Chaucer

Textual Cultures Texts Contexts Interpretation, 2007

Modernity is premised on a break from the past that initiates progress. For England, this break i... more Modernity is premised on a break from the past that initiates progress. For England, this break is thought to occur in the sixteenth century, and is reflected in the development of the English literary canon. This essay contests such a view by re-reading the prefaces to Edmund Spenser's 1579 Shepheardes Calender and Thomas Speght's 1598 Workes of Chaucer against John