Why post RAP online for all to see?

RAP could have been password-protected, screening student work from worldwide appraisal. In many cases, I would recommend that Wikis be used in such a way. Copyright issues would not loom so large, and students would not be burdened with the exposure of their writing to readers having nothing to do with the class.

But when it came to RAP, that exposure was much to the point. The idea was to cultivate a sort of "performative self-consciousness" (James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism, p. 357): to help students feel, experientially, some of the same uncertainties of dissemination shaping poetry of the romantic era. It is one thing to read about the many technological innovations that make audience relations such an unpredictable and dominant topic of these writers - innovations whose effects have been explored by several critics in the past twenty years (Lee Erickson, Jon Klancher, Steven Behrendt, Mary Favret, and Lucy Newlyn spring to mind); using new technology to unsure ends allows students to cultivate a historicist framework for the early nineteenth century as measured against the present day.

It then became more pertinent to investigate what Newlyn terms, in the subtitle to her study Reading Writing and Romanticism, the "anxiety of reception" - to measure the way old fears about uncontrolled dissemination line up against the reach of the world wide web.

The open-access model (limited in RAP, of course, to read-only access) in fact honors the non-hierarchal, decentered structure of Wikis, not to mention their basis as open-source software.

Read other Infrequently asked questions