Professor Straddles Divide Between Literary Technologies

by Jan Bear

Excerpt from the Catholic Sentinel
May 19, 2006

It’s the last meeting of the term for Prof. Meg Roland’s Shakespeare class, and the 10 or so students gather into groups for the "Who was Shakespeare?" debate.

Each group makes its case with enthusiasm. One advocates for the mysterious man named William Shakespeare from the town of Stratford-Upon-Avon, about whom so little is known; another for Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford; and another for Sir Henry Neville, along with a student who wrote her senior thesis speculating that the author of Shakespeare's plays, with their strong and finely drawn women characters, might have been a woman.

The students cite the incongruous facts know about the middle-class William Shakespeare—who left behind no books and only a couple of mundane letters and seems not to have had the kind of education and experience that would lead to the Bard's enormous vocabulary or broad knowledge of important literature in several languages.

History and legend make a bumpy crossing at Shakespeare, which makes it an appropriate subject for Roland — who seems to have made a specialty of those jagged intersections.

After parlaying her bachelor's degree in economics into being part of founding of the Full Sail Brewing Company, she went back to school and earned her doctorate in Medieval literature and textual study, which she now uses as chair of the English department at Marylhurst, where she teaches medieval literature and hypertext — that's as in the language that makes it possible to glean information in a whole new way on a computer, especially by means of the Internet.

But if you ask her students and colleagues, you find that she's as much at home among the very human life on campus as among the illuminated and hyperlinked manuscripts that she studies.

Literature major Pamela Langley says that Roland is one of those teachers who "inscribe themselves on your psyche." Langley has studied both Shakespeare and hypertext theory under Roland and describes her as an inspiring teacher who "brings light and life into everything she teaches."

Langley, who was the 2005 editor of the M Review, Marylhurst's literary review, also appreciates the fact that Roland works to make sure students in the English literature and cultural and historical studies programs have opportunities to socialize during the year — "a nice perk in a school that focuses on the non-traditional student and can therefore be less social than more traditional institutions," Langley says. There are public readings of students' creative works, and Roland and her colleague — director of writing Perrin Kerns — attend and sometimes bring refreshments.

Kerns says that Roland is an exceptional teacher and advisor: "Under Meg’s guidance, the students in [the English literature and writing program] say that they feel like they belong to something significant, a program with a particular feeling of academic rigor, professionalism, and collegiality." She credits her connection to the students, her organizational vision — planning departmental gatherings and readings, her outreach to English departments at other universities, and her informative emails to students in the program.

Roland traveled last year to the Netherlands for an international Arthurian conference, where she delivered an address about Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur, the topic of her doctoral dissertation.

In her focus on Arthurian literature and on hypertext, she straddles two different breaks in the technology of story telling: Malory compiled stories that had been written down from oral legends about an English king; hypertext uses computer technology to create a text that proceeds according to the interest of the reader, not the plan of the writer.

Medievalists are all about text, she said. When you look at a handwritten manuscript, the amount of work that went into it can say much about the writer, the person who commissioned it and its intended audience, in much the same way as a beautifully printed coffee table book reveals something about its audience and intended use compared to a freely distributed weekly newspaper.

A medievalist will ask whether the manuscript is deluxe or common, Roland says, whether it has illuminations or only text. These characteristics tell who the audience for the work might have been, she says, and that becomes one of the clues to the meaning of the text.

That's why it's not such a jump as it may at first appear from manuscripts that preceded the printing press to hypertext, which leaves the printing press behind.

"Many medievalists became interested in hypertext earlier on," she says, "because we are trained to pay attention to the material form of the text." Like illuminated manuscripts, the way text appears on the Web incorporates visual elements into the fabric of the text itself.

Her interest in medieval literature grew out of her childhood in Catholic churches, where beauty and tradition are valued. Medieval manuscripts are "vessels of beauty," she says, and she learned a reverence for the text surrounded by medieval sensibility. "Medieval literature is both strange and familiar at the same time," she said. "There are long strands from their culture to our culture."

Hypertext: Information Revolution

The transition from oral to written literature caused — and still causes — people to observe that we write things down not to remember them but to give ourselves liberty to forget. These thinkers argue that there's a loss in that, as well as a gain.

Hypertext likewise offers a new way of looking at information. Instead of following a thread of the author's thought from beginning to end, it gives the reader more control over compiling the information for his or her own purposes.

A hypertext document contains both text and graphics, and its ability to include moving images and sound files is limited only by problems of storage and transmission. In the text of the document, phrases or words are underlined, a convention indicating that the reader can click there and go to a different page with more information on that topic.

So in a history text, readers can click through to footnotes, leave the page for background information, compare alternate versions of an event and gain a fuller understanding of things happening at the same time.

Roland is interested in the material text in whatever form it comes: manuscript, printed book, playscript and, now, hypertext and blogs. "Hypertext gives us some intriguing ways to think about the relationship between author and writer, she says, and that may better reflect the way our minds work. I think we are just learning to explore how this new medium uses the elements of text and image and material form (in this case a computer screen) to interact with the reader."

Likewise, the transition in literature from the linear model to hypertext has its detractors.

Author Barry Sanders expresses the fear in his book A Is for Ox: "God is dead. The author has passed away. The written page is being deconstructed. Word processors have turned everyone into ghostwriters, so that technology, like a hard-wired vampire, has sucked the very essence out of life."

Roland takes a calmer view of the transition: "The book is not going to go away," she says, adding that the book itself is a technology.

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