Literary scholars face a new and often baffling reality in the classroom: students spend more time looking at glowing screens than reading printed text. The social lives of these students take place in cyberspace instead of the student pub. Their favorite narratives exist in video games, not books. How do teachers who grew up in a different world engage these students without watering down pedagogy? Clint Burnham and Paul Budra have assembled a group of specialists in visual poetry, graphic novels, digital humanities, role-playing games, television studies, and, yes, even the middle-brow novel, to address this question. Contributors give a brief description of their subject, investigate how it confronts traditional notions of the literary, and ask what contemporary literary theory can illuminate about their text before explaining how their subject can be taught in the 21st-century classroom.

Introduction Paul Budra and Clint Burnham1. Roll a D20 and the Author Dies Paul Budra2. Consider the Source: Critical Considerations of the Medium of Social Media Kirsten C. Uszkalo and Darren James Harkness3. Voice of the Gutter: Comics in the Academy Tanis MacDonald4. Television: The Extra Literary Device Daniel Keyes5. Hypertext in the Attic: The Past, Present and Future of Digital Writing Andreas Kitzmann6. The ABCs of Viewing: Material Poetics and the Literary Screen Philip A. Klobucar7. "Let the Rhythm Hit 'Em": Hip-Hop, Prosody, and Meaning Alessandro Porco8. Thinking Inside the Box: A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of Television Studies C.W. Marshall and Tiffany Potter9. Middle Brow Lit and the End of Postmodernism, Clint BurnhamContributors