Dr. Rochelle Gold is a lecturer in the Writing Program at the University of Southern California. Her research and teaching interests include composition, digital literacy, 20/21 century American literature, and feminist theory. She earned her PhD in English in 2015 from the University of California, Riverside.
Professional Appointments
Lecturer, Writing Program, University of Southern California, 2015–present
Education
- English, University of California, Riverside, June 2015
- Dissertation: "Correspondence Fictions: Critical Literacies and Experiments in Writing Media After Computation"
- English, University of California, Riverside, June 2011
- Comparative Literature, University of California, Los Angeles, June 2007
Publications
Articles in Refereed Journals
"Reparative Social Media: Resonance and Critical Cosmopolitanism in Digital Art," Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, Forthcoming.
Book Chapters
"Hybrid Bodies and New Media Narratives: Critical Media Literacy in the Literature Classroom," with Kimberly Hall, for the edited collection Digital Technology and the Literature Classroom, Bedford/St. Martin's. Forthcoming Fall 2014.
Other Publications
Write It .5: A Process Approach to College Essays with Readings, Instructor's Manual. Co-authored with Benedict Jones and Kimberly Turner. Dubuque: Kendall Hunt Publishing Company, 2013.
"Digital Pedagogy: Should We Bridge the Skills-Based Divide?," Media Commons, April 5, 2013.
Awards, Grants and Fellowships
- 2016
Undergraduate Information Literacy Course Enhancement Grant, University of Southern California
- 2014
Washington University in St. Louis Library Research Grant
- 2014
Society for Literature, Science and the Arts Travel Award
- 2014
Dissertation Year Program Fall Quarter Fellowship, UC Riverside
- 2014
English Department Summer Dissertation Fellowship, UC Riverside
- 2014
Simon Fraser University Summer Publishing Workshop Tuition Scholarship, Vancouver, Canada
- 2014
English Department Service Award, UC Riverside
- 2013
Advanced Seminar in Text Encoding Travel Award, Brown University
- 2013
Digital Humanities Summer Institute Scholarship, Victoria, Canada
- 2011
Emory Elliott Endowed Memorial Essay Award, English Department, UC Riverside
- 2009-2010
Dean's Distinguished Fellowship, UC Riverside
Conference Presentations & Talks
2016
"Collaboration and Digital Writing Assignments." National Council of Teachers of English. Atlanta, Georgia. November 17-20, 2016.
2015
"Multimodal Composition Pedagogy." Teaching with Technology Roundtable. University of Southern California. October 30, 2015.
"Processing as the Core Value of Critical Digital Humanities." Cultural Studies Association. Riverside, California. May 21-24, 2015.
2014
"Feminist Hypertext and Fluid Reading." Society for Literature, Science and the Arts. Dallas, Texas. October 9-12, 2014.
"TEI and Mark-Up Fundamentals." Graduate Quantitative Methods Training Program. University of California, Riverside. May 8, 2014.
"Humanities Approaches to Feminist Social Media Research." Console-ing Passions. Columbia, Missouri. April 10-12, 2014.
"Data Visualization Tools." Graduate Quantitative Methods Training Program. University of California, Riverside. February 13, 2014.
2013
"Where Social Media Meets Browser Art: Critical Cosmopolitanisms and Digital Interactivity." PAMLA. San Diego, California. November 1-3, 2013.
"Reading Electronic Literature: Minneapolis and St. Paul are East African Cities." Digital Humanities Summer Institute Colloquia. University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada. June 6-10, 2013.
"Digital Pedagogy: How Do We Critically "Do" Technology in the Classroom?" (dis)junctions conference. UC Riverside. April 5-6, 2013.
2012
"Archives, Memory and Virtuality: Edwidge Danticat and the Problematics and Possibilities of Media in Diaspora." PAMLA. Seattle University, Seattle, Washington. October 19-21, 2012.
"Re-Writing Authorship: Dennis Cooper, Violence and the Digital Public Sphere." International Conference on Narrative. Las Vegas, Nevada. March 15-17, 2012.
Teaching Experience
University of Southern California
Courses (2015-present)
- Writing and Critical Reasoning: Education and Intellectual Development (2 sections)
- Writing and Critical Reasoning: Technology and Social Change (6 sections)
University of California, Riverside
Courses (2010-2015)
- Alternative Approaches to Literary and Cultural Studies (Teaching Assistant, 3 sections)
- Applied Intermediate Composition (1 section)
- Beginning Composition (1 section)
- English Writing (5 sections)
- Graduate Teaching Practicum (Teaching Fellow, 2 sections)
- Intermediate Composition (4 sections)
- Special Topics in Technoculture and Digital Media (Teaching Assistant, online sections)
- Writing Across the Curriculum (Teaching Assistant, 2 courses)
University and Professional Service
- 2016-17
Education and Intellectual Development Thematic Coordinator, University of Southern California
- 2016
Rater, Advanced Placement Seminar, Educational Testing Service
- 2016
Moderator, Undergraduate Writers' Conference, University of Southern California
- 2015-17
Reading Group Organizer, Writing Program Technology Committee, University of Southern California
- 2015-16
Member, Writing Program Outreach Committee, University of Southern California
- 2014
Organizer, Local and Small Press Table at the American Studies Association
- 2013-2014
Coordinator, Mellon-funded Critical Digital Humanities Research Group, UC Riverside
- 2012-2013
Assistant Director of Entry Level Writing and Writing Across the Curriculum, UC Riverside
- 2012
Reviewer, The Best of Independent Journals in Rhetoric and Composition 2012 (Parlor Press)
- 2011-2013
Leadership Committee Member, (dis)junctions Conference, UC Riverside
Professional Affiliations
- Modern Language Association
- National Council of Teachers of English
Languages
- Spanish (advanced reading, speaking proficiency)
- French (reading proficiency only)
Correspondence Fictions: Reparative Social Media and Literary Value
Brief Abstract
My dissertation explores how literary aesthetics and social media composition combine to offer new models of what meaningful communication might look like within the economic and media networks of neoliberal globalization from the 1960s to the present. Through an analysis of postmodern fiction, electronic literature, digital art, locative media, and everyday social media practices, "Correspondence Fictions" points to the abiding value of literature as a site of disruption and imagination within contemporary culture.
Detailed Abstract
The dissertation traces innovative American print and digital literary forms that imaginatively challenge hyperindustrial capitalism from the 1960s to the present. Through readings of postmodern novels, early hypertext fiction, web-based art, locative media, and commercial social networking sites, my project explores the intersections between so-called social media and literary forms. All of the texts included in my project combine literary aesthetics and social media composition in experimental ways to offer distinct perspectives on what meaningful communication networks might look like in contemporary culture. The archive of literary social media forms that I have assembled promises to redefine social media beyond the business-oriented paradigm of Web 2.0 in order to offer alternative, critical and historically situated models for transnational networked sociality.
Building upon Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's concept of "reparative reading," I refer to these models as "reparative social media." The reparative social media discussed in my dissertation provides a means for individuals to experience surprise, hope, and critical resonance without being naïve to the harsh economic and political realities of hyperindustrial neoliberal globalization. Using reparative reading as a framework, my project also seeks to revalue the agency experienced through the act of reading in a time when scholars in the digital humanities and digital media studies often prioritize the ostensibly more active role of composing.
Moving from the 1960s to the present, each of the five dissertation chapters explores a different model of literary social media. The first and second chapters, which focus on William Gaddis' J R (1975) and Carolyn Guyer's Quibbling (1993) respectively, explore experimental literary texts that seek to reinvent the epistolary novel in order to imagine meaningful modes of sociality within and outside of corporate communication networks. The third and fourth chapters consider how collaborative web-based literature like "Minneapolis and St. Paul are East African Cities" (2003) and locative fiction like The Silent History (2013) problematize global economic inequality and transnational mobility while at the same time providing a model for ethical communication between individuals across geographic distances. Finally, turning away from literary experiments to everyday life, chapter five explores how literary satire circulates in commercial social media networks, a phenomenon perhaps best exemplified by satirical product reviews posted on popular commercial websites like Amazon.
By demonstrating that literature and digital sociality have been inextricably intertwined over the last fifty years, my project points to the ongoing importance of literature in our culture; at the same time, the dissertation explores new literary models that potentially offer readers multimodal and radically inclusive literacies that resonate with concerns around self-representation, mobility, embodiment, and globalization as articulated by postcolonial and feminist critics. My dissertation then provides a more historically-grounded, experimental, and even risky vision of what social media might become by opening up new possibilities for how literary values might continue to be a site of disruption and imagination within oppressive economic, political and cultural networks, even if these literary disruptions come in other forms besides the print book.
Chapter Descriptions
Chapter 1
Chapter 1, "Distance Education, Big Data, and the Fiction of Failed Correspondence," explores communications networks in William Gaddis' postmodern novel J R (1975). This chapter argues that J R uses information overload to interrogate the ethics and possibilities of distance education, as the novel questions what education may mean in corporatized information cultures. Drawing on close readings from J R, archival documents from the 1960s on the educational effects of television, early experiments in networked art, and scholarship on the history of distance education, the chapter demonstrates how educational and economic networks intersect, generate shared knowledge, and challenge one another in J R.
Chapter 2
Moving from the "big data" of a massive postmodern novel to the "small data" of short-form fiction, Chapter 2, "Feminist Literacies and Hypertext Intimacies" explores fictions of correspondence in Carolyn Guyer's Quibbling (1993), Christine Love's Digital: A Love Story (2010), and Emily Short and Liza Daly's First Draft of the Revolution (2012). Drawing from recent scholarship in new media studies and game studies, I contend that these feminist narratives provide a model of literacy that priorities sociality and participation over technologies of interactivity. In doing so, both hypertexts challenge what interactivity may mean by showing that reading—more than, but not necessarily opposed to, composing—becomes the key feminist act with the greatest potential to produce moments of intimacy, surprise and affinity between individuals.
Chapter 3
With an emphasis on multimedia digital narratives, Chapter 3, "Cosmopolitanism and Collaboration in Contemporary Immigrant Narratives" traces how historically marginalized communities use social media composition to self-reflexively represent themselves in literature and art. This chapter explores the digital art experiment "Minneapolis and St. Paul Are East African Cities," the ongoing collaboratively authored hypermedia Flight Paths (2007-), and Dave Eggers' fictional memoir What is the What (2006) in order to consider how the above-mentioned, largely non-fictional literary experiments reimagine transnational mobility and social belonging across time, space, and social or subjective difference.
Chapter 4
Questions of place and mobility appearing in the previous chapter continue into Chapter 4, "Movement and Constraint in Locative Social Fiction," which focuses on locative fiction that uses mobile computing technologies to link literary narratives to specific geographic sites. Through a close analysis of The Silent History (2013-), this chapter demonstrates that what I call locative social fiction may have the potential to depict, if at times only in part, what Donna Haraway has referred to as "historically situated knowledges." Through an examination of literary and non-literary precursors to locative fiction, this chapter engages with Bruno Latour's notion of the social in order to reveal how place becomes a new kind of correspondent within locative social fiction.
Chapter 5
Finally, Chapter 5, "Becoming Literary: Re-writing Everyday Social Media as Correspondence Fiction," examines how ordinary media users strategically deploy the literary in their everyday lives online. This chapter explores the practice of writing, reading and sharing satirical reviews of products on commercial websites like Amazon as an example of how literary narratives are used to disrupt, challenge and perhaps even transform digital capitalism. Through a broader analysis of literary narratives appearing on Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon, I argue that literary values can offer us not only disruption and critique but also reprieve and a glimpse of collective hope in a media ecology dominated by corporate interests.
Conclusion
By way of conclusion, I aim to show that although many have argued that social media has been fully incorporated into the global capitalist regime of advertising, data-mining and surveillance, the range of works I have analyzed in this dissertation, offer competing visions of how everyday social media practices, drawing on literary values informed by feminist, queer, or postcolonial analysis, might create meaningful sociality in unexpected ways.
"Correspondence Fictions: Critical Literacies and Experiments in Writing Media After Computation" Dissertation, June 2015
This research explores innovative print and digital literary works from the 1960s to the present. Through an analysis of postmodern fiction, electronic literature, digital art, locative media, and everyday social media practices, "Correspondence Fictions" identifies the key components of critical literacy, and, the project ultimately argues that critical literacy is non-instrumental, process-oriented, collaborative, and geospatial. This dissertation project theorizes literacy while also offering ideas for how theory can inform classroom practice.
"Reparative Social Media: Resonance and Critical Cosmopolitanism in Digital Art" Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, Forthcoming.
Through her notion of "reparative reading," Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has shown that meaningful, politically engaged reading strategies must do more than simply expose the workings of power. Research on hacktivism and political net art, like Rita Raley's Tactical Media (2009), has focused on projects that Sedgwick might deem "paranoid" as they primarily seek to reveal global political and economic injustice. This article explores how politically oriented new media art, especially "Minneapolis and St. Paul are East African Cities" (2003), which is based on the social media contributions of nineteen Minnesota-based East African teenagers, can use a reparative framework to address problems of transnational mobility and local belonging. Through the self-reflexive and critical display of social media composition and through the complex interactivity of the interface, "Minneapolis and St. Paul" has the potential to surprise, move and resonate with readers. In this way, social media composition combined with digital art practice can become a site for reimagining our relations to one another and for producing critical cosmopolitan affinities.
"Hybrid Bodies and New Media Narratives: Critical Media Literacy in the Literature Classroom" Co-authored with Kimberly Hall, for the edited collection Digital Technology and the Literature Classroom, Bedford/St. Martin's. Forthcoming Fall 2014.
The chapter describes a successful multimedia composition assignment I developed with a colleague for a lower division survey course on literature and media. The chapter offers a theoretical discussion of the work of N. Katherine Hayles and Donna Haraway that underpins the assignment, along with an explanation of how the assignment can be adapted and implemented in a range of literature courses.
Write It .5: A Process Approach to College Essays with Readings, Instructor's Manual. Co-authored with Benedict Jones and Kimberly Turner. Dubuque: Kendall Hunt Publishing Company, 2013.
This instructor's manual offers activities, lesson plans, advice and answer keys for instructors using Write It .5, a textbook geared at English Language Learners in the college composition classroom. I wrote Part II: Writing Basics; Assignment #3: Amy Tan's "Mother Tongue"; and Assignment #4: Jared Diamond's "Accepting or Rejecting Innovation."
Teaching Experience
My classroom practice and my teaching philosophy stem from my research on digital literacy and experimental narrative forms. I have taught a range of Writing, English, and Cultural Studies courses at USC and UC Riverside.
Pedagogy Beyond the Classroom
I am currently serving as a Thematic Coordinator in the Writing Program at USC, and I previously held the position of Assistant Director in the University Writing Program at UC Riverside. Both of these administrative roles involve mentoring graduate students and developing new writing program curriculum.
I will present a paper on "Collaboration and Digital Writing Assignments" at the National Council for Teachers of English in November 2016. I also co-authored a chapter in Bedford St. Martin's Technology in the Literature Classroom (2014) and co-wrote the teacher's manual for Kendall Hunt's developmental writing textbook Write It .5 (2013).
The Digital Humanities, with its emphasis on multimodal writing and collaboration, is an important influence on my ongoing scholarly and teaching interests. At USC, I currently serve on the Writing Program Technology Committee. At UC Riverside, I was coordinator of the Mellon-funded Critical Digital Humanities working group.
Projects:
Collaborative iBooks
Students in my Technology and Social Change course in spring 2016 successfully authored multimodal iBooks in small groups based around shared interests. Students revised previously written essays and made use of images, audio, and video to enhance their existing arguments. This assignment, which was supported by a USC Libraries' Information Literacy Course Enhancement Grant, allowed students to work closely with peers, develop multimodal literacies, and think critically about technologies of writing.
The Last Cartographer
What is digital fiction and what does it mean to create it? The Last Cartographer" is a work of digital fiction in progress that I helped to create along with a dozen others at the Pathways: Creating Digital Fiction with Kate Pullinger Workshop at Simon Fraser University in 2014. The work is still in progress, but here is a link to a working prototype.
TEI and William Gaddis
Is there any use for text encoding aside from creating large-scale digital projects? This question drove a small group of us at the NEH sponsored "Teaching with TEI" workshop at Brown University in 2013 to ask ourselves how the process of text-encoding might be useful for students developing close reading skills through the study of challenging, long form narrative. We designed an assignment where students use the TEI against the grain to perform a reading of a literary text from a critical framework of their choosing. At the same time, the assignment gives students an opportunity to think like critical code studies scholars as they reflect critically on the rhetoric of xml. I envision using this assignment in an upper division English literature class in conjunction with reading William Gaddis' J R.