Welcome to my blog! My name is Brian Eberle, and I’m a 2^nd year PhD student in the English department. In spite of being a member of what somebody once termed the “look at me” generation, talking about myself has always felt like an onerous task—especially online. However, the opportunity to improve the way that I communicate through writing in online settings like blog and discussion posts is one of the reasons that I’m excited about taking this class. So, here goes!

I’m originally from California where I got my BA from Chapman University and my MA from California State University, Long Beach. I moved to New York in 2017 and started at Stony Brook in the Fall of 2019. Before my move, I taught English classes at community colleges in Southern California, which brings me to another reason that I’m excited to take WRT 614: I’m hoping to get a better understanding of how digital spaces shape students’ writing habits. Although the courses I taught relied on certain digital tools like email, Blackboard-type sites, and the occasional use of YouTube, I was reluctant to stray too far from many of the models of writing instruction that I’d seen my teachers using. So, for the sake of my future students, I’m looking forward to gaining more familiarity with multimodal rhetoric here.

Additionally, I’m interested in digital literacy from a research perspective. I study British modernism and am particularly interested in how changing conceptions of urban space impacted the narrative styles we see in modernist novels. Although this period is typically thought of as having taken place between 1890 and 1945 in Europe and the US, scholars are reevaluating locating the movement in such a narrow time-frame and space. Instead some, like Susan Stanford Friedman, see modernism as the aesthetic reaction to modernity more generally: different modernisms occur during different periods in different places. Because of this argument, I’ve begun to give more credence to the idea that we’ve applied “post” in postmodern a bit prematurely and that many writers and artists are still engaging with the world in ways that might appropriately be described as modernist. Additionally, I would argue that both the excitement and anxiety over contemporary technical advances, as Werner Herzog depicts in Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World, parallel the reactions of many modernist writers to the shifts that took place during their own lives. While Herzog doesn’t touch on many artistic or literary responses to our (over)reliance on the internet, I think that it’s worth considering how we might think of those responses in terms of modernism and modernity. To better understand this, I’m hoping to increase my own digital literacy.

Thanks for reading! I’m excited to interact with all of you in the coming weeks!