19th Century Clues Explored with 21st Century Writing Tools Richmond Writing

19th Century Clues Explored with 21st Century Writing Tools Richmond Writing Here, avatar Beeble Baxter muses upon the image of Immanuel Swedenborg in Richmonds virtual House of Usher. During our pedagogical collaborations in virtual reality, there have been surprising parallels with traditional composition, but finding these parallels is not difficult. More challenging is the invention of an engaging and useful composition in virtual reality for use in our courses to help us to create that balance of challenge and learning that Lev Vygotsky called the zone of proximal development, or ZPD. Poes horror story The Fall of the House of Usher has always fascinated me in terms of its psychological prescience and its manifold intriguing but arcane details. Like many Poe characters, Roderick Usher is melancholic and has surrendered to the grim phantasm, FEAR that seems to   paralyze him. Sometimes a cursory reading of Poe moves us to dismiss his tales as merely formulaic, but his details are often doors to the dank dungeons of the human psyche. The narrator of this tale, responding to Rodericks desperate letter, attempts to distract his friends obsessive and fevered mind as they pored together over the titles in Ushers library. In so doing, the narrator gains some understanding of Ushers disintegrating psyche, but we do not. However, it only takes a look behind the mention of Immanuel Swedenborgs Heaven and Hell (1758) to get a more detailed insight into Rodericks madness. The full title of the text the narrator finds in Ushers Library is Heaven and its Wonders and Hell from things Heard and Seen.   Swedenborg begins with an exegesis of Matthew 24:2931 in which he makes the following claim after dismissing the literal reading of the passage:  However, people who believe such things are not aware of the hidden depths that lie within the details of the Word. There is in fact spiritual meaning in these details, for they intend not only the outward and earthly events that we find on the literal level but spiritual and heavenly events as well. This holds true not just for the meaning of phrases but even for each word. This passage almost seems to apply to Poes tale as well, and so in traditional text we have mirrors of meaning. Rodericks belief in the consciousness or sentience (1st coined in this story) of his house and the influence of the masonry, most specifically the collocation of the stonesor their particular arrangement, seems to suggest a tendency to find hidden meanings not unlike Swedenborg. The House of Usher certainly exhibits the layered meanings that Swedenborg sees in the Scriptures. In his mystified mental misery, it may be that Roderick overlooked or dismissed Swedenborgs insight in entry 311 where he reminds us that heaven and hell come from the human race a concept that might have encouraged Usher to clean up his own haunted palace to end the personal hell he had endured for so long. It is such detail that suggests virtual reality as a potentially powerful tool for motivating students to dig more deeply into the details of the text and reflect upon their narrative function. Why does Poe bother to list these specific titles? The image of Swedenborg on one of the walls of the Usher library can be scripted to provide clues for student research prompting them to ask: how can Swedenborgs Heaven and Hell can help us understand the intricacies of Rodericks madness?  And this is but one of the books named by the narrator of Poes story, each of which provides its own web of connections and opportunities for research. In Fall of the House of Usher the line of exploration can run from Poe to Swedenborg to William Blake whose astonishing hybrids of poetry and image composed via etching and engraving, continue to provide fertile intellectual and aesthetic delight even in the digital age. The William Blake Archive is one of the first collaborative hypermedia texts to receive academic acclaim and its design provides unprecedented access to the vast collection of Blakes genius scattered across the globe. Here students can follow the thread from Swedenborg to Blakes The Marriage of Heaven and Hell which includes images and text critical of Swedenborgs views. When the 19th Century meets the 21st Century in the dark digital hallways of our virtual House of Usher, the possibilities begin to unfold for the bold who playfully pioneer.