Speaking about the impact of multiculturalism in literary studies on classroom practice, John Alberti has commented, "Clearly, the movement to change the direction and focus of study in American literature has radical practical and, therefore, theoretical implications for pedagogy, as will be evident to any teacher replacing a traditional anthology of American literature representing fifty or so authors (predominantly male, northern European, Protestant and middle- to upper-class) with the overone hundred thirty voices found in the Heath Anthology [of American Literature]--voices originating in Zuni, Spanish, Chinese and English, in the experiences of both colonized and colonizer, immigrant and Native America, rich and poor."

In the shift from a traditional to an expansive anthology there is a qualitative, not merely quantitative, change. As Kevin Kelly puts it over and over again in his influential book on society in the network age: "More is different." In a literary anthology, the difference is more than a growth from 50 to 130 authors; it is more, even, than the cultural politics of that expansion. The difference is a exponential multiplier of possibilities now that a whole new order of possible relationships, of valid textualities, and of visible cultures are at the center of knowledge reproduction in a particular field. The print versions of a literary anthology gives a material reality to the politics of knowledge production; that is, the politics of canonicity that inform the literary anthology are inseparable from the book as a material object. That fact bears seriously on the future of electronic texts and online cultural resources. The knowledge embodied within a literary anthology has everything to do with capabilities of that medium to bear the pressure of expansion within the strength of its binding, size of its font, and the thickness of pages, as well as the protocols of the genre and standards of curricula. The relationship between an anthology and its level of canonical (or noncanonical) representation perfectly exemplifies, as Peter Lyman puts it, the "phenomenological link between the technical format of a text, the rhetorical rules within which it is constructed, and its content." The point here is simple: in print, an expansive anthology can only expand as far as its physical constraints. And the Heath is crying to burst its boundaries.

So, it is with this in mind I want to explore some of the ways that electronic resources can supplement and integrate with the Heath. It is not merely that new electronic tools are useful to support the Heath Anthology, but to support the Heath's project. That is, there is a real, fundamental and logical connection between the tools of electronic textuality and knowledge on the one hand, and new forms of pedagogy, course organizations, and strategies of reading implied by the Heath Anthology, on the other. Let me briefly suggest some of these connections here.

One of the great advantages to having electronic texts available isn't simply to access them, read them online, or download them and print them. Having literary and rhetorical texts in electronic form is beneficial because it allows you to do something with them: to search them, manipulate them, annotate them, to make them into hypertexts, to write productive connections between them, to make visible (through electronic linkages) connections between them. In short, new technologies can be used to enable students to develop a more direct relationship to materials. In his online essay, "Rationale of Hypertext," Jerome McGann talks about how the ways that we study cultural texts is changing because the "scale of our tools" is changing. I think this is an important point for the use of electronic tools with novice learners as well. One of the most striking things that I've found in asking students to use electronic tools to engage with cultural and historical materials, is how these tools change the scale of the student's relationship to those materials. As faculty who have degrees in the humanities, we tend to forget (or perhaps we never knew) what it meant to feel powerless in front of a text. Electronic tools of various kinds (and student work with texts in electronic environments) help shift the balance of power between students and texts. And that would seem to be the fundamental idea behind the Heath itself.

For example, when students are working with a hypertext cd-rom on American cultural history, or an electronic (word-searchable) version of a literary text, they are able to manipulate the material according to their interest or to ask questions of it and quick results. One of my earliest experiences with this was working with an electronic text version of Frederick Douglass' Narrative. With the word searching program we were using, students could interrogate the text for rhetorical patterns, looking for example of all instances of the word "slave" and "human" in the same paragraph. (It turns out that Douglass almost never uses the word human except in the same paragraph as a form of the word "slave"--but often to different semantic effect. ) Now, as a matter of course, I have students doing various kinds of word searches with electronic versions of texts, often working in pairs to identify common language in two texts assigned for a particular class day. Once having found a common term or phrase, students must then write a short paragraph about how the word(s) function in the respective texts. The role of the electronic search tools in this process is key in my opinion. Students working with the electronic version of a primary text are able to exercise a form of control over that text that expert learners develop over many readings. My experience (and the experience of other faculty using similar tools) is not that such tools are the "easy way out," but the reverse: that such exercises tend to bring students back to their printed texts with a heightened sense of language, and a greater interest in interrogating the text for patterns.

Doing work with electronic texts is merely one among many ways for students in introductory classes to make use of new technologies. Similarly students who are using an online archive of primary materials on the World Wide Web are able to work their way through the kind of scholarly resource which only experts in the field would previously have had access. The scale of these new tools allows novice learners to get closer to seeing key texts as ideas situated in a complexity, and to use those tools as prosthetics for searching and sorting through possibilities and contengcies, en route to performing authentic analysis and synthesis. This is the phenomenon that I call the 'novice in the archive.' If one of the implications of a new American literature is a shift from "themes" to "reading practices," then student engagement with primary cultural materials in a rich electronic environment can be one path to the development of such practices. The unique opportunity with electronic, simulated archives is to create open but guided experiences for students that would be difficult or impractical to replicate in most library environments. It is, as always, not merely the access to materials that matters, but structured activities where students do sort through "possibilities and contingencies" that speak to new pedagogical practices.

I'm not speaking of strictly literary texts, but other kinds of historical texts, such as the online archival collections at the Library of Congress' National Digital Library. Let's consider a resource like the 25,000 images of the Detroit Publishing Company's collection of views of American life from 1890-1925. How might these enhance the study of a work like Stephen Crane's Maggie, or Anzia Yezierska's The Bread Givers, by offering a visual guide to urbanization and immigration around the turn of the century? Or, might a reading of early modern voices, especially the regional writers, be read in the context of the WPA life histories; or Depression writers like Meridel LeSeuer or John Steinbeck be read in the context of an online archive of the Farm Security Administration photographs. As with the potential of electronic literary texts, the accessibility of online archives provides opportunities for students to "make knowledge" from them, connecting contextual materials to literary texts, whether through small assignments where they are asked to match passages form a literary work with photographs from the same period, or more substantive research projects where they can use primary materials that they locate on their own to build a context for the texts on which they are focusing in class.

The use of electronic materials also suggests the ways that multiple media can work together. Many American literature instructors bring slides, cassettes, videos, into class. These materials have always enhanced the study of literary texts. Electronic environments, however, offer even greater opportunities to present mulitple media: they can often present mixed media in effective "combinations" (i.e. as interactive multimedia), and they can offer students the opportunity to work with multimedia and "make" their own projects out of them. How, for example, might it enhance the study of the jazz age and texts from the 1920's to have students work with some of the growing number of excellent History of Jazz web sites and cd-roms (see, for example, Dan Morgenstern's History of Jazz)? Or to have students work with the multimedia published edition of the Survey Graphic Harlem Number journal as well as the photographs of American life from the 1920's? Or all of the above? How might an understanding of fiction and poetry in the nineteenth century be enhanced by working with an electronic version of the collections of the National Museum of American Art? Or sorting through a range of 16th-century woodcuts and maps of the new world in tandem with the literature of discovery and exploration? Interactive multimedia not only promotes the richness of the printed texts in the Heath, but affords an environment for student constructive projects, emphasizing the process of knowledge creation (rather than the mastery of a single tradition). Obviously each course context is very different in its capacity to work with mulitmedia and electronic archival materials. The point is merely that the widening cultural approach to American literature is naturally moving toward the broader more constructive pedagogies that electronic environments enable.

Finally, if the ultimate goal of an introductory American literature course is teach students to build their own connections across diverse texts, electronic environments are very suggestive as spaces in which to represent that knowledge. Whether through standalone hypertext applications or on the Web, increasing numbers of teachers and students are experimenting with writing in nonlinear, hypertext environments. Hypertext papers and projects (whether as electronically linked traditional papers' or as virtual exhibitions of one kind or another) can help make vivid the web of connections among texts and their contexts. As with the activities above, constructive hypertext projects are further ways of engaging students in the problems and practices of the multiple literary cultures that make up American literature studies.

All of the activities implied above and many others can serve to distribute the responsibility for making knowledge in the classroom. When students work (individually or in pairs) with electronic texts, or online archives, or multimedia materials, they have the opportunity to bring their own unique information and perspective to class. Work in these media, especially in combination with the use of other "dialogic technologies," such as electronic discussion lists, email, and web conferencing programs, further enriches the ability of students to continuously engage in making connections and meaning. The open and shared nature of electronic media helps students learn to be accoutable for their ideas and puts the construction of knowledge into a public sphere. This also seems to be in the spirit of an expanded American literature and the new pedagogies implied by it.