Recently my freshman composition cla** at Augustana worked on annotating Horatio Alger's novel, Ragged Dick. Alger is best known for his rags-to-riches stories where a young white teen begins with nothing but an honest face, a healthy dose of pluck, firm morals, and a positive outlook and ends up with moderate success in life, usually due to being in the right place at the right time and capitalizing on a break given to him by an older, successful benefactor. Ragged Dick was Alger's fourth novel and kickstarted his career as a writer. Even though he tended to stick to the same boilerplate plot, his novels are usually very readable and entertaining.
We worked on Ragged Dick because it (and Alger in general) made an indelible mark on the formation of what we have been calling “the American dream” for the past 80 or so years. Some students agreed with Alger's narrative that anyone can achieve success via honesty and hard work, and some students noted that race, gender, and cla** play enormous roles in the odds one faces in achieving the American dream. These students remarked on the peculiar absence of women or anyone of color in the novel.
Either way, Alger's accessible literary devices and his many references to specific locations in Manhattan in the 1860s made this novel especially fun to annotate. And the platform of Rap Genius is particularly helpful in turning a book like this—set in a time and place unknown and unimaginable to most students—into an extra-dimensional text. I didn't force my students to buy a print copy of this novel because many of them do the bulk of their reading on iPads, Nooks, etc. And I know several students read it entirely on Rap Genius. So even though I a**igned my students to annotate this text on RG because it compels them to engage with the text in new and interesting ways and to have their work seen by potentially thousands of people, I'm psyched to see that after a few semesters of these annotations, students (or anyone, for that matter) reading the book on RG will have an entirely different experience thanks to the work of those who came before them. They won't skim over the many references to Lower East Side landmarks, but see pictures of the Old Bowery or read explanations of slang from the 1860s—“Bully!” And then of course they'll dig into certain parts of the text they are curious about and leave their own marks for future students. Decades from now we'll have not only the original text by Horatio Alger, but layered on top of it a palimpsest of reader engagement and interpretation—or, as Gadamer might have called it, a hermeneutics of understanding. And that, as Wanz sings, is f**ing awesome.
Our next project, a few weeks down the road, is to tackle The Great Gatsby—in many ways a cynical response to Alger's archetypal portrayal of the American dream. So if you get the chance, let us know what you think of our annotations before we take on Fitzgerald's masterpiece.