Gideon Burton's Blog

The Book of Jer3miah: New Media Mormonism

This week the first season of The Book of Jer3miah concluded, a 20-webisode Internet drama that can only be described as a spiritual thriller based on Mormon themes. Praised as "a tight, suspenseful little series" in a Salon.com blog post, it has garnered a respectable fan base reaching well beyond LDS or Utah audiences. In addition to lighting the blogosphere with animated arguments (as much from within as outside Mormonism), the series has caught the attention of mainstream media, including the New York Times.

Mitt Romney, Stephanie Meyer, and "Fantastical" Mormonism

A recent post on GetReligion.org about Mitt Romney and Stephanie Meyer prompted these thoughts:

The attraction of the Latter-day Saint imagination both to the Young Adult fiction genre and to speculative fiction has been a focus of the academic study of Mormon literary culture well before Twilight. For a summary of Mormon Young Adult fiction (successful both in the niche LDS market and nationally), see my blog post (http://bit.ly/seDRj). In teaching the Literature of the Latter-day Saints at Brigham Young University, I account for this affinity to adolescent literature by relating the Mormon concept of eternal progression to the bildungsroman literary tradition (the coming of age novel). Joseph Smith himself authored a spiritual autobiography that can be considered in this tradition.

A Brave and Reverent Mormon Play: Little Happy Secrets

Perhaps the least accurate way to describe Melissa Leilani Larson's new Mormon play, Little Happy Secrets, would be in terms of the primary issue with which it deals, same-sex attraction. Unfortunately, homosexuality has become its own red herring, distracting many an important conversation or the success of a work of art because it has become so politically and religiously charged. Homosexuality is an ISSUE, something requiring people to take stands and poise themselves to be offended or to offend.

Finding the right artistic or rhetorical approach is everything in these matters. How can one assure one's audience that they are not going to be subjected to propaganda or preaching, whether from the left or the right? You do what Larson and the director and cast of this play did--you focus on the core human issues. You make homosexuality not an ISSUE (with all its inevitable dangers) but a subject--a reason for authentic art, not a pretext for divisive politics.

Creativity and New Media Mormonism

I presented a speech, "Creativity and New Media Mormonism" at the annual meeting of the Association for Mormon Letters on February 28, 2009 at Utah Valley University. Below find links both to the PDF version of the written speech and to a recording of it. In the audio version I excerpt a symphony composed by my father, Rulon T. Burton. The complete symphony is included as the last 9 minutes of the 30 minute recording. If you like the music, send a compliment to the composer (rulonburton AT gmail.com) or to the sound engineer, Perry (introspectiveafrika AT gmail.com).

Download Burton-AML2009 (PDF)

Download Creativity and New Media Mormonism (audio, 40mb)

Mormon Blogs - Sampling an Emerging Literary Genre

An emerging (and exciting) mode of Mormon literary expression is blog writing. I'm sure this is true of many other cultures, and I'm also sure that the digital divide has restricted many Latter-day Saints from engaging in this new mode of personal expression, but a definite flowering has taken place. Mormon lives are opening up as never before, revealing breadths and depths.

Mormon Young Adult Fiction before Twilight

The recent and enormous attention given to Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series has sparked interest in Mormon authors and those writing for the Young Adult Fiction market. Meyers is not the first Latter-day Saint author to make a splash in this national market--even if none have achieved her celebrity.

The Coming Change in Humanities Publishing (7): The Online Archive

So far in this series I have described two types of publishing we are going to see more of as the humanities (with the rest of academia) retool for the digital age: electronic publication of conventional scholarship, and Open Access publication. In this post, I discuss a third type of electronic publishing: the online archive. But wait a minute, you might say, archiving and publishing are very different things. Scholars publish; librarians archive. Right? Well, the lines have blurred, as has the very definition of what constitutes publishing today. But before discussing the changing nature of publishing, let me quickly define the online archive and sketch how it works.

The Coming Change in Humanities Publishing (6): Open Access

Open Access is the major movement in scholarly publishing today. The humanities are behind other disciplines in understanding and adopting Open Access, but as the sciences are already discovering, Open Access is reinventing the field of academic publishing generally and will ultimately eclipse traditional publishing.

Visit my break-out blog: Academic Evolution

Please visit Academic Evolution, a blog I've broken out from this one. Discussion at Academic Evolution is focused on changes in higher education and issues regarding access, pedagogy, and publishing in the age of new media.

The Coming Change in Humanities Publishing (5): Electronic Conventional Scholarship

In the next four posts I will characterize four general types of electronic publishing, moving from that sort which is most like traditional print scholarship to that which is least so.

The first, "Electronic Conventional Scholarship," can be considered the closest to traditional publishing. It includes online versions of established print journals (such as Modern Philology) or, increasingly, journals with no print history or counterpart (such as Textual Studies in Canada). Also within this category are the many digitized issues of back issues available through collections such as JSTOR.