Introduction to the First Edition (1998, rev. 1999)
In 1978 a publisher asked Greil Marcus to round up about twenty rock critics for an anthology based on the “Desert Island Discs” radio program originated by the BBC. Marcus found his writers, they wrote their pieces, and the publisher paid them. Then controversy erupted because one of the pieces contained a politically incorrect image which Marcus refused to censor. Eventually the book found a more thoughtful publisher (Alfred A. Knopf) and appeared in 1979 as Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island. Seventeen years later Da Capo press released a paperback version with a new preface by Marcus.
In 1997 we (Gardner Campbell and Bill Kemp) used Stranded as the focus for an introductory writing course at Mary Washington College. Each of our students selected the CD s/he would take to a desert island and spent the semester developing an essay on hir choice. This site consists of those essays. Like the orginal book, these pieces constitute thoughtful personal responses to popular music. They aren’t a history, a survey, or even a top twenty listing for the past decade. Each writer chose a piece s/he values and set out to explain why s/he values it.
The rules for choosing were simple: one discography item, no “complete works” box sets. We did allow double CDs if they were released as a single title. And we insisted that the chosen title be “popular” rather than “classical.”
In 1999 we taught the course again, with twice as many students.
So here it is.
Introduction to the Second Edition (2007)
This year marks the tenth anniversary of our first excellent adventures with Stranded, freshman composition, and web publishing. It’s a banal observation indeed to note that much has changed since that time. In 2003, Gardner became Assistant Vice-President for Teaching and Learning Technologies, a post he held for three years. In 2004, Mary Washington College became the University of Mary Washington. In 2005, Bill retired from the faculty. For a variety of reasons, including Bill’s election as department chair, Bill and Gardner were not to teach this course together again after 1999. Gardner taught it twice more on his own, once in the fall of 1999 (”Stranded at the End of the Nineties”) and for a final time in the fall of 2002 (”Stranded 2002,” published here for the first time).
In the spring of 2007, while writing an essay for EDUCAUSE Review on his longstanding interest in computers, Gardner had the notion that it was time to move Stranded to a new home on the Web, at a new domain: www.stranded101.info. Once again he and Bill met to discuss the course, this time to collaborate on the shape it would take in its second edition.
The results are what you see here. The Web 2.0 world affords interesting opportunities that were not fully developed, and in many cases not available at all, when we began our work in 1997. One new feature will be immediately apparent: readers may now comment on essays, and we fervently hope they will. There’s also a wiki for reader contributions: www.stranded101.info/strandedfans.
We hope these essays and the course design prove useful to students and teachers in the years to come. We also hope we have conveyed something of the depth of our affection and admiration for these students. Not every student caught fire in these classes, but those who did burned with an unusual intensity. It was our privilege to be among them.
This web publication is dedicated, with gratitude, to the students represented in these volumes.
–Gardner Campbell and Bill Kemp, August 2007
Above: the logo from the original website, c. 1998.