Reading is always a critical performance. And I would like to include in another more specialized course, perhaps on Lorca, assignments for students to go into the recording booth and create this kind of critical performance. In the short term, there are still a lot of logistical problems, but this is my long term goal for teaching literature. Students now see the movie in class. It would be useful to isolate a scene or two and put them on the Web as a place to discuss the relationship between writing and film as art forms.
People do sometimes run astray of the centrality of the written word.
The Spanish 223 site includes over 2500 images. Sheer number tells us you believe there is a strong iconic component to learning. I hesitate to put it in those terms. I will say that often literature is not contextualized enough at the level of deep contextualization that Ortega speaks of, at the level of the philosophical and ideological basis that art and literature share. In addition to geographic context, maps help to illustrate geopolitical and thematic concerns.