Technoculture

Technoculture is a very different genre for me. I thought that it would be somewhat easy to understand since we are in the era of technology, but I was wrong. While watching the Matrix, I found myself bouncing back and forth from reality to what the movie was trying to present. It was hard to wrap my mind around the concepts and ideas that was shown in the movie, but it did get me thinking. Is that really what we are? Just batteries charging the world? I hope not, but it does make you think about your life and what you have done so far. I believe that once I continue on reading Neuromancer, technoculture may be easier to understand.

Kindred

This is my favorite book that we have read so far. I love the fact that it makes you feel that you also went back in time with Dana. Just when you think you have the book figured out something comes up and changes the whole thing. While reading this book I was trying to relate it to a movie that has this same concept of time travel. I realized that the movie Butterfly Effect is a perfect match. They both deal with going back in time, but the one main difference is that in the movie he changes history. Both of these texts are very interesting to wrap your mind around, but in a very exciting way.

Brokeback Mountain

After watching the movie and then reading the short story, I noticed some differences. In the short story Jack and Ennis are 19 years old. To me that gives the story a whole new twist. In the movie, the two men are older which I think gives off a different perception. Men at that age should have their life under control. They should know where their path is leading too. The short story also gave a more detailed description of what the men looked like. From the movie you saw two handsome men trying to make a living. In the short story the men were poor, filthy and ugly. This perception gave us, as readers, the idea that Jack and Ennis really had nothing in their lives. The movie atleast gave us the idea that they had something, not much, but something. Between the two texts I enjoyed the short story because it was more detailed then the movie. Over all I enjoyed reading and discussing both forms of the text.

Blog Paper

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I enrolled in this class. I had the basic idea that it was a literature class and that I would be reading and writing, but what I didn’t realize that it would be a lot of fun. What makes this class so interesting, to me, is the fact that everything we are talking about is pretty recent. It makes is easier to want to follow the stories. The other aspect that I really enjoy is the blogs. I have never done a blog before let alone for a class so it’s a nice change. So far the class is very easy to follow. The texts that we have been looking at are very interesting and make me want to find out the hidden meaning between the lines.

The one thing that I have noticed about myself since I have started this class is how I look at text. Before I would watch the movie and that was it. Now when I watch the movie I look for other aspects within the movie. I think of why the director shot a character at this particular angle or are they trying to trouble gender? For me words are no longer just words, they have a double standard. The way we interpret the words may differ from person to person and understanding other’s views is very interesting. It’s fun to play around with possibilities of why certain texts were portrayed in the way they were. At the beginning of class I was at the text-self stage of reading. In my first blog I really emphasized on my opinions and what I thought and how I interpreted the text. In the story, ‘Lost in the Fun House,” I said, “I can't help but wonder if the idea of a fun house really is the relationship between himself and Magda.” Here I used “I” to explain what the text meant. I didn’t look at it from any other view. It’s hard to get away from the “I” stage. We are constantly asked for our opinions so it’s just natural to say “I”.

Even though it’s only been a few short weeks since class started, my stage of reading has changed. I went from a text-self stage to text-other texts stage. I slightly leave the “I” phase and move towards a collaboration of other texts to explain the text at hand. For example, when we were reading “City of Glass” I often thought about the movie The Secret Window, with Johnny Depp. These two texts shared a lot of commonalities that were easy to compare the two. “They both deal with writers that bring their characters to life. In the "City of Glass" Quinn brings to life four of his characters from his books…” For me relating the book back to a movie made it easy to understand metafiction better. A story within a story can be very fun to analysis, but it can also be very confusing if you don’t understand the concept. I’m not to the point of text-world, but I have made a big improvement since I started this class. I will forever look at text in a different light then what I have in the past.

In order for me to move to the next stage, text-world, I would have to fully understand politics, economics and scientific issues. I have the basic knowledge, but not to the point that I could argue or explain how text reflects all those things. I will say that recently in class we did touch up on how the movie Brokeback Mountain reflects how the poor live. The book does a better job at this then the movie. The opening page paints a picture of the background of Ennis and where he comes from. You know off the bat that he doesn’t have any money because of the description of his cloths, home and physical appearance. You get a sense from a few words that he has nothing in his life. He is working job to job to make a living. In away you feel sorry for him because he doesn’t have anything. This is the image that society has given us about all people who are poor. The way they dress, act or the jobs they posses. So in that regards I had a glimpse of the text-world, but I don’t know if I could really get to that stage. In order for me to reach the next stage I would have to read texts that deal with societal issues and relate the text back to it. I don’t know if I would like to get to that point. I feel that at this point you may not enjoy reading due to the fact that you are always looking for underlying message. At the same time it would be very neat to be able to relate the text to current issues in the world, but I have a long way to go before I reach that point.

Maus

The thing that I enjoyed most about this "comic" book was the fact that it was telling a piece of our history, but in a way that it made you forget you were reading. It was a story within a story. Yeah it was about the Holocoust, but it also was a story of a son that was trying to understand his family's past struggles. The imagry that was used had great symbolic meaning and the flow of the story was smooth and easy to follow. It's a great way to teach someone about the Holocoust because you still get the main pieces of information, but with a modern twist.