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.