11'24'08 House of Leaves day4

1
11.24.08 House of Leaves day4

• Schedule
• Attendance Questions?
• Calendar
• Immersion paper
• Inside the Hallway
• Large Group
• Discussion groups, revisited
• HW Keep Reading!

• Goals
• Identify and evaluate the role of the reader in
  the realization of a story.
• Relate role of the reader to the discussions
  raised by the text.

2
Interactivity Paper

• Due by Monday.
• 3lt X lt 4
• MLA formatting, citation, and bibliography.
• THERE WILL BE NO OPPORUNITY FOR REVISION.
• Really try to build off your experience with the
  last paper.
• Answer HOW questions.
• Use the TEXT to support your positions.
• Think about the kinds of statements you are
  making and what kinds of EVIDENCE you need.

3
Example Pages 426 460

• With a partner answer these questions
• WHAT is happening in this pages? Describe
  literally what is on the page.
• HOW does manipulating the page like this affect
  the task of reading?
• SO WHAT? Is it just a neat trick or is there some
  resonance with the themes of the book? Some
  larger issue?
• Large Group.

4
In the story, there seems to be many hidden
messages within the passages. From research done
on the book from wikipedia, it seemed that if you
go through the first letter of footnotes 27-42,
it would spell out the authors full name and
same for foot notes 46-57 which spells out his
surname.                         27 Mitchel
Nadine Goetz                      32 Declared
Martin Heideggers             28 A selection of
personal                     33 And heres the
English             29 Rita Mistopolis
                               34 Neatly
translated             30 Keillor Ross
                                   35 In Appendix
II                                                
                         36 Easily that whole
bit             31 Zampano.                       
                 37 Look at David
Contes                                           
                              38 Edith
Skourjas                                         
                                39 Walter Jospeh
Adeltine                                          
                               40 Something
like                                              
                           41 Know what, Latins
way out                                           
                              42 In an effort to
keep   Another code that seem to be hidden in the
passages of the story were the portions that were
written in alternating short and long paragraphs
which turn out to be Morse code that correspond
to the text. I believe this could be found on
page 97-106. More hidden codes could be found on
page 64-65 from the long list of random names
given. If you put the first letter of each of the
individual's last names together, it would spell
out the phrase "A LONG LIST".   Knowing that this
book have many hidden codes within its passages,
does it affect your interactive/immersion with
the reading or does it increase your curiosity
with the book making you more interested in
discovering where and what the codes are of?
5

• Many people will claim that House of Leaves is an
  interactive experience, often defensively citing
  the varying approaches readers take when reading
  the novel, for example. Does the ability to skip
  reading certain sections really conform to the
  idea of "interactivity" as you understand it?
  What would Ryan say?tldr -- is it really
  interactive to simply choose what parts of the
  book not to perceive?