10'27'08 Hills like White Elephants

1
10.27.08 Hills like White Elephants

• Schedule
• Attendance Questions?
• Writing reflection
• Where we are in the course.
• Readers role.
• Discussion.
• HW Read Kafka.

• Goals
• Identify and evaluate the role of the reader in
  the realization of a story.

2
Writing Reflection.

• After finishing a major project, it is good to
  take a moment to reflect on what you have
  accomplished and to think about what comes next.
  Since we just finished our major paper, lets do
  that now.
• Answer the following questions in your notebook
• 1. What do you think of the paper you just turned
  in?
• 2. What aspects of your paper do you consider a
  success?
• 3. What aspects of your paper didnt turn out as
  well as you would have liked?
• 4. How can you build on your strengths to improve
  your weaknesses? What can you do to move forward
  and meet your writing goals?

3
Where are we?

• We have been focusing on immersion and how it is
  produced by a variety of texts. Now we are going
  to move on to consider some other
  aspects/descriptions of the reading experience
  that may challenge a notion of immersion.

4
Ryan recap.

• In the space-travel mode, represented by fiction
  and now by virtual reality technology,
  consciousness relocates itself to another world,
  and recenters the universe around this virtual
  reality.
• Requires you suspend disbelief to accept virtual
  world as real.
• Key to this is transparency, because you have to
  ignore the reality you know is true
• possible-world and make-believe theories of
  fiction presupposes a relative transparency of
  the medium. The reader or spectator looks through
  the work toward the reference world

5
As a result

• Ryans theory suggests that the readers
  participation in the reading process needs to be
  ignored.
• She says we are so good at fiction reading we
  fill in the gaps without noticing thats what we
  are doing however
• When the reader of a postmodern work is invited
  to participate in the construction of the
  fictional world she is aware that this world does
  not exist independently of the semiotic activity
  hence the loss in immersive power

6

• The most immersive forms of textual interactivity
  are therefore those in which the user's
  contributions, rather than performing a creation
  through a diegetic (i.e. descriptive) use of
  language, count as a dialogic and live
  interaction with other members of the fictional
  world. I am thinking here of children's games of
  make-believe, and of those interactive
  hypertextual systems where users are invited to
  play the role of characters.

7
BUT

• Readers play an interactive role in whatever they
  read.
• You are the one holding the book, looking at the
  printed page, imagining what is described. Thats
  all on you.

8
Wolfgang Iserfrom the Johns Hopkins Online Guide
to Literary Theory and Criticism,
Reader-Response entry.

• Iser still assumes that the text establishes
  norms guiding and limiting readers "The process
  of assembling the meaning of the text . . . does
  not lead to daydreaming but to the fulfillment of
  conditions that have already been structured in
  the text" (Act 4950) however, the texts
  potentials, which include indeterminate gaps,
  blanks, discrepancies, and absences, disturb the
  structure and stimulate the readers activity
  (9899). Readers synthesize "perspectives"
  deriving from the texts narrator, characters,
  plot, and explicit reader, but the text still
  signals, guides, directs, and manipulates them,
  moving them to reinterpret the text and, more
  importantly, to produce what it cannot the
  experience of a coherent, living whole growing
  out of "the alteration or falsification of that
  which is already ours" (9899, 132).

9
the readers role

• For the rest of the quarter, we will be talking
  about the role of the reader.
• What are you doing when you are reading?
• What role do you play in the creation of the
  story?
• What is your relationship to the text?
• How is that relationship set up by the text?
• Etc.

10

• In the short story, Hills Like White Elephants,
  addressed a critical issue on abortion that
  protagonists Jig and her American travel
  companion (significant other) emphatically
  discuss. Throughout the text, Jig wanted to carry
  their baby to term however her companion wanted
  her to abort their child, so they could continue
  with their travel ventures.
• Questions
• Does their conversation regarding abortion
  heighten your interactivity within the context of
  the story (with the characters, conversation,
  etc.)?
• Within your interactivity within the text, and
  knowing how each character felt on this issue,
  did you choose sides? If so which? And why?
• Did you like how the story concluded? If so, did
  this story leave you interactively engaged until
  the end of the text?

• Since "Hills Like White Elephants" is a very
  dialogue based story, why do you think Hemingway
  found it important enough to describe the
  scenery? Do you think there is any significance
  in that there is a difference between the land
  surrounding the train station and the land across
  the valley?