10'30'08 How to Tell a True War Story

1
10.30.08 How to Tell a True War Story

• Schedule
• Attendance Questions?
• Filling in the gaps in Elephants
• Waking up a bug.
• Discussion.
• HW Read Kafka.

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

2
Readers Role Where are we?

• Hills Like White Elephants Reader is charged
  with filling in the scene around the sparse
  dialogue.
• Metamorphosis Reader has to suspend disbelief
  consistantly, to accept the storys central
  conceit.
• How to Tell a True War Story Reader has to
  assemble the distributed fragments and wade
  through the ambiguities.

3
Amending some of our habits.

• Having followed along with GoPost and now having
  read about half of your papers, it occurs to me
  we have gotten into some unproductive habits of
  talking about the texts.
• The questions we have been asking have generally
  been How does X affect your immersion?
• While there is nothing inherently wrong with this
  question, it is not generating useful responses.
• We tend to reply with how it affected OUR
  PERSONAL immersion, which means each of us is
  talking about something different. OR, it leads
  to evaluative statements that people are not
  substantiating.
• Now I have been noticing the same trend with
  questions about interactivity, only its more
  marked now as we have no definition yet
  formulated as to what that means.
• INSTEAD, lets ask this question as What does it
  mean to be immersed/interactive with this text?
• Hopefully, this shift will allow us to talk
  specifically about what the text is doing rather
  than our reactions.

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Also

• It is no longer acceptable to explain the impact
  of some element of a text as
• More interesting. to whom?
• More entertaining. for whom?
• Appealing to a larger audience. who cares?
• Unless you can connect the statement to stakes
  other than broader readership or book sales.
• Remember STAKES!?! Who cares and why? To simply
  notice/point out some element of a text is
  descriptive. Instead, your observations need to
  serve as evidence for a claim about what the
  text/element is doing/arguing/articulating.

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How to Tell a True War Story

• Simple question that is actually pretty
  complicated What is this?

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Interactivity

• What does it mean to interact with this text?
• How is that interaction elicited?
• What are the effects, implications, results, of
  interacting in this way?
• dont say it makes it more interesting/entertaini
  ng! Or connects with a larger audience!

7
Discussion.

• In the following excerpt, how does Michell
  Sanders' telling of his war story parallel the
  narrator's telling of the story about Curt Lemon?
  In what ways does this define the reader's role
  in reading the text?
• 176-179

• In this text, the author interjects almost every
  snippet of a war story by telling you it's true
  and sometimes even the degree of truth. He also
  tells you what a true story should be in broken
  bits.
• While I found this to be extremely irritating, I
  wanted to hear what others had to say about it.
  Were you able to suspend your disbelief and
  actually listen to the author and believe the
  story was true? How did this conflict/agree with
  Ryan's definition of immersion, could you
  actually get into the text and forget about the
  medium to access the text?Also, the readings
  this week have been open-ended and up to your own
  interpretation, what do you think was the point
  O'Brien was trying to get across?