10'8'08 Invisible Man

1
10.8.08 Invisible Man

• Schedule
• Attendance Questions?
• Dalloway returns
• Invisible Man Q.
• Class discussion of Invisible Man
• HW read Gilman

• Goals
• Analyze ways in which modes of access relate to
  the story accessed.

2
Pitfalls of discussing Immersion

• By Ryans definition, if you are reading and you
  are aware of your level of immersion, you are not
  immersed.
• This means the question, were you immersed in
  the story, isnt as productive as it seems.
• In order to talk about immersion, you have to
  look past your own experience of the text to talk
  about immersive elements and potentially
  immersive features. It requires that you talk
  about characteristics of the texts construction.
• Remember, immersion is an individual experience.
  If we are to talk about it at all in a common
  language, we have to recognize reasonable
  potential for being lost in the book, taking it
  for true.
• So, lets ask questions about how or in what ways
  a text could generate immersion, rather than to
  what degree is a text immersive.

3
Dalloway return.

• Yesterday we hit on these themes
• Between the wars
• What is civilization if we can start World Wars?
• Piecing life back together the return to
  normalcy.
• A day in the life
• What people thought about back then
• Engaging the small things, the details.
• Life in the city.
• New Age
• New Technologies Aeroplanes and Cars.
• Place of the individual
• Anonymity / insignificance
• Theory of other minds.
• What do others think about?
• Separated by skulls in the story, but we get
  inside everyones head.
• Breaking down walls between consciousnesses
  through writing style.

4
The motor car

• Every one looked at the motor car. Septimus
  looked. Boys on bicycles sprang off. Traffic
  accumulated. And there the motor car stood, with
  drawn blinds, and upon them a curious pattern
  like a tree, Septimus thought, and this gradual
  drawing together of everything to one centre
  before his eyes, as if some horror had come
  almost to the surface and was about to burst into
  flames, terrified him. The world wavered and
  quivered and threatened to burst into flames. It
  is I who am blocking the way, he thought.
• The car had gone, but it had left a slight
  ripple which flowed through glove shops and hat
  shops and tailors' shops on both sides of Bond
  Street. For thirty seconds all heads were
  inclined the same way--to the window. Choosing a
  pair of gloves--should they be to the elbow or
  above it, lemon or pale grey?--ladies stopped
  when the sentence was finished something had
  happened. Something so trifling in single
  instances that no mathematical instrument, though
  capable of transmitting shocks in China, could
  register the vibration yet in its fullness
  rather formidable and in its common appeal
  emotional for in all the hat shops and tailors'
  shops strangers looked at each other and thought
  of the dead of the flag of Empire. In a public
  house in a back street a Colonial insulted the
  House of Windsor which led to words, broken beer
  glasses, and a general shindy, which echoed
  strangely across the way in the ears of girls
  buying white underlinen threaded with pure white
  ribbon for their weddings. For the surface
  agitation of the passing car as it sunk grazed
  something very profound.

5
Invisible Man Preliminary questions

• What happens in this selection?
• What themes or topics are brought up? What does
  the text have to say about them so far or can you
  tell?
• What is your perspective? Mode of access to the
  story?

6
Invisible Man Question.

• QUESTION   How does the depth of (or lack of)
  detailed description the narrator gives effect
  how connected (or immersed) you were in the text?
• IE physical descriptions of characters and
  locations, etc.
•  
•  SUBQUESTION       How did the narrators
  contradictions influence of your views of the
  events, characters, and the narrator himself?
•       
• IE he mentions that he does things that he
  doesnt necessarily want to do fights when he
  only wants to give his speech, etc.
• I wanted at one and the same time to run from
  the room, to sink through the floor (page 19,
  lines 19-25)