E-literature

by TMD

28 comments

1 Peter Hill { 11.04.09 at 7:51 am }

Hi everyone,

Well, here we are in e- literature land.

I should also add that I’ve enjoyed all the discussions so far, and anything said below is purely for the sake of discussion and provocation.

Garcia (2009) poses the question whether e-literature is art. Not to steal her thunder, as i think it will be a very interesting presentation, but I was wondering the same thing.

When we were discussing the narratives in gaming last class, I kept thinking that it reminded me of something other than art. It reminded me of politics. Think of Obama’s campaign last year- many people participating, many stories being told, much manipulation, a form of democracy, people taking on new personalities, new identities, lots of writing going on. This is what some of the games sound like.

Some people call politics an art- but i don’t think so.

Which gets us back to e-lit.. I certainly feel as if some of the works seem artistic to the eye of this beholder. Others remind me of that famous Samuel Johnson quote. Boswell reports:

‘I told him I had been that morning at a meeting of the people called Quakers, where I had heard a woman preach. Johnson: “Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”‘

These days we all know that women can preach as well as men, but the metaphor is interesting.

Some e-lit looks like a dog on its hind legs.

A cool trick, some might say an electronic gimmick, but is it aaaaart?

Or as Ryan asks- is it a good story?

I expect that you, dear readers, may question my definitions of ‘good’ or ‘art.’
A very short , very personal definition-I consider good art something I can go back to again and again and derive new insights from it each time.

Let the games begin!

Peter

2 Melanie Wong { 11.05.09 at 1:31 pm }

Hi everyone,

I echo the same sentiments as Peter with regards to enjoying all the discussion so far.

I was fascinated by our readings this week on e-literature.

Hayles (2007) article discussion on the develop of e-literature brought up some interesting points. She starts off by posing the question, “Is electronic literature really literature at all?” I am still thinking about this. For me, I see it as a form of literature. Perhaps e-literature is a less static then a printed book? I don’t know I am still wrapping my head around this idea. However, I totally agree with Hayle’s comment about how “to see electronic literature only through the lens of print is, in a significant sense, not to see it at all.” Also, from what I am reading, it is becoming very apparent how visual e-literature is and how creative individuals can be with it. I remember Teresa’s recent talk for our department and how excited I was when I saw her examples of Flash poetry. It was the first time I had ever really seen this. I could see the potentials of this especially in an ESL classroom. Perhaps students could take on a more bilingual approach to it. However, it is an amazing activity and form of e-literature. Has anyone here ever tried it in their classrooms? I would love to hear about it, if so.

Dobson’s (2006) article got me thinking again. In particular my thoughts went to Wikis and networked forms. It is fascinating to think about students writing in a non-linear form. I guess in some ways I have never taught this way. This concept of switching from perceptive to creative. I have often been frustrated by how, at least from my experiences, school has sort of forced out the creativity. There are few times in my K-12 academic career that I remember having opportunities to be creative. It was not that my teachers didn’t appreciate creativity but there was so much emphasis on structure and writing in an academic register. Dobson (2006) mentions that by using the prompt text, its intent was to be a “catalyst for creative engagement of the imagination” (p. 65). Students are not just reading anymore.

More comments later…but I am now thinking about Douglas (1992) comments on “gaps” in reading. I think I have many of them right now and I need to think more about this. LOL!

Melanie

3 Erin Garcia { 11.05.09 at 6:55 pm }

I hope other people add to the wiki story Teresa set up, I really want to see where it goes. Last night, I have to admit in creating my hyperlink of the word “meme”, I got sucked into the world of memes and watched, read, looked at a bunch of them. It’s interesting how commonplace this word/concept is out there, and outside of this class, I’ve never heard it before. One forum even had people debating whether said meme was a true meme, because it was only being discussed in a singly long thread.

My favourite meme is without a doubt, the flashmob. Totally want to be part of a flash mob one day soon.

So I’ve been trying to tie in my ideas about Transmediation in my classroom, and discussing it with my Drama 8s as well as applying it to the school production I am currently directing. *But you have to wait till monday to hear about that.

4 Genevieve Brisson { 11.06.09 at 3:47 pm }

Bonjour Peter,

“E-lit looks like a dog on its hind legs”… Interesting image… We can say the same thing about print literature, don’t you think? I remember devouring dozens of books in the Baby-sitters Club series (http://www.scholastic.com/annmartin/bsc/index.htm) in Grade 5 or 6, and these books definitively do not fit your very personal and insightful definition of art, definition which makes a lot of sense to me. At the time, I loved these books. The great thing is that they led me to read other books, and I still read today.

Hi all!
I echo Erin’s suggestion: have a look at the Wiki story! I would love to see how it turns out with everyone adding to it!

This week’s readings got me thinking about using e-literature in my teaching. I was simply fascinated by Douglas’s experiment with the short story cut into segments. What an interesting way to engage students with texts and narratives and to talk about gaps and multiple connections in texts. After reading Dobson’s article, I was also interested in exploring the use of Wikis to write fiction. When I think of Wikis, I think Wikipedia: historical, factual, descriptive facts, not “creative writing.” With these two activities, students are not simply reading anymore, like Melanie said, they are engaging with a text in new and creative ways, something we all hope for, no?

As I was finished reading Hayles’ article, a friend of mine sent me the link to an article published yesterday on Times Online. I love the title: The Internet is killing storytelling!!!
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/ben_macintyre/article6903537.ece

The subject is different from what Hayles discusses in her article, since it does not address e-lit per se, but Internet in general, but I think it’s interesting to read both of them and compare the tone and vocabulary used. In a nutshell, the article in TO states that the Internet has reduced our attention span, resulting in the slow death of narrative:
“Like some endangered species, the story now needs defending from the threat of extinction in a radically changed and inhospitable digital environment.”

Bonne fin de semaine
Geneviève

5 Janet Pletz { 11.06.09 at 11:34 pm }

I really enjoyed the readings this week. The Douglas article seems a good place to start. Towards the end of the article, he refers to Riesman’s terms “inner-directed” and “other-directed” in describing different kinds of readers in media environments. On one hand, inner-directed readers are defined by their “ability to redefine their roles as readers by discovering a new way of navigating through narrative space or by revising the concept of closure”; while on the other hand, other-directed readers “take their cues for reading from their knowledge of established reading practices and literary conventions, leading them to brand examples of narratives wildly divergent from familiar norms.” I visualize these two descriptions as occurring on a continuum, and within media environments, I am learning to recognize aspects of these reader characteristics in the way I navigate and experience my own “readings”.

The notions of semantic playfulness, creative invitations, imaginative capacity, and narrative explorations in the readings this week have once again provided opportunities to examine ‘shape-shifting’ school-based notions of literacy pedagogy. From an early childhood educator’s perspective I have given considerable thought to how aspects of Dobson’s project and Douglas’s project might be developmentally re-designed for young children. Bring forward the elements of play, and I see many potential openings. What potential for educational software designers!

Genevieve, the article your friend sent to you was interesting to read. What was most significant is the way my own reading (and thinking) has changed over the last few months—Peter, I like your working definition for good art. My short definition would have to include ‘emotionality’ and ‘aesthetic attunement’…and derive new insights? yup!

I realize it’s far too late to be thinking coherently…

Janet

6 Peter Hill { 11.07.09 at 9:52 am }

Hi,

Salut Genevieve,
merci pour le Times on line article.

Here are two other apt responses to our world in the other world.

‘ Is you tube killing Canadian culture?” run by UBC dialogues.( See below)

And an article in the Sun suggesting that men/boys that play video games have lower incomes!!!???
http://www.vancouversun.com/life/Video+game+aces+tend+have+lower+incomes/2196093/story.html

Regarding definitions of art- Genevieve, my addiction as a kid was comic books( probably why my income is so low), I went back to them again and again. Were they art? Maybe- but a kind of escape art.

Janet – does it have to be emotional? i don’t know, or are there other triggers?
p

Upcoming UBC Dialogues

Is YouTube Killing Canadian Culture: Will the Canadian story go viral? Or will it buffer forever?
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Panelist: Tracey Friesen, BA’98, Executive Producer, National Film Board of Canada, Pacific and Yukon Centre
Panelist: Ron Mann, Filmmaker, Sphinx Productions

7 Richard Harris { 11.07.09 at 2:52 pm }

Hello everybody,

I enjoyed the connections Teresa made, in her article, between Monro’s work and that of the students. Any time students can be encouraged to create rather that just read or regurgitate, it becomes more likely that higher level learning will occur (my opinion). It was interesting that students constructed narratives that were so similar to that of Monro’s.

I wonder whether these types of wiki writing spaces will ever completely replace the traditional linear page of text? There certainly there is a learning curve for both the writer and the reader in these environments. But, at the same time, it seems somewhat intuitive. A hypertext piece that consists of a core idea with radiating nodes of extra information recalls, for me, a mind map or brainstorm web. Perhaps this form of writing is a more natural one, structurally.

While reading some of the e-literature linked to this wiki (especially the wiki story set up for our class) I began thinking about the link content themselves. Some links lead to nodes which expand the narrative, while others lead to external sites which provided illustrative examples of words or concepts. The later serves the function of a multimodal footnote. Hyperlinks are extremely effective in this regard, I think. This could also work for literary allusions. While reading Shakespeare, or anything else that is not contemporary, the complete meaning may not be transmitted to the reader/viewer because the allusions are antiquated. It would be wonderful to read a hypertext version of Shakespeare where the classical allusions were linked to images with captions. I know most Shakespearean texts are annotated for this purpose already. But why not recreate the visual, image that the allusion is seeking to call up in the “mind’s eye,” on the screen itself?

As far as the debate about “art” goes, I agree with Peter that art needs to be something which begs revisitation by the reader/viewer. Some of the e-lit on the Electronic Literature Collection seems a bit trite, or even inconsequential. But, also, Genevieve makes a good point that print literature is just as susceptible to looking like a “dog on its hind legs.” Bad literature exists in every medium. Just because something exists in a new medium does not mean that it warrants attention. But, don’t ignore certain art just because of the medium either.

OK I’m done for now,

Richard.

8 Chelsey Hauge { 11.07.09 at 5:27 pm }

Where’d everyone find the Douglas article?

9 Erin Garcia { 11.07.09 at 8:48 pm }

Last week we touched on the idea of real life versus virtual life. Here is a poignant passage from Anne Bogart’s collection of essays A Director Prepares which illustrates this universal? choice:

As a young man, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre served as a sailor on a trading ship. One cold and stormy night the ship put into the port of Hamburg, Germany. Sartre got off the ship and made his way through the rainy windswept streets to the shelter of a seedy bar. He sat down at a table and ordered a drink. After a while a beautiful woman made her way towards his table, introduced herself and sat down next to him. They began to talk. Finally, after quite some time, the woman excused herself to go to the bathroom. As he sat alone, anticipating her return, Sartre imagined the night that he and the woman would spend together in a hotel room, the seduction, the sex, and ultimately their farewell the next morning. He imagined the letters they would spend one another in anticipation of reunion. He envisioned the story that lay ahead of them. Suddenly, as he awaited her return from the bathroom, Sartre experienced an epiphany. He realized that every moment of his life, including this one, offered a choice. He could either choose to live his life in the fabricated fiction of a story, or to embrace the discontinuous blips and bleeps of human existence and live without the security of a story. All a t once Sartre made the decision, He stood up and walked out of the bar and into the storm and never saw the woman again.

Have you read any of Sartre’s plays? I was cast in one once, No Exit, and based on the theme and mood of the play, I question how happy Sartre was with his choice.

10 Eva Ziltener { 11.08.09 at 12:59 am }

Hello all! I felt the need to share my first wiki experience with you all. I’ve been playing around with our collective wiki story and discovering how much easier it is to write a story that is non-linear. I love that freedom of linking to external sites, or connecting my stories to those the rest of you have written. I hope you enjoy my (bad?) puns too… I’m discovering the ease of word play in wiki environment, where you can use pictures to tell jokes, and also to help translate from one language to another (so far I’ve played around with Spanish and German). I hope more of you play around with the story this weekend… it’s a lot of fun and great way to learn how to use a wiki.

Buenas noches amigos,

Eva

11 Richard Harris { 11.08.09 at 10:50 am }

I too can’t find the Douglas article. The link doesn’t seem to work. I tried some GoogleScholar searches, but no luck there. Anybody find it elsewhere?

12 Erin Garcia { 11.08.09 at 11:03 am }

Douglas Article: http://noel.pd.org/topos/perforations/perf3/douglas_p3.html

13 Erin Garcia { 11.08.09 at 11:04 am }

Doed anyone know of a safe freeware site I can use to convert a Quicktime movie to FLV?

14 Chelsey Hauge { 11.08.09 at 11:33 am }

Great discussion this week.

Genevieve, I too read way too many Babysitter’s Club books, to the point where my folks made a rule that if I was buy a Babysitter’s Club book, or “junk book” they called it, I had to also get a “wholesome book.” I agree with you that Staci and Claudia and Katie- and the other babysitters- and their stories represent a rift similar to the “dog on hind legs” that e-literature represents.

In light of the Hayles and Dobson articles, there’s a few things that grabbed my eye:

Janet writes: “The notions of semantic playfulness, creative invitations, imaginative capacity, and narrative explorations in the readings this week have once again provided opportunities to examine ‘shape-shifting’ school-based notions of literacy pedagogy.”

I’m drawn to the idea of creative experiences and creative making, and shape shifting, especially as they relate to embodiment. The idea of nonlinear storytelling that Melanie grasped onto from Dobson’s article, in terms of opening up spaces for creative learning. The idea seems so generative, reminds me of work on embodiment and creating embodied spaces in order to open that gap space for learning. O’Loughlin talks about creating spaces through creative learning that engage body-subjects through multi-sensorial experiences. I see them being engaged multi-sensorial-ly through e-literature, especially if it’s a collective viewing or experiencing of the text. They can be engaged through repition, temporal and aural engagement, movement. Many of these ways of engaging are very present in e-literature, and engage the senses in ways that the book text does differently. Reading a book you hear your fingers on the page, you touch the page, smell the pages, etc., but its usually a solitary experience. Your eyes, ears, body is not engaged through movement, spatial relationships, etc.

I’m also very drawn to Hayles’ discussion of stories that are dependent upon mobile devices and interaction with both the mobile device and the physical world in order to achieve understanding, much for the same reasons states above. I do think this is very related to, maybe a cousin of?, installation art. When I was reading other people’s posts, I was reminded of the installation work by Carlos Cruz-Diaz, who’s main medium is light and who attempts to shift interaction with the world through creating immerse color spaces. Check him out. But back to the mobiles, and the way the foreground physical-world spaces and their interaction with virtual narratives—this seems to echo the ways youth interact with the virtual, as per our discussion last class.

More coming.

15 Chelsey Hauge { 11.08.09 at 11:36 am }

Erin, In Flash 8, you can drag a .mov onto the project window and it will offer to do a conversion to Flash video for you (ignore the wrapper stuff it adds if all you care about is the .flv). See if that works.
Thanks for the Douglas article!

16 Emma Kivisild { 11.08.09 at 1:15 pm }

First, thanks for the link to Douglas, Erin.

Something that came up for me repeatedly as Douglas talked about mazes and puzzle solving was a wholly different labyrinth, the practice of walking a specific path for a journey of enlightenment rather than towards an end of closure. Here’s a site: http://www.sacredwalk.com/

One of the things that e literature seems to be getting at is a non-linear, not strictly sentence/paragraph epistemology, and that sacred path route to knowledge does do that. very body-centred and intuitive. I am not a person engaged in religious practice, but it’s an interesting thing. We apparently have a labyrinth in Vancouver in a church downtown. It would be interesting to see if it does anything.

Another thing I have been thinking of is audio and radio. Has anyone heard glen gould’s idea of north? Here is a video of gould talking about it as music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Snt35m2fzBw
It is not interactive, but really stretches metaphor.

And re: last week, david cronenburg’s movie ‘existenz’ is very interesting re games and virtual reality. a trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAdbdUt_h9M

now I am returning to the wiki to see what of the stuff I wrote last night still fits.

emma

17 Genevieve Brisson { 11.08.09 at 2:36 pm }

The Wikistory is looking good! I am enjoying writing and reading it.

Ladies and gents, I don’t think anybody volunteers to bring snacks tomorrow. I’ll do it!

Geneviève

18 Emma Kivisild { 11.08.09 at 4:21 pm }

i am always leery of posting that exposes my techno-ignorance BUT i am having a hell of a time putting things in the wikistory. i write in ms word, and then want a word in the story to be a link to those paragraphs. i started trying to figure this out last night, and today i emailed chelsey for help, but i am still sittong here with my paragraphs. increasingly irrelevant paragraphs. sigh. i did correct a spelling error.

19 Erin Garcia { 11.08.09 at 4:50 pm }

Emma, in order to create a link in the wiki:
when you are logged in and have clicked on the “edit” tab…
Take the word you want to link off of and insert something that looks like this:
[http://sites.wiki.ubc.ca/dlc/565_meme meme]

The above link is taken from the link I created for the word “meme”, copy paste: [http://sites.wiki.ubc.ca/dlc/565_ add your own new word to replace “meme” to complete the link and then type the same word again to act as the title of the link, then close it with a “]”. Hope this helped.

20 Jeff Miller { 11.08.09 at 6:48 pm }

Hi Emma,

Here is a link to a page that gives some basic wiki editing instructions. It might help you to set up the links to your material.

http://design.test.olt.ubc.ca/Wiki_Basics

Best,
Jeff

21 Emma Kivisild { 11.08.09 at 8:52 pm }

i had a thing to put in the wikistory, and i tried! then i planned to post it here for you guys to post it for me but now my word file is refusing to paste it in here so i give up and will see what help i can get tommorrow.

emma

22 Melanie Wong { 11.08.09 at 10:05 pm }

Hi everyone! Sorry I have missing all weekend. Wow, that wikistory is pretty cool. I am going to try my hand at it too! Great discussion by the way. It’s making me think a lot.

23 Heidi { 11.08.09 at 11:38 pm }

Hi everyone,

It feels like I have been in hibernation for the past week and only now gaining clarity from within my cold-induced state of mind….thus, I apologize for posting these thoughts so close to class. However, if you are like me then you will be revisiting this blog to further contemplate the ideas posted…

In response to what has been posted in regards to e-literature and art….a basic definition of art is ‘something that resonates with you’…it could be emotional, but not necessarily. That said, each person will have his/her own definition of what art is and that will be based on his/her own experience with art, keeping in mind that there are many levels/fields/types of art in contemporary society. Personally speaking, I work from a conceptual place and the act of thinking in response to art is important (for me). That said, there are certain art pieces I love that are purely abstract, which I am drawn to for only aesthetic reasons…so in that case, it is the composition and form that resonates with me. Often through time, I may be led to think about the formal aesthetics of the work in relation to the context through which the work is displayed or in relation to similar forms from the past, this revealing my analytical nature. Since I attended art school in the 1990s, my education and views about art are influenced by the teachers I had, artists who themselves would have been influenced by discussions surrounding anti-modernist approaches and critical feminist inquiry. I think it’s also important to mention that the word “art” is often used in a very broad manner within disciplines that are not located within “art” without a necessary critical view of what makes good art. If we are to think critically about art itself (and this takes time, discourse, study, etc.), we should include quality as a determining factor.

The readings this week were great (I am finding so many ways to connect these texts with ideas being explored in my other courses). Hayles (2007) is definitely a resource I will continue to refer to for its numerous examples of e-literature….I have realized that I am definitely a fan of Hayles’ work. Something I hope we can touch on further is the idea of “embodied metaphor.” The following quote from towards the end of Hayles’ text perhaps connects in some way: “Writing on New Media poetics, Adalaide Morris aptly discusses this aspect of digital literature by commenting that it articulates for us what we already in some sense know. To this I would add it creates practices that help us know more about the implications of our contemporary situation. Much as the novel both gave voice to and helped to create the liberal humanist subject in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so contemporary electronic literature is both reflecting and enacting a new kind of subjectivity characterized by distributed cognition, networked agency that includes human and non-human actors, and fluid boundaries dispersed over actual and virtual locations.” In continuing on the thread of digital works of art, this section of the text relates to ideas I presented at two conferences this past year, in which my partner and I proposed the concept of “digital graffiti” as a concept for understanding the use of current digital technologies being used for artistic expression in physical and virtual spaces. For more details and visual examples, visit http://heidimay.ca/Heidi_May/CSEA2009.html

Still continuing on the art thread…
Hayles’ overview of genres of electronic literature made me think about how visual artists have used the space/place of the internet, some examples of which are included in the presentation slideshow link above. “Net art” was first explored in the early 1990s [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net.art]. I’m curious to know if e-literature enthusiasts would have been familiar with the work of Vuk Cosic and Olia Lialina, and how digital artists might have influenced the work of those working with e-literature and vice versa. An early example of Cosic’s work is “ASCII history of the moving images” [http://www.ljudmila.org/~vuk/ascii/film/]. Through this work, Cosic translated video of classic films into code, arriving at a somewhat recognizable film image and an abstract code together as one. He did this for several films including King Kong and Psycho. An example of Olia Lialina’s work, which I feel is central to current writing on digital interactive narratives, is the 1996 piece “My Boyfriend Came Back from the War.” In this interactive internet-based work, viewers go to the website and proceed through the piece by clicking on images and words, which then causes the windows to split into frames. Lialina expanded the piece into “The Last Real Net Art Museum” using the original narrative as a starting point, inviting others to remix the narrative, developing the project into an archive of variations on the work by other artists. This project spans 12 years with the last post made in 2008 [http://myboyfriendcamebackfromth.ewar.ru/] — screenshots of selections from the original and some of the remixes are included if you scroll through the slideshow move here: http://heidimay.ca/Heidi_May/CSEA2009.html

In terms of contemporary “art” projects that relate to this discussion, here are a few…

ON the internet (interactive):
Eduardo Kac: http://www.ekac.org/teleporting.html
“Reverie” (Western Front group project): http://projects.front.bc.ca/2005/reverie/about/info_frames.html

not interactive:
Jer Thorp: http://www.flickr.com/photos/blprnt/sets/72157614008027965/

IN public space:
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: http://www.lozano-hemmer.com/english/projects.htm
Daniel Sauter: http://danielsauter.com/display.php?project_id=20
Daniel Sauter: http://danielsauter.com/display.php?project_id=57
Julie Andreyev: http://www.fourwheeldrift.com/ (specifically Urban Productions section)
Camille Utterback: http://www.camilleutterback.com/abundance.html
Jennifer + Kevin McCoy: http://victoriavesna.com/dataesthetics/?cat=8
This last one by the McCoys I feel really challenges ideas of narrative we have read in the course and, in light of this piece and the texts we have read, I am now considering what some of my own work says about narrative, and how the meaning would be altered/extended if they were transformed into interactive pieces:
http://heidimay.ca/Heidi_May/Art_Seven_Slides.html
http://heidimay.ca/Heidi_May/Art_you_wont_get_anything.html
http://heidimay.ca/Heidi_May/Art_Screens.html

I also wanted to share this work that has triggered much debate in terms of “what art is”….a web site that documents a performance art work that promotes critical analyses of the nature of art, knowledge and Wikipedia: http://wikipediaart.org/

Sorry for the length of this post….it’s an archive for me to refer to later…

~ Heidi
PS. The “full” piece by Janet Cardiff, listed in the Hayles text, can be viewed/experienced here: http://www.cardiffmiller.com/artworks/walks/longhair.html#

24 Eva Ziltener { 11.09.09 at 11:47 am }

Hello again,

I’ll help out with the snacks Genevieve. I’ll bring brownies and some swiss-style gingerbread.

Cheers,
Eva

25 Jeff Miller { 11.09.09 at 12:01 pm }

Hi All,

I’ve got some mandarin oranges and rugoleh to add to the table!

Jeff

26 Cory Theodor { 11.09.09 at 8:32 pm }

I didn’t post this before class, but I thought maybe it would be helpful to post now. Too late? Oh well.

Recognizing our current reading models through the use of hypertext, to better acclimatize readers to complex narrative structures (like Munro’s) has important ends in pedagogy. As Teresa points out, students using hypertext fiction can recognize the creative aspects of reading (resisting the notion of a passive reception). The other direction that this relationship between hypertext models and complex narrative structures can take is towards a recognition of the embedded power dynamics present in narrative structures more generally—the power relationship between authorship and reading. There’s a power negotiation that can be resisted (or reified) in the reading process that is highlighted in alternative reading forms. The reification of traditional narrative structures appears in “Douglas’ Gaps, Maps and Perception: What Hypertext Reader’s (Don’t) Do” in the sense that readers look for logical bridges between events and actions in texts that are not made for them through static proposed order. They bring with them traditional narrative patterns, even to the reading of multi-sequential narratives. The gaps in narrative or the choice to order a narrative endows the reader with creative agency but at the same time, the reader/author constructing a narrative out of, for example, loose sheets of paper often falls back on the narrative patterns that he or she is used to, instead of enacting the narrative possibilities. Making narrative meaning is a constructive and creative process (yes). But, making narrative meaning does not only occur in the direct interaction between reader and text, it occurs far before when the creative agent is embedded with cultural values.

27 Erin Garcia { 11.09.09 at 10:21 pm }

Yes it’s true we are all but blades of grass, and all narrative, even the story of our own lives is illusion.
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/pre_game_coin_toss_makes

28 Cory Theodor { 11.09.09 at 10:35 pm }

tequila? hahaha

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