10.27.08 | Hills like White ElephantsSchedule:1. Attendance &

Questions?2. Writing reflection3. Where we are in the

course.4. Reader’s role.5. Discussion.6. HW – Read Kafka.

Goal[s]: Identify and evaluate the

role of the reader in the ‘realization’ of a story.

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, let’s 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 didn’t 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?

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.

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”

As a result…

• Ryan’s theory suggests that the reader’s 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 that’s 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”

• 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.

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. That’s all on you.

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 49–50); however, the text’s potentials, which include indeterminate gaps, blanks, discrepancies, and absences, disturb the structure and stimulate the reader’s activity (98–99). Readers synthesize "perspectives" deriving from the text’s 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" (98–99, 132).

the reader’s 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.

• 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?