Week of October 14, 2013

The presentations this week were really interesting. One of my favorite parts was the discussion of the themes and concepts during Jason’s presentation, especially because he got the class involved with questions and talking directly to us. Tyler’s text had some really intriguing and unique themes, too. The all-in-one experience of the story, the title and content and ending all merging together, was something I don’t usually see in written works. It actually makes me wonder how the creation of such a piece would go — in the initial idea, the planning, the staging, etc. It seems to me like an incredibly ambitious process that, if done well, would yield a fantastic result.

My text took a bit of a different way through storytelling, though, and ended in more of a “back to square one” sort of way. The book begins talking about the relationship and the beauty of nature, then delves into a lot of politics and world events, and concludes getting back to the relationship and the nature around the three. While things happen, it doesn’t entirely feel like the story moves forward, in terms of content. It obviously does move forward through time, but the story could be told all at once with information just piling up as well and end up basically the same. The ambiguous nature of storytelling and building content through ambiance and outside forces unrelated to the three main characters was fun to read, though confusing quite often.

Week of September 30, 2013

During our discussion in class on Wednesday, a lot of good things came out about our interpretations and thoughts about Dictee. One of the biggest things, kind of to keep in mind throughout the rest of the thoughts, is that the process is the point of the writing, not the actual product — it’s the journey, not the destination. I thought that was a really interesting thing to talk about because, although I’ve heard it before many times, I just hadn’t been thinking about that while reading this specific text. Keeping that in mind during the rest of the discussion allowed for more thoughts to come about in our group.

The reference to the Greek chorus is also a really neat thing to look at, since it easily creates this idea of a narrator-like thing going on during the text to help keep it all connected even when it doesn’t seem to be. It’s also cool because of the mythological reference it makes to the muses, tying it together with the Christian themes that present themselves in the text. That, along with what seems like a connection between each muse and the content of the section that they title, makes me really interested to see how the rest of the book connects to everything else.