1. 10.30.08 | How to Tell a True War Story Schedule: 1.Attendance & Questions? 2.Filling in the gaps in “Elephants” 3.Waking up a bug. 4.Discussion. 5.HW – Read Kafka. Goal[s]:  Identify and evaluate the role of the reader in the ‘realization’ of a story.

2. Reader’s 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 story’s 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, let’s 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.

4. 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.

5. How to Tell a True War Story Simple question that is actually pretty complicated: What is this?

6. 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? – [don’t say it makes it more interesting/entertaining! 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?