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Class Notes

Start class off with 2 images. (From fluid to fixed)

Are we finding note taking useful? No one talked about it evaluations.

sweetp: When taking notes for the class I thought it was kind of fun. It was nice to kind of sit back and watch. I got kind of creative, but as a reader I know I never look at them.

Anne: Fun and interesting to do the note taking, but don’t really look at them.

rachelr: I don’t read them on a regular basis, but I found something interesting that Paul said that I used in my paper.

TPB1988: If you want to talk about a topic and you want to look back at the notes it’s been useful.

Aybala50: About going back to post

Anne: If you go to your account you can send Serendip instructions to send you notifications/Recent Group Comments

Anne: One other thing I want to say about note keeping. I like reading them and it’s interesting to see different interpretations of what’s going on in class. rachelr and Teal ended their notes on class differently. “Who said this thing about reality being a collective …

I was also delighted rachelr said “If we can’t define reliability by scent or fallibility, then how?” (If I meant to say “assent, but racherr heard “scent”…)

One pay off of the notes is putting in questions of what actually happened.

Course keeping: Anne talks about pursuing “mirror images” of Alice. Several imiges are given.

(go to Anne’s course notes for the examples)

TPB1988: I never saw Alice before so when I saw the movie I was a little confused. The characters would come in and just quote parts of the text. The text and movie complimented each other and I understood the movie better after reading the text.

Anne: Fair warning that my questions on Thursday will be about genre. How has the story of Alice altered after moving from text to other forms of genre?
The question of time is an interesting one and Wai Chee has helped us think about it. (Different ways time might be measured, the different ways it operates)

Wai Chi: “to think of anything as ‘literature’ implies a sequence, a before-and-after” (i.e. : a sense of TIME…)- literature makes no sense in the absence of the measuring tape of time…

Anne: on Thursday I want a post of ‘your reactions to my proposals for the reminder of the semester- (“ahead of time” an interesting phrase…what does it mean)

(go to Anne’s course notes for the examples)

Anne: as I realize the time it takes as a group to decide on what we want to do together…decide on whether we should reduce distribution requirements (talks about department and how much we trust students on how much they can decide on their own stuides???)

Anne: If you are interested in larger questions of category-making/and/or category-making….(course notes)

Friday at 5 the next paper is due

COURSE KEEPING OVER

Anne: It was interesting to me that you were talking about genre and thinking about a variety of genre

Herbie: When she sent a copy of the list of the books to get there was confusion of titles (there is a recap of her account on course notes under Herbie)

Anne: genre of gardening? If you were interested in gardening would you be interested in Alice in Wonderland? So that was a more historical version of the book…

mkarol: I was curious to see if anyone else thought that reading it online would change what the book is…encompassed everything we thought of

I didn’t have a problem reading online…I was able to focus pretty easily

Anne: So your experience of learning was not affected by reading it online. Do you want to talk about your experience?

aseidman: I like reading them online because I like messing with font and margins etc.

Herbie: I read things online all the time…

skindeep: It’s the way you interact with the book when you are holding it….

Anne: Do you value or attend to the physical material experience when reading the physical book?

sweetp: It’s awkward to balance a laptop….

Anne: The physical comfort of the book…

spleenfiend: I get more distracted when I read stuff online….have the tendency to check things while I’m doing it

Anne: I often will have 4-5 screens open at once. I feel like it keeps me more focused…it allows me to handle my distractions by tending to different things (all academic)

Anne: Does anyone else do books on tape? Would you call it reading or listening to a performance?

skindeep: I think it’s more like listening to a story. It was helpful when I had a copy in my hand and the tape.

Anne: Could listening be reading?

Herbie: Not everyone in my family reads at the same speed…when we all want to talk about something listening to the audio book allows us to all get a book done at the same time so we can discuss things.

Anne: Group listening experience where group pacing’s can be brought to the same pace (???)

Anne: Were all of you read to before you began to read?
Anne: I travel a lot so I do audio books and I really like authors reading their own books. I’ve become addicted. I love hearing the changes that I think I would not have heard if I was reading the change. It really does take me back to the experience of my grandma reading to me. But my cousin thinks it’s not reading, but just listening.

sweetp: “I think it’s reading, I mean whether you are reading visually or audioly they are both entered into your conscience.”

Anne: Would we like to come up with a new definition of what it means to read in the 21st century? Does a written text allow us for a wider spectrum of understanding?

TPB1988: I don’t consider reading, I would never read anything online. If I’m reading the book it’s me and the book and no one else. The first Harry Potter I read was on tape in class and it’s not the same. You have your own Harry and your own character. This is how they think their tone.

Anne: Agency and power to the reader.

Rachelr: Isn’t that why you choose a book. Connect it to yourself?

Sven Birkets (in Anne’s class notes)

“To read [seriously]… one needs focus, silence, and deep time… (CLASS NOTES)

Herbie: for spring break I was on a plane and I had a flight attended was complaining that someone had a ‘kindle’ and she was annoyed that she can’t strike up conversations with people because she can’t see what they are reading

Anne: the experience of reading is a shared cultural experience for the purpose of connecting with people

Anne: what will internet reading do for us?

We watch “The future of publishing”

Anne: TPB1988 had said that she liked the subtle rebellion to any kind of genre.

Etc. (go to class notes on what people have said)

Anne: What do you think? What are we to do with this text?
What is the result of our immersion in her dream narrative?

Paired up in class

sweetp: Opened up the genre, showed what a novel can be and that it can diverge from the norm. It’s flying under the radar disguised as a novel.

Anne: If we play with the idea of flying under the radar, what is the norm of a novel?

sweetp: A linear narrative

jrf or jrlewis: Whether we see something linear or not there still can be development.

Anne: Moby Dick plays with how novels usually begin and progress. From the inception of the novel, the form of the novel has been played with.

When you pick up your next novel will you read it differently?

sweetp: I guess it just reinforces for me that there are so many different styles and ways of reading things out there…

Anne: Any stories can be told and rendered in multiple different forms

spleenfiend: On the surface it doesn’t look very linear…Alice on the surface is conventional because the events go in order

Anne: There is a sense of linearity

skindeep: When I was a child it was so easy to believe everything the book said…and right now when I’m reading it ‘can we believe this? and what does it mean?
Anne: Gaining logic made us lose something else…for a child the world underground may not have seem weird, but as adults it doesn’t fit our logic

jrlewis or jrf: Talking about watching something while high on meds (pain meds…prescribed)

skindeep: I like the jumping around…it doesn’t annoy me. It seems like a break from reading something that is so (the usual)

herbie: I will always associate it as being a children’s book

Anne: For me one of the hilarious things about it is all the literary critical commentary….a text like this really pokes fun of all of the literary critics. Will you read differently the next book you pick up? Should you read it differently?

aseidman: I don’t think that’s a fair question…it’s a new medium

Anne: We always bring to our experience what we have done before…not as blank slates

herbie: I try to read a book for itself

Anne: What was your reaction to the nonsense poems?

sweetp: I found myself kind of skipping over them because I don’t really like poems

aseidman: I’m poetry fobic and I read them…they didn’t make tons of sense, but they were sometimes helpful.

Anne: What is a poem as a genre signal?

herbie: These poems in particular were easy to memorize because they rhyme, but also makes them catchy and fun..they’re not very serious, kind of like children’s poetry

Anne: If this narrative is a representation of the unconscioius…these poems in particular might be a pure representation of the unconscious

Bringing things together:
Anne: I want to say that this novel is a very profound questioning of main stream work….a reality of the constructed universe. I think it is especially interesting as a satire on education…Alice a very sensitive 7-year-old where the world is being presented to her as so constructed