class summary from yesterday 4/27

  We started class with Anne mentioning that her comments to all our papers had been posted.  She said they ranged across the board in how good they were.  Then, she shared 3 student papers on framed and unframed states that particularly interested her.  At this point I zoned out a bit, and forgot about my note-taking task and got into the discussion.  I came back to my notes when the class was discussing how the character of House involves the viewer of his television show in his dream state.  While some students felt this way, others felt like a viewer and not a participant.  We discussed some of the different episodes that people in the class had watched, after which Anne came to the conclusion that the television show House gave "a sense of the unconscious."  "House M.D." was compared to Alice in Wonderland when someone cited the wonderland reference in one of the episodes we had to watch for class.  Is this a dream narrative like Alice?, Anne asked. The concrete link the class came up with between Alice and House was that every character in is dreams (or hallucinations) were representations of some part of himself.  His visions include the members of his team, but it was argued that House hired them because he saw himself in each one of them.  At this point, I again forgot I was recording the class day and instead got involved in the conversation-obviously, on this day I wasn’t too adept at focusing.  My notes begin again at the “genres as formulas” discussion.  Anne then told us that both the word ‘genre’ and ‘gender’ are from the same latin root, ‘gen.’ Anne then revealed that her interest in genres was playing them, and pushing against their boundaries.  The old-fashioned sense of the “genre of a person, or genre of character” was discussed, and the class decided that House’s personality definitely fit into a genre.  We ended class by establishing that House crosses every line in the medical field.