Literary Kinds course

I read the first 8 (or 9?) stories from the ELF online version, mostly because I didn't want to buy another textbook when I'm in the midst of packing my room up to move out.  I'd known the premise of the book, but I had never heard any of the individual tales.

I was surprised at how short some of the stories are.  Given the premise, I was expecting to hear longer stories, so that she was only telling one story at a time.  Instead, I was surprised to find out that she was telling many stories within the context of a much longer story, and we ourselves are reading both of those within a much longer, better known story.

While watching the movie the other night, I noticed that while many scenes were copied from the graphic novel, they were executed in a style that utilized the medium of film. 

Think, for example, of the scene in which Satrapi recaps the history of the Shah for the viewer. In the graphic novel, the panels depicting this scene resemble (parody?) the flat art style from ancient works. 

The film depicts this scene in a different manner. No longer are the Shah and England flat, immobile representations. They are animated as a kind of puppet one would hold by a stick and jostle to move the arms and head. The scene is like that of a puppet theater. the background and the people look as though they could be made out of paper or cardboard. 

I just finished reading Philippe Petit's book, "Man on Wire"   This text chronicles Petit's multiyear long project to perform a high wire walk across the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.  There is a significant amount of autiobiographical information, including Petit's childhood passion for horseback riding.  Interspersed throughout the text are black and white images of Petit, his accomplices, and the Twin Towers.  Some are photographs, others are sketches and notes in

Class Notes

TPB1988's summary

We opened with the introduction of aseidman's friend Dave Joria, who writes comics as part of the group Tangent Artists.

We looked at an image from the Dream Suite; Anne thought it was interesting to see visuals generating other visuals.

Anne also brought up Restless—it's based on data on diversity issues at BMC, and featured a professor character who had a second-self subconscious/private self/“electric subconscious”.

“Yet such a definition may perhaps be reached by considering the points of difference between reality and its opposite, fiction. A figment is a product of somebody's imagination; it has such characters as his thought impresses upon it. That those characters are independent of how you or I think is an external reality. There are, however, phenomena within our own minds, dependent upon our thought, which are at the same time real in the sense that we really think them. But though their characters depend on how we think, they do not depend on what we think those characters to be.