Hypertext and Pandora

In his essay on hypertext, Landow references Thais Morgan, claiming that "intertextuality replaces the evolutionary model of literary history with a structural or synchronic model of literature as a sign system. The most salient effect of this strategic change is to free the literary text from psychological sociological, and historical determinisms, opening it up to an apparently infinite play of relationships" (35).

This whole concept of linking materials together in what Derrida calls an "assemblage" or web reminds me of the popular Pandora internet radio. Similar to Daniel's hypertext essay, "Public Secrets," which is based on an algorithm, Pandora generates an ever evolving playlist that accommodates your musical tastes. The "like" or "dislike" feature of Pandora lets you control what style of music you want to listen to, but functions on attributes such as genre, artist, and other musical qualities to "suggest" music for your radio station.

Now whether you use Pandora for study music, or to seek out new artists, the great thing about this program is that it is designed to make connections between artists that may never actually meet or even know of each other. Landow talks about the interaction of consciousness and escaping the boundary of the book page. Hypertext serves as that gateway which can weave ideas together that one might not cognitively piece together on his own.

Talking about "Decentering," Landow says, "hypertext transforms any document that has more than one link into a transient center, a directory document that one can employ to orient oneself and to decide where to go next" (37). Pandora is such a great example of this web of information because it provides a new center of investigation with each tweak or adjustment you make to your music profile. In very basic music terms, say you're listening to a folk station, which also offers you acoustic music, which you "like" by pressing the thumbs up button. Now you've added acoustic music to your profile, which is an umbrella for countless other genres. So as you can see, the web grows quite quickly. Although the entire advantages and disadvantages of hypertext theory are still to be seen, the "freeing" of information from it's physical bonds is monumental in the learning process.

Booth. Unreliable Narrators

So last year I read novel, it's called the Woman in White by Willkie Collins, and I think that the narrator would certainly qualify as unreliable. Booth defines a reliable narrator as one who "speaks or acts in accordance with the norms of the work". There are actually a few narrators in this novel, but the one I am thinking of is "Walter Hartright". His name is in quotations because at the end you find out that that isn't his name at all. The novel from the very beginning is presented as something that could hold up in the court of law, implying both it's utter truth and its direct experience by the narrator. Walter says, "he will describe them [plot events] in his own person. When experience fails, he will retire from the position of narrator..." However by the end of the novel the plot has deteriorated to a tidy mafia style ending (I won't ruin it completely) and the reader finding out that Walter (or whatever his name is) gave himself the name "Hart-Right". Which calls into question his motives for narrating and also his character. This whole time he has had the reader under the impression that he can't do any wrong doing, just to find out he's kind of a liar as the novel concludes. I leaves the reader wondering "what else was a lie?"

I may be biting off more than I can chew...

After reading Burroughs and Landow my understanding of hypertext widened somewhat, but not enough to answer all my curiosities and uncertainties relating to the subject of hypertext and its functions, advantages, disadvantages, usability, etc. After reading to compilation of many theorists in conversation (Landow) needless to say, I felt slightly overwhelmed, yet I walked away with my expansion of knowledge dominating. Burroughs short discussion of “the cut-up method” and “the fold-in method” and Landow’s argument that hypertext lacks a structured center confused me in terms of genre. In Miller’s “Genre as Social Action” the key claim was that “Genre must be centered… on the action it is used to accomplish” and that it is an accumulative effort of societies interpretation and grouping that define genres, which is difficult enough as it is (Miller 151). So when Landow states that “anyone who uses hypertext makes his or her own interests the de facto organizing principle (or center) for the investigation at the moment” it makes Miller’s claim that genre is a social action inapplicable to hypertext theory (Landow 37). Unless of course hypertext is viewed as a genre that stands alone, and does not give the reader agency in terms of critiquing the form upon which the text is derived. I am still trying to wrap my head around where exactly hypertext fits in when organizing and categorizing and its relationship with rhetoric.

“Choose Your Path” Books

The articles on the abilities and networks of hypertext reminded me of a few novels I enjoyed reading as a child, the “choose your own way” type books. These were often scary stories or mysteries that, at various points, offered the reader the option of how to progress further action, to choose for the character. The choices branched further reading off to a new page further in the book, creating a web of paths that led, sometimes to back in circles (which is less like the idea of a tree-map and a lot more like the case study), but mostly to various ends. As a child, this control was a very interesting concept. I could actually determine what happens to the characters in the book.

Readers in general have a sort of agency, freedom in the way they can interpret a text, but hypertexts add a whole new layer to this agency. One is still only limited to the choices given in the text, but this ability allows the reader to really create the types of characters for themselves. This creation is an extreme form of reader-agency, a product of networking within hypertexts.

Often when I made an important choice in these novels, I would scan the other options or branches of decision to see how they too panned out. This interlinks the types of characters that can be creates, contrasting the decisions and networking between a multiplicity of voices generated by reader-agency.

And when the action connects back to previous sections (in a way that conjures images of Burrough’s “déjà-vu” fold-over technique), the networking system of the hypertext allows for a comparison of voices, a heteroglossia in which varying decisions/voices of character play off of and add to each other. A web is created within the novel, giving the reader extreme agency over the characters and allowing them to see the implications of their decisions by creating a web or network of all possible compared and contrasted decisions.

Bare Life

Upon incarceration, the prisoners are stripped of their citizenship and become bodies, literally “property of the state”. Thus all subjective qualities in the lives of the prisoners are diminished, and they become a type of “bare life”. This idea of “bare life”, a study of Gorgio Agamben and quoted in “Public Secrets”, is a life involving no choices, no freedoms. This extends to the point where the prisoners have no control over what they do with their own bodies. Prisoners in the case study commented about how, if they even got sunburned out in the prison yard, they would receive a 105 from the system, giving them thirty more days in jail. And if prisoners are but the “property of the state”, an objective “body” living the barest of functional life, than how could they possibly act as agent?

When you limit someone‘s ability to choose or to even think and act for themselves, you simultaneously limit their agency. The prison system fully perverts this concept by completely stripping them of free choice. Thus the prisoners have no agency, no control of their own lives, which are considered, while in jail, completely controlled by the system. This creates and extremely unbalanced power dynamic between prisoners and prison system.

The prison system then has all agency, controlling every facet of the objective bodies (prisoner’s) day (from where they sleep to what they eat to how they spend each and every minute). When diminishing prisoners to a form of “bare life” they become easily manageable, simple objects to be given food, clothes, and shelter. The problem with this system, as one that is meant to inspire progress, is that, in treating its inhabitants like bodies, the prisoners are static and learn nothing.

One of the prisoners in the case study attributed this to the core way the prison system works. It is a “judge and punish” system, one that’s main intention is to prevent further incidents through punishment. A more effective system would involve “nurturing and rehabilitizing”, a system that digs deeper to find out why the crimes were committed.

It seems obvious that to have a productive penal system, one can’t strip all agency from its prisoners. Rather the system must give prisoners agency, letting them find out why they committed the crime and how not to repeat it. The system must educate or, in the extreme view of Daniels, be abolished completely.

Prisons, to prevent future crimes, mustn’t ask, how can we suppress these criminals? But rather dig deeper and ask, why were these crimes committed in the first place? The solution can only be found within the prisoners, and that will never be if they are only allowed to live a bare life.

Cut-Up Method in Gus Van Sant's "Elephant"

While reading William Burrough’s The Future of the Novel I tried to think of examples of novels I am familiar with that use either the “cut-up method” or the “fold-in method,” he describes. The cut-up method is likened to collage-style painting, while he explains the fold-in method as being, “A page of text—my own or someone else’s—is folded down the middle and placed on another page—The composite text is then read across half one text and half the other,” (Burroughs 305). Burroughs is interested in telling stories in a non-linear fashion, because “…with time and space shifts we see events from different viewpoints and realize that so seen they are literally not the same events, and that the old concepts of time and reality are no longer valid,” (305). I want to say that Burroughs is interested in playing with the context of events, but it seems that that is not quite accurate for what he is describing.

I am having difficulty thinking of a novel I have read that uses the cut-up or fold-in method, but the film Elephant by Gus Van Sant immediately came to my mind. The film is about a high school shooting, and is told from multiple perspectives. While multiple perspectives in a narrative is nothing new, what I found to be novel about this particular narrative was that the same scene would be shot literally from different character’s perspectives. The film will follow one character for several scenes, and then will change and follow a different character. What is significant about this is that if Character 1 and Character 2 are in the same scene, regardless of if they interact with one another or not, Van Sant will show that scene twice, with camera angles suggesting the change in perspective.

While at some points this style made the film tedious for me, thinking about it helps me to understand what Burroughs is saying when he says that seeing events from different viewpoints lets us see that they are not the same events at all. In a scene with Character 1 standing at his locker while Character 2 has an intense interaction with another student a few lockers down, showing this from both perspectives lets the audience see that any moment can have much or no significance to an individual. It caused an unsettling feeling in me as a viewer, because the interactions from the shooters perspective was suspenseful and upsetting, while repeating the same shot from another character’s perspective made the interaction seem nonchalant or even boring. While it is hard for me to find the vocabulary to describe what non-linear narratives do for an audience, I can say for sure that they cause an awareness in the reader that traditional narratives often do not achieve.

Public Secrets, Secret Authors

Daniel's "Public Secrets," while it had a much deeper point I'm sure, kept making me wonder who on Earth could be the author? It seems as if most of us think that the author is Daniel. I could agree. Or I could just argue for the sake of a blog post.

When I first asked myself this question, I thought of the interviewed as the authors. After all, we see their words, not Daniel's. Daniel just slapped them on a web page. Daniel is the creator of "Public Secrets," but was she the author? Well, there was my big question. Could the author and the creator be two different people?

My conclusion: not really. The creator of a work is always, as we've already discussed in class, compiled of many different people and many different things. The author, the audience, the context, the language... these are all things (but not the only things) that make up a text. In all honesty, I had to tell myself, "Public Secrets" could be compared to many other genres in order to come up with Daniel as the author. The reason I couldn't see Daniel as an author was because Daniel stripped herself of an identity in "Public Secrets."

I'll use an example that is the most comparable I could think of: a newspaper article. More specifically, a news newspaper article. Never mind the opinion page, because that's the one place when a writer in a newspaper gets to have more of an identity. A reporter, however, gets little identity. A reporter is to report. Whatever text a reporter writes that is not a quotation is meant to clarify or set up a quotation. If a reporter writes a piece that includes no quotations, it's pure information (and a little fluff, if need be). A reporter's job is, like Daniel's, to give the story identity so that it can breathe its own life.

I keep thinking of McCloud when I write this. He kept saying that the author had to blend into the background sometimes to get his point across, and the reason for that is getting clearer and clearer. Stick to the story, because the author picked it. The author chose not to write a story about his or her own childhood or culture, so he or she fades into the background so that we as readers may appreciate the story that the author chose to tell.

Daniel's Exigency

After scanning through the most recent posts I've decided to discuss the exigency of Sharon Daniel from a personal experience I had of visiting Tennessee's Riverbend maximum security prison. This prison is also the site of the state's electric chair and lethal injection facilities. It currently holds around 700 offenders, more than half of which are considered high risk prisoners.

So of the few "field trips" I had my senior year in high school, one of the most, for lack of a better word, memorable ones was my trip to Riverbend. I went with a Social Conscience class who had been able to get us a tour of the place. We met staff from all different departments, a couple of inmates, and toured the grounds of the prison.

Daniel's project about the horrifying condition of the prison system, along with Miller's discussion of exigence, led me to thinking about the chilling surreality of that facility. Any reader who takes but ten minutes to explore Daniel's project would immediately question why people, although considered criminals, are receiving such inhumane treatment. This sympathy is cultivated from our identity as a collective species, and invites us to participate in recognizing that "social need" that Miller says we can address in a "socially recognizable and interpretable way" (158). "Public Secrets" is a manifestation of voices, thoughts, and pictures that you can't know without having experienced it. But assembling the struggle of the inmates' situation in this form allows their actual voices to be heard. It lets the reader connect with three minds: the author's, the inmate's, and his own. The project addresses a "socially objectified motive," creating the need for us to react, to respond.

Daniel's exigence is the realization of corruption in the system. It is a part realizing the flaws in our procedures from prisons, perhaps rooted even deeper in the state government. The introduction of this project to me through this class shows me that I also have witnessed a social pattern of separateness and that someone such as Daniel is out to expose it.

Trying to Connect Miller's Hierarchies

I have been having a bit of trouble trying to decipher Miller's notions on "Hierarchical theories of meaning," at least to some point where I feel that I have a decent grasp on where she is connecting them(159). The first hierarchy that she discusses calls for a mix of of substance and form as being essential to understanding symbolic meaning. She says that substance "constitutes the aspects of common experience that are being symbolized," presumably through language, and form acts as "the ways in which substance is symbolized(159)." If substance is the idea, then form is the media in which that idea is symbolized, which I suppose may not necessarily need to be words. Miller then throws in a third hierarchical level of understanding when she adds the concept of "context" to the mix, explaining that context is needed because it "specifies the criteria for interpreting both the meaningfulness and property of any communicative event (160)." Context, in one way or another, sets the stage for the language that is being communicated, and with that sense of a setting, there can be a better understanding of what meaning is being understood. With this hierarchy of substance, form, and context in mind, I seem to be having a bit of difficulty being completely certain with how it links with the hierarchy that Miller creates later in her text.
Miller's later proposed hierarchy finally puts the term "genre" into the hierarchical mix, but I am really not sure how necessary it is. In a lot of ways, Miller's definition of genre seems a lot like what is described as context. She notes that "genres are provided interpretive context by form-of-life patterns and are constituted by intermediate forms or strategies (161)", and also says that, "genre is interpretable by means of rules (163)." Isn't all of this what is meant by context? The form-of-life patterns that provide guidelines for interpretation and meaning is really what context was referring to in the first hierarchy that was introduced, wasn't it? Again, I may be way off base and probably overgeneralizing, but it seems like all that Miller's proposed hierarchy does is make her first hierarchy that she talks about unnecessarily complicated, and it is when language is over complicated that it most often fails. I think that in this case, the simpler the hierarchy, the easier it is to comprehend, but maybe someone else can let me in on a little more insight before I take this to the bank.

Hypertext and Narrative: The Death of the Author?

Conventionally, one thinks of the author as a creator of text. The driving force behind a literary work, and in particular the narrative, is the author. The traditional narrative utilizes a linear structure, and the author writes in the order that he percieves the reader to follow the text. While we have discussed agency extensively in class, it is undeniable that the the narrative empowers the author as the dictator of fiction. The writer determines structure and form, and the writer leads the reader through the text. While the reader may be responsible for taking away meaning from the text, the groundwork is layed by the author. As we enter the age of digital technology, however, we must start to think about the function of the writer that produces digital texts. As we saw in Daniel's "Public Secrets," the linear model of the typical narrative all but dissapeared, and the author was reduced to an organizer. The author simply serves as the individual that compiles the relevant substance of the work, and the reader is the one that determines how to navigate the intricate web of information. Of course, "Public Secrets" is not a typical narrative, but it is indeed an example of hypertext.

Landrows "Hypertext and Critical Theory" discusses the role of the author quite extensively in relation to hypertext. Borrowing the term from Barthe, I would like to propose that hypertext, especially in the digital realm, may indeed by the death of the traditional author. Hypertext is the end of the hiearchial and linear organization of text, the depletion traditional frames and even inviting in endless possibilities of influence within. Derrida's influence in hypertext theory is of importance, as Landrow states that he "understands that electronic computing and other changes in media have eroded the power of the linear model and the book as related culturally dominant paradigms" (pg. 470). But what does this mean for the author, and his function within the narrative? More and more, it seems to point to the direction that digital media is heading...No longer are narratives bound to the physical limitations of pages, reliant on the author for structure. Digital media and computing can empower the reader with this task.

While it is somewhat of a stretch, I would like to use videogames as an illustration. Today, many games follow storylines. The videogame designers (the authors) construct the story line and provide the arena for the players to follow the story through gameplay, but the player (the reader!)is ultimately the individual that decides how to navigate the game. The game is not bound by a linear structure. I use this analogy because I feel that the role of the author in hypertext merely works to organize and produce a loose structure of narrative, but ultimately has little to no say in how the reader interprets or navigates the text.

Agency and Exigency

I am intrigued by the concept of “exigency” in Miller’s “Genre as Social Action.” Miller borrows this concept from Bitzer, but she understands the concept quite differently from Bitzer. Miller defines exigency as “a form of social knowledge – a mutual constructing of objects, events, interests, and purposes that not only links them but also makes them what they are: an objectified social need” (157). It provides for the rhetor a sense of rhetorical purpose, but is separate from intention. Miller also notes that “Exigence provides the rhetor with a socially recognizable way to make his or her intentions known” (158). To me, this sounds a lot like Campbell’s definition of agency. Both speak to a way for a person to communicate something that will be recognized by a community. This causes me to question, are exigency and agency related concepts? How do these concepts work differently in texts?

Miller also states “It provides an occasion, and thus a form, for making public our private version of things” (158). Here, I think, agency and exigency clearly depart from each other. Agency as I understand it is the capacity to act – not the occasion or the form. Perhaps agency enables us to recognize exigency and act on it. Exigence is that something needs to be done/said/written, and agency is the capacity to be able to do such a thing. If I have agency, I may or may not act, but a situation demonstrating exigency might propel me towards action. However, Miller states that exigency is not a cause of rhetorical action. Rather, it is a social motive (158). Miller states, “[Exigency] is an understanding of social need in which I know how to take an interest, in which one can intend to participate” (158). This statement makes me think that agency precedes exigency. If one doesn’t have the capacity to act or write in a certain community, it would make acting on exigency very difficult. Perhaps it is possible to recognize that a situation has exigency.

Recurrent situations produce social exigencies (159). Recurrent situations also give rise to genres. I am wondering, then, if genre is an expression of social exigencies. How might this change the way we read genres, if indeed they are expressions of social exigencies, especially if genres have agency?

The Circle of Audience Ownership

After discussion in class, I have been thinking a lot about the quality of ownership concerning a text, whether a piece of writing can belong to the author or if it belongs completely to the public after being written. This has been an issue in both Wimsatt and Beardsley's The Intentional Fallacy and Miller's Genre As Social Action. Both texts deal with the interaction of literature in society and how the two function together in understanding intention.

There are three elements in the equation of interpretation: author, audience, and critic. In Wimsatt and Beardsley's piece, they address this as they write, "'Is not a critic, asks Professor Stoll, 'a judge, who does not explore his own consciousness, but determines the author's meaning or intention, as if the poem were a will, a contract, or the constitution? The poem is not the critic's own'"(812). They set the critic aside as a separate participant in the writing, then go on to say, "The poem belongs to the public. It is embodied in the language, the peculiar possession of the public, and it is about the human being, an object of public knowledge"(812). In this case, the poem does not belong to the creator, the critic, but to those that the poem came from - the inspiration, which is the audience. The public acts as the paint on the canvas that they get handed back to them.

This interpretation parallels many of Miller's arguments in Genre As Social Action because Miller's argument lies in the effect of society on genre, which can be extended to literary criticism. Miller writes, "Situations are social constructs that are the results, not of 'perception,' but of 'definition.' Because human action is based on and guided by meaning, not by material cases, at the center of action is a process of interpretation"(284). Human action is the derivative of interpretation. This then makes sense that the critic must be taken out of the equation and left unable to be the owner of a text. The audience is not preoccupied with judging the text, and can therefore interact with it like the the author intended, with the image of the audience in mind. This circular method of ownership is what I have come to when it comes to who owns poems, prose, etc., but I would be really interested in how everyone else sees it!

Burroughs' Dashes

I found Burroughs' grammatical format sort of interesting in the essay that we read. He uses every kind of punctuation that would be expected, except for the period. Instead, he uses dashes at the ends of his sentences. But are they really sentences if not demarcated by proper punctuation? I think his use of dashes is meant to reflect some of what he's talking about in terms of changing literary form. The dash after each idea indicates that the following ideas flow from the previous ideas in a way that periods do not necessarily convey (neither visually, nor grammatically). Rather than stopping ideas when there is a grammatical pause, Burroughs creates a very linear text--as opposed to the nonlinear narratives he is writing about--by linking each idea with a dash.

However, at the end of the piece, Burroughs seems to be poking fun at his reader, perhaps showing how the fold-in method can lead to both jarring confusion and new meaning in a text. He states, "In any case [the fold-in technique is] a matter for experimentation not argument--The conferring writers have been accused by the press of not paying sufficient attention to the question of human survival--" (306). In the first sentence, Burroughs is referring to the technique he has been describing in the essay, but in the second, he seems to veer off course and start talking about something unrelated. The rest of the paragraph and essay are about his writings and the "question of human survival." While he seems to be demonstrating some sort of fold-in method here, it also seems like he's indicating something fundamental about the flow of ideas in a text and textual instability (?). With just one unrelated phrase--even a phrase that might be somewhat related--he segues into an entirely different topic. His system of dashes ends up tricking the reader, leading them into the sense that the ideas are flowing from one another, and then taking these ideas into a jarringly unfamiliar realm. Perhaps the message here is, yes, literature should explore different ways of representing time and space, but watch yourself, reader, because this might bring you somewhere that you're not altogether familiar with!

Genres and Agency

Back in September, Vanessa asked a very interesting question to the class: Does genre have agency? Certain writing situations recur again and again, which creates new genres. A related question might be, what kinds of power do genres have over what we read and write? I think that Miller’s “Genre as Social Action” might equip us to finally answer some of these questions.

“Genre study is valuable…because it emphasizes some social and historical aspects of rhetoric that other perspectives do not” (Miller 151). Thus, genre definitions cannot be centered only in classifying substance and form, but on the action that fusions of substance and form accomplish. Agency as Campbell defines it is also centered in action: to have agency is to have the capacity to speak/write in ways recognized by one’s community (Campbell 3). Agency and genre both require action, which accomplishes something specific.

Forms of writing – a part of genre – shape our expectations for pieces of writing, and they shape our response to certain kinds of writing, and this might be thought of as an agency. In fact, Campbell states that forms have power because they signal to readers how to categorize the form of the piece of writing (7). Since genres represent typified rhetorical action, a productive question to ask might be, does typified rhetorical action have agency? Campbell has established that the agent – the person writing or speaking – can use agency. Thus, is the action seems to be an expression of this agency.

Consider Miller’s concept of the recurrent rhetorical situation. These situations give rise to discourse, but as it is people producing/using discourse that cause the situations to recur, I am not sure that the situations themselves have agency. Miller notes that other scholars, such as Jamison and Campbell, have noted that recurrent situations provide insight into the human condition (156). Perhaps, then, recurrent situations give us insight into the kinds of agency that are happening around us, rather than being agential in and of themselves.

It is possible that genre has agency, and that this agency is separate in function from that of the author. Texts, too, have agency (Campbell 7). To say that a text has agency separate from the author is not to disregard the agency of the author – after all, someone (an agent) writes a text, which is itself an expression of agency. The text’s agency may be a result from the author’s since an author is a necessary predecessor to a text, but it separate and may function differently. Campbell notes that the agency of a text is linked the audience.

As both texts and forms have agency, it would follow that genres also have agency. This is an agency independent from that of the text, although perhaps genre agency works with textual agency to communicate something to the reader. Genres are produced by recurrent agential actions, and in the discourse situation the genre of a piece has an agency separate from the author’s, the text’s, and the reader’s. However, it is an agency that helps to shape the interactions between author, reader, and text.

Millers Genre as Applied to Daniel's "Public Secrets"

Reading Miller's essay "Genre as Social Action" motivated me to think of genres as more than just a catagorization, but as situationally defined. Miller states that "genres are typified rhetorical actions based in rhetorical situations" (pg. 158). Her discussion of a eulogy as a genre really hammered home her claims. In class we mentioned that a particular genre is a means to connecting private intentions to social function, or exigence. In thinking about the eulogy as a genre, we must pay attention to the intention of the author and how the writing of the eulogy serves to promote and reaffirm societal beliefs about death and mourning. As a sociology minor, the function of the genre and its rhetorical value within a culture is an important and interesting topic to me.

But what about Daniel's "Public Secrets?" Is it possible to label this piece as a genre that serves as a rhetorical action that occurs within a certain social situation? While "Public Secrets" does not fit as nicely into Millers definition of genre as the eulogy, it does typify genre as something that connects Daniel's private intentions to serve as a social function. Daniel's multimedia project is a look inside the lives of women within a prison. Daniel's intentions seems pretty clear from the introduction and the project itself: to expose the prison system and give voice to the women who have spent time incarcerated within their walls. Connecting this private intention with a public exigence, however, is a more difficult. What rhetorical situation does her project fit in to? Daniel has rhetorically set out to expose the lives of prisoners to her audiences. In doing so, and by producing her piece in an easily accessible format on the internet, she is entering herslef into the conversation about an interesting facet of our society (the institution of prison). The substance of Daniels project, as Miller would define it, is her investigation of the institution and the interviews she conducts of those living as prisoners within. In doing so, she exposes an often ignored part of our society. While it may not be as clearly defined as the eulogy as occuring within a specific rhetorical situation, it is intended to serve a rhetorical purpose and thus, as social action as well.

Evolution

In "Hypertext and Critical Theory," one of the points concerning hypertext on which Landow chooses to quote the pervasive Derrida is the status of the book: "The form of the 'book' is now going through a period of general upheaval" (Derrida in Landow 47). Hypertext, Derrida (and by association, Landow) claims is the rising star of the textual world, due to its fewer limitations.

Looking at how the publishing industry (and a number of others) is being swiftly dominated by electronic media, I would say that the E-book is doing for print what a timely meteor shower did the dinosaurs, only more slowly and with less mercy. Although bookshops are still to be found (for now), I'm already grieving for this dying format. One day books will make kids do double-takes of the kind inspired by the record in the mp3 age.

"Hypertexts," Landow writes, "relate directly to performance, to interaction" (41). The E-book does offer more interactive advantages than the book; Project Gutenberg, for example, allows for a range of text connection, whether you want to find a collection based on their topic, publication year, authors, or even language. The same would be true for any quality E-bookstore. In a traditional library, you are obliged to wander adventurously on your own or get help from a Dewey Decimal-savvy librarian.

Rearranged Narrative

I am intrigued by William Burroughs's "fold-in method" of writing, in which (if I understand Burroughs correctly), two texts are made into a composite text by placing half a page of one atop another. While the physical method strikes me as a bit impractical in terms of readability, I do think there may be value in exploring narrative that is arranged in non-linear form.

I laughed a little at Burroughs's specific mention of "flashback used in film," as these days the flashback is just as common in written works. Contemporary novels make use of non-linear extensively, if in creative little ways - the magical "pensieve" used in the Harry Potter series comes to mind. In a way it seems Burroughs did predict the future of the novel.

I wonder if stepping outside the linear tradition might be successful in other forms too. The theatre set is always looking for new ways to produce Shakespeare; why not shuffle the scenes a bit? While reading "The Future of the Novel," I was reminded of the first time I watched "Amadeus." It was on one of those double-sided DVDs you have to turn over halfway through the film, and I began it with Side B. It wasn't until the credits began rolling that I realized my mistake, and so I simply flipped the disc and watched Side A. Memorably, the film made just as much sense as if I had watched it in order and, perhaps, held even more meaning for me because I knew what the ending would be.

Hulu Advertising and Genre

I was thinking about different cases that I could talk about during my SCD 3 while watching Hulu today (heh heh), and I started thinking about the new way that hulu advertises as sort of an extension of our discussion about genre. I don't know if you watch hulu at all, but basically it has this new feature that allows you to choose the ads you want to watch, to personalize your own "ad experience." So when you watch a show, there is usually an option at the beginning to either take a questionnaire about a certain product or TV show and watch the rest of the show commercial free, or to watch with regular commercial breaks. If you choose the latter option, each ad has the question, "Is this ad relevant to you?" with a yes or no button to choose. If you choose to click on either button, the program promises to use your information to better you "ad experience." With either option, the viewer is asked to directly participate in choosing the type of advertisement that is directed towards him/her.

This reminded me of Daniels' "Public Secrets" project, because it seems somewhat similar to a treemap. The viewer is asked to decide between two options, and these options lead to the viewing of different advertisements (and therefore more options that are thematically or product-fully related). It seems to me that this Hulu project is evidence of the changing/dynamic genre of advertising. Instead of sticking with what the assumed consumer base is for each show, the website invites the consumers to in essence tell it what to advertise. In this way, they are given some control over what they are seeing advertised, but Hulu retains ultimate control over their consumer experience. It seems like this system of choice and control is a way in which genre can affect the lives of the public--through deciding how consumers relate to the genre of advertising.

Calvin & Hobbes, Aristotle, & Academia

This strip pretty much sums up the frustration I feel with 'academia-speech.' I love Aristotle's logic that the best rhetoric is that which is most easily accessible, that which relies on common logic instead of big words.

Miller has me thinking a lot about genre, and I wonder what she would have to say about the genre of academic writing. She writes, “Human action, whether symbolic or otherwise, is interpretable only against a context of situation and through the attributing of motives” (Miller 152). So, when it comes to super complex, 'difficult' academic papers like the ones Bill Watterson is poking fun at in the strip above, do the motives include hierarchization and commodification of knowledge? If a paper is intelligible only those who have access to years of schooling, would Longinus condemn that motive as 'bad'?

Scream

Today in class Professor Graban asked us to give an example of Carolyn Miller's idea that there is a symbiotic relationship between a genre and itself--that when writers read a genre, their writing is influenced by that genre. They recognize the tropes that are at play in the genre, and mimic and challenge them in different ways to make a genre fresh. In class I was drawing a blank as to an example of this, however I have been thinking about it all day and I have come up with one. Scream.

For those of you who don't know Scream was a 90's horror flick staring Drew Barrymore, Courtney Cox, David Arquette, and a young Neve Campbell. At the time horror movies weren't doing so well in the box offices, and the genre was basically dead. When a writer by the name of Kevin Williamson took the horror genre and made a horror move that was in conversation with everything that had come before.

The characters in Scream are extremely familiar with the tropes of the horror genre. However, their awareness of what has come before doesn't uses but doesn't destroy the horror films of the past. This film is set up as a horror film about horror films.

It is also part of the idea we were talking about when one is influenced by past works in the genre and writes a piece in the genre that reflects how it allows for the genre to grow and expand, which then leads to others doing the same with this new addition to the genre. We can see this happening with Scream in the other horror films of the mid to late 90's and early 2000's such as the Urban Legend and the Final Destination movies. The characters and the writers alike seem to have been influenced and are knowledgeable about the past of their genre.

Does that make sense?