Final Project: Personal Statement

Jane Lippman

05/06/12

 

Final Project: Self Reflection

            When I first arrived at Washington College, I thought that I knew my way around revision pretty well. I’m able to take criticism of my work well, willing to chop up a piece of writing only to reorganize or delete sections of it… and perhaps add on whole new paragraphs or pages. I thought I was perfectly capable in the revising field… turns out I was wrong.

While I was able to slice and dice the work easily enough, I wasn’t able to accurately come up with all the necessary parts of an argument. I was never able to think up a strong counter argument before now, or come up with a conclusion that does more than reiterate my paper in a paragraph. Logos was always a weak point of mine, as well as my natural tendency to ramble. Grammar has always been a nightmare in my papers, although I’d thought I’d finally reached a point where mine was passable. Then winter break came along, I stopped writing, and when I arrived back for the fall semester, I was grasping at straws, trying to remind myself that a paragraph shouldn’t be one full sentence.

I was able to improve upon these as the semester progressed, and decided that I wanted to showcase these talents in the third project. When that came out weaker than I intended, I couldn’t think about doing anything else for the final project other than fixing the third project into a work that I could be proud of, one that I took the time and effort to mold into a good piece of writing.

I was able to tidy up the closing pages, make them seem like a less drawn-out conclusion. I was able to more effectively give a counter argument, with the extra time given to go back over the paper. My favorite part of the revision, though, as always, was the chance to elaborate on what had already been written, to take an idea that I hadn’t fully expanded—just briefly mentioned—and take the time to go into detail with it, to flesh it out into a larger metaphor that got my point across in a particularly colorful way.

I’m not saying that my writings skills are perfect now—far from it. I’ll have to keep practicing the new skills I’ve acquired or else risk losing them. I also want to learn how to better deal with bringing in the “So What/Who Cares” part of an argument that I learned about in my GRW course—taking my argument and applying it to real life, stating why it matters to all people, and not just to me. I know that it’s something that I really struggle with, and I’m considering taking the matter with me to the writing center, should I be unable to grasp it more readily in the coming semester. I’d also like to work more on my logos, and making my argument flow more than it currently does. I worry that the problem is in how I think—too sporadically and unorganized—and not in how I write. If so I’ll have to do more to organize my thoughts, before I put them to paper.

Over all, though, I am pleased with where my writing has ended up. I took a large step in going from high school level writing, to understanding what is needed in a college level paper and working my hardest to grasp those concepts. I did my best to improve myself, and while at times I admit I felt I was going backwards, I can say that in this paper I feel that I’ve finally made up for lost ground and come up with my best work yet… in this course at least. I feel like I’ve come a long way as a writer and a thinker, and that this shows through in my final project.

Final Project: Revised Draft

Jane Lippman

05/06/12

The Genres of Storytelling

            Almost everyone nowadays knows that books are under siege. There are fresh ways to go about reading: eBooks, hypertexts, audiobooks. Less and less people are actually reading a book made up of bound pieces of paper, words printed via ink pressed into delicate pages. Sven Birkerts thinks that the situation is dire, that the time of the death of the book is upon us. With hypertexts like The Cape out there, it is easy to panic and take up Birkerts’ view. However, I don’t believe that books are dying or will be forgotten as this new medium takes a greater place in the reading world; books will merely become a form of reading, a genre of medium to choose from.

Birkerts claims, in his argument against the hypertext, that “to make a mark on a page is to gesture toward permanence” (Birkerts, 157). However, he does not apply this permanence towards a hypertext, or any form of medium that isn’t tangible—to use his word, “opaque” (156). In other words, he claims that words are only worth as much as their appearance, as the clothes (medium) that they wear, and that they have no deeper, innate meaning.

I find Birkerts’ argument puzzling. He doesn’t believe in the power of words, yet, we had spoken language long before there was ever a written word. Our memories used to be of greater capacity, and we could remember the spoken word much better than we can now. All we had then were words. Birkerts would argue that we have made progress from that, and that by turning towards other medium we are regressing towards a world where words aren’t written in stone, that their meanings can be lost.

I can’t disagree with him more. The power of a word isn’t in the manner in which it was written, but in the connotations that we ourselves have given it, in the way that we let the words shape our lives. When I think of the word love, I don’t think about the four characters that I just hit on a keyboard that the computer just electronically inputted through a series of fancy programming rules into this word document. No, I think of situations I’ve experienced, of books I’ve read, of people and places and things completely outside of those 4 letter characters. Those are what words are—not printed characters, those are just their clothes—but ideas, powerful enough to shape all of human history.

Murray, in contradiction to Birkerts, states, “the computer is not the enemy of the book”, that the computer is merely “the child of print culture” (Murray, 8). She turned to hypertext and other medium because she found books limited, the manner in which they were written not informative enough. She wanted to have more information available to a reader, craved to live in a hypertext world where there is more than one way to tell a story, more information about elements of the tale accessible. She is “not among those who are eager for the death of the book” (8). She doesn’t even think that the death of the book is a real threat. However, she is open to other areas of storytelling, new ideas of how to write, and that is no sin.

I am torn between feelings similar to Birkerts—that we are losing something special—as well as Murray—that we are entering a new, exciting form of storytelling, that is open to more creative manners and mediums of telling a tale. I can relate to Birkers’ youth, to the wanna-be-writer who spends all their time surrounded by books, writing in journals, living in secondhand bookshops: I do that too. I surround myself with books, consider them some of my very best of friends, and live for the day when my name might end up stamped on a cover of a novel. I’m stuck in this book-centered past, setting my dreams up in it, loving it and craving it to never be any less than it is.

As a storyteller, however, I can admit honestly that Murray’s favored brand of storytelling works quite well. Hypertexts give a lot more to storytelling.  Take The Cape by J. R. Carpenter. The storyline is easy enough to follow (you click on the pictures to move from ‘page’ to ‘page’), but there are added elements of moving pictures and audio clips that bring the story to life. The elements combine to create an overall work of art that would be less for the loss of any of its components. The piece is short, and definitely not a traditional ‘book’… but it is a story, portrayed beautifully, that captivates the audience and makes them care to discover more about this world that the author has created.

Maybe hypertexts and such things aren’t books… not in Birkerts’ sense of the word. They could be closer to works of art. That’s okay. They still tell a story—just like paintings by great artists like Van Gogh do—and can be a great medium for storytelling, if the author is any good. Books, hypertexts, audiobooks, TV, movies… all of these are ways to tell a story. As such, I believe that someday in the near future, they can all be viewed as genres of the same thing (storytelling), and we can stop arguing over which is better than the other. The emergence of hypertext isn’t the end of the world, the death of the book… it’s just a new genre being added to the many that we already have. Sure, people will have favorites. Some people like to watch movies more than they like to read books. Others like to watch plays over reading. Some are bookworms. The addition of a hypertext only adds a new medium for people to love, another genre for people to pursue… or not to pursue, if they so choose.

Of course, some still say that the book is dying, that these other genres will wipe away the importance of the book from society. We won’t be a print based culture anymore, but a people obsessed with our little electronic boxes and the stories they tell us. They worry that we forget our roots, or that we’ve moved on and are planting new ones instead. We have grown from so much, started with so little—just gestures and pictures before we ever had words. Then we developed spoken language, learned the taste of words, and gained the ability to figuratively move mountains, to shape empires, with sentences and phrases. Then, these words were put to paper, cemented into history, given permanence. Print culture is alike a tree that grew from a tiny little seed—first it grew roots, and then reached skywards, developed a thick trunk and sturdy branches, with leaves (authors) that give the tree vibrancy for a season, before falling and being replaced by new life. If we were to lose this, we would lose a large part of our culture, something that has grown to be sturdy and strong and has lasted us for centuries.

At most though, I feel that the only major change we’re seeing is the sprouting of a few acorns… that, if left to fall, may turn into a new tree altogether, but one that is shaped by the one it grew out of before. Even now, hypertexts are trying to be like books, movies are based off of books, audiobooks are merely books read aloud and recorded. Books will shape the future of reading for a long time to come, and I don’t believe that we will ever forget our roots. It’s impossible to, after they’ve had such a large part in shaping how we view storytelling.

And still the doubters press on—what if we manage to forget those roots, though? What if hypertext stops mimicking books and finds a life, a will, a style of it’s own? What if more original films are made, if audio books have no paper predecessor, if eBooks are the only kind released? What about my paper pages? What will happen to them?

All I can answer them with is this: maybe we are forgetting. Maybe the Time of Books is ending. Really, though… so what? Books are just one medium of storytelling. It’s the words that matter, the morals that we learn from the story, the hope and fear and love that we take away from it that matter, not the medium from which it was portrayed. Birkerts argues that electronic medium isn’t permanent, as opposed to books—in the electronic age, nothing is set in stone. To the contrary, Birkerts—I can smash up marble. I can burn a book. The electronic medium however… even if I delete a file from my personal computer, once it is put out onto the Internet for the whole world to see… it never really goes away. Just as burning one book doesn’t burn all of them. One is not more permanent than the other, they’re much more similar to each other than many would like to believe. And really, books won’t ever go away. Sure they may be read less, which will be sad, but they have been such a large part of our history that they will always shape the medium that come along after them. And, I’m sure, will be available in antique shops and adorable Used Book Shops.

Hypertext, eBook, audiobook, film, television, and the book, all are different genres of storytelling, none of them better than the other. It’s only that some are still in development, still pushing forward, growing, while some are already old and familiar to us, and we fear them being displaced in the world. Birkerts fears for the future of the book; Murray doesn’t, although she also is excitedly moving new methods of storytelling forwards. So what’s the point? We don’t have to read in fear. We can take a deep breath, relax, enjoy storytelling in all of its forms, without worrying that reading itself is vanishing. We can be safe with the knowledge that stories and those who tell them will always stick around, no matter how much the media used to tell the tales changes.

Bibliography

Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994. Print.

Murray, Janet. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace.   Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997. Print.

Carpenter, J. R. “The Cape.” 2005. Electronic Literature Collection Volume One. Web.    29 April 2012.

Honor Code Statement: I pledge my honor that I have completed this work in accordance with the Honor Code.

Final Project: Initial Draft

Self Reflection: I feel that I included Murray and Birkerts well, that I used them to further my argument effectively—this ‘works’ in my essay. What doesn’t ‘work’ as well is my counterargument, which I would strengthen more if I return to this essay. What’s next would be to expand more on the thesis—what does any of this matter/who cares?

Jane Lippman

04/29/12

The Genres of Storytelling

            Almost everyone nowadays knows that books are under siege. There are newer ways to go about reading: eBooks, hypertexts, audiobooks. Less and less people are actually reading a book made up of bound pieces of paper, words printed with ink pressed into the pages. Sven Birkerts thinks that the situation is dire, that the time of the death of the book is upon us. With hypertexts like The Cape out there, it is easy to panic and take up Birkerts’ view. However, I don’t believe that books are dying or will be forgotten as this new medium takes a greater place in the reading world; books will merely become a form of reading, a genre of medium to choose from.

Birkerts claims, in his argument against the hypertext, that “to make a mark on a page is to gesture toward permanence” (Birkerts, 157). However, he does not apply this permanence towards a hypertext, or any form of medium that isn’t tangible—to use his word, “opaque” (156). In other words, he claims that words are only worth as much as their appearance, as the clothes (medium) that they wear, and that they have no deeper, innate meaning.

I find Birkerts’ argument puzzling. He doesn’t believe in the power of words, yet, we had spoken language long before there was ever a written word. Our memories used to be of greater capacity, and we could remember the spoken word much better than we can now. All we had then, were words. Birkerts would argue that we have made progress from that, and that by turning towards other medium we are regressing towards a world where words aren’t written in stone, that their meanings can be lost.

I can’t disagree with him more. The power of a word isn’t in the manner in which it was written, but in the connotations that we ourselves have given it, in the way that we let the words shape our lives. When I think of the word love, I don’t think about the four characters that I just hit on a keyboard that the computer just electronically inputted through a series of fancy programming rules into this word document. No, I think of situations I’ve experienced, of books I’ve read, of people and places and things completely outside of those 4 letter characters. Those are what words are—not printed characters, those are just their clothes—but ideas, powerful enough to shape all of human history.

Murray, in contradiction to Birkerts, states, “the computer is not the enemy of the book”, that the computer is merely “the child of print culture” (Murray, 8). She turned to hypertext and other medium because she found books limited, the manner in which they were written not informative enough. She wanted to have more information available to a reader, craved to live in a hypertext world where there is more than one way to tell a story, more information about elements of the tale accessible. She is “not among those who are eager for the death of the book” (8). She doesn’t even think that the death of the book is a real threat. However, she is open to other areas of storytelling, new ideas of how to write, and that is no sin.

I am torn between feeling as Birkerts does—that we are losing something special—and Murray—that we are entering a new, exciting form of storytelling, that is open to more creative manners and mediums of telling a tale. I can relate to Birkers’ youth, to the wanna-be-writer who spends all their time surrounded by books, writing in journals, living in secondhand bookshops: I do that too. I surround myself with books, consider them some of my very best of friends, and live for the day when my name might end up stamped on a cover of a novel. I’m stuck in this book-centered past, setting my dreams up in it, loving it and craving it to never be any less than it is.

As a storyteller, however, I can admit honestly that Murray’s favored brand of storytelling works quite well. Hypertexts give a lot more to storytelling.  Take The Cape by J. R. Carpenter. The storyline is easy enough to follow (you click on the pictures to move from ‘page’ to ‘page’), but there are added elements of moving pictures and audio clips that bring the story to life. The elements combine to create an overall work of art that would be less for the loss of any of its components. The piece is short, and definitely not a traditional ‘book’… but it is a story, portrayed beautifully, that captivates the audience and makes them care to discover more about this world that the author has created.

Perhaps hypertexts and such things aren’t books, but are closer to works of art. That’s okay. They still tell a story, and can be a great medium for storytelling, if the author is any good. Books, hypertexts, audiobooks, TV, movies… all of these are ways to tell a story. As such, I believe that someday in the near future, they can all be viewed as genres of the same thing (storytelling), and we can stop arguing over which is better than the other. The emergence of hypertext isn’t the end of the world, the death of the book… it’s just a new genre being added to the many that we already have. Sure, people will have favorites. Some people like to watch movies more than they like to read books. Others like to watch plays over reading. Some are bookworms. The addition of a hypertext only adds a new medium for people to love, another genre for people to pursue… or not to pursue, if they so choose.

Of course, some say that the book is dying, that these other genres will wipe away the importance of the book from society. We won’t be a print based culture anymore, but a people obsessed with our little electronic boxes and the stories they tell us. They worry that we forget our roots, or that we’ve moved on and are planting new ones instead.

Maybe we are. Really, though… so what? Books are just one medium of storytelling. It’s the words that matter, the morals that we learn from the story, the hope and fear and love that we take away from it that matter, not the medium from which it was portrayed. Birkerts argues that electronic medium isn’t permanent, like books, which nothing is set in stone. To the contrary—I can smash up marble. I can burn a book. Electronic medium however, even if I delete it from my personal computer, once it is put out onto the Internet for the whole world to see… it never really goes away. Just as burning one book doesn’t burn all of them. One is not more permanent than the other, they’re much more similar to each other than many would like to believe. And really, books won’t ever go away. Sure they may be read less, which will be sad, but they have been such a large part of our history that they will always shape the medium that come along after them. Even now, hypertexts are trying to be like books, movies are based off of books, audiobooks are merely books read aloud and recorded. Books will shape the future of reading for a long time to come, and I don’t believe that we will ever forget our roots. It’s impossible to, after they’ve had such a large part in shaping how we view storytelling.

Hypertext, eBook, audiobook, film, television, and the book, all different genres of storytelling, none of them better than the other, just that some are still in development, still pushing forward, growing, while some are already old and familiar to us, and we fear them being displaced in the world. Birkerts fears for the future of the book; Murray doesn’t, although she also is excitedly moving new methods of storytelling forwards. So what’s the point? We don’t have to read in fear, we can take a deep breath, relax, enjoy storytelling in all of it’s forms, without worrying that reading itself is vanishing. We can be safe with the knowledge that stories and those who tell them will always stick around, no matter how much the media used to tell the tales changes.

Bibliography

Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994. Print.

Murray, Janet. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace.   Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997. Print.

Carpenter, J. R. “The Cape.” 2005. Electronic Literature Collection Volume One. Web.    29 April 2012.

Honor Code Statement: I pledge my honor that I have completed this work in accordance with the Honor Code.

Writing Assignment 3 Final Draft

Self Reflection: I feel that I included Murray and Birkerts well, that I used them to further my argument effectively—this ‘works’ in my essay. What doesn’t ‘work’ as well is my counterargument, which I would strengthen more if I return to this essay. What’s next would be to expand more on the thesis—what does any of this matter/who cares?

 

Jane Lippman

04/29/12

The Genres of Storytelling

            Almost everyone nowadays knows that books are under siege. There are newer ways to go about reading: eBooks, hypertexts, audiobooks. Less and less people are actually reading a book made up of bound pieces of paper, words printed with ink pressed into the pages. Sven Birkerts thinks that the situation is dire, that the time of the death of the book is upon us. With hypertexts like The Cape out there, it is easy to panic and take up Birkerts’ view. However, I don’t believe that books are dying or will be forgotten as this new medium takes a greater place in the reading world; books will merely become a form of reading, a genre of medium to choose from.

            Birkerts claims, in his argument against the hypertext, that “to make a mark on a page is to gesture toward permanence” (Birkerts, 157). However, he does not apply this permanence towards a hypertext, or any form of medium that isn’t tangible—to use his word, “opaque” (156). In other words, he claims that words are only worth as much as their appearance, as the clothes (medium) that they wear, and that they have no deeper, innate meaning.

            I find Birkerts’ argument puzzling. He doesn’t believe in the power of words, yet, we had spoken language long before there was ever a written word. Our memories used to be of greater capacity, and we could remember the spoken word much better than we can now. All we had then, were words. Birkerts would argue that we have made progress from that, and that by turning towards other medium we are regressing towards a world where words aren’t written in stone, that their meanings can be lost.

            I can’t disagree with him more. The power of a word isn’t in the manner in which it was written, but in the connotations that we ourselves have given it, in the way that we let the words shape our lives. When I think of the word love, I don’t think about the four characters that I just hit on a keyboard that the computer just electronically inputted through a series of fancy programming rules into this word document. No, I think of situations I’ve experienced, of books I’ve read, of people and places and things completely outside of those 4 letter characters. Those are what words are—not printed characters, those are just their clothes—but ideas, powerful enough to shape all of human history.

            Murray, in contradiction to Birkerts, states, “the computer is not the enemy of the book”, that the computer is merely “the child of print culture” (Murray, 8). She turned to hypertext and other medium because she found books limited, the manner in which they were written not informative enough. She wanted to have more information available to a reader, craved to live in a hypertext world where there is more than one way to tell a story, more information about elements of the tale accessible. She is “not among those who are eager for the death of the book” (8). She doesn’t even think that the death of the book is a real threat. However, she is open to other areas of storytelling, new ideas of how to write, and that is no sin.

            I am torn between feeling as Birkerts does—that we are losing something special—and Murray—that we are entering a new, exciting form of storytelling, that is open to more creative manners and mediums of telling a tale. I can relate to Birkers’ youth, to the wanna-be-writer who spends all their time surrounded by books, writing in journals, living in secondhand bookshops: I do that too. I surround myself with books, consider them some of my very best of friends, and live for the day when my name might end up stamped on a cover of a novel. I’m stuck in this book-centered past, setting my dreams up in it, loving it and craving it to never be any less than it is.

            As a storyteller, however, I can admit honestly that Murray’s favored brand of storytelling works quite well. Hypertexts give a lot more to storytelling.  Take The Cape by J. R. Carpenter. The storyline is easy enough to follow (you click on the pictures to move from ‘page’ to ‘page’), but there are added elements of moving pictures and audio clips that bring the story to life. The elements combine to create an overall work of art that would be less for the loss of any of its components. The piece is short, and definitely not a traditional ‘book’… but it is a story, portrayed beautifully, that captivates the audience and makes them care to discover more about this world that the author has created.

            Perhaps hypertexts and such things aren’t books, but are closer to works of art. That’s okay. They still tell a story, and can be a great medium for storytelling, if the author is any good. Books, hypertexts, audiobooks, TV, movies… all of these are ways to tell a story. As such, I believe that someday in the near future, they can all be viewed as genres of the same thing (storytelling), and we can stop arguing over which is better than the other. The emergence of hypertext isn’t the end of the world, the death of the book… it’s just a new genre being added to the many that we already have. Sure, people will have favorites. Some people like to watch movies more than they like to read books. Others like to watch plays over reading. Some are bookworms. The addition of a hypertext only adds a new medium for people to love, another genre for people to pursue… or not to pursue, if they so choose.

            Of course, some say that the book is dying, that these other genres will wipe away the importance of the book from society. We won’t be a print based culture anymore, but a people obsessed with our little electronic boxes and the stories they tell us. They worry that we forget our roots, or that we’ve moved on and are planting new ones instead.

            Maybe we are. Really, though… so what? Books are just one medium of storytelling. It’s the words that matter, the morals that we learn from the story, the hope and fear and love that we take away from it that matter, not the medium from which it was portrayed. Birkerts argues that electronic medium isn’t permanent, like books, which nothing is set in stone. To the contrary—I can smash up marble. I can burn a book. Electronic medium however, even if I delete it from my personal computer, once it is put out onto the Internet for the whole world to see… it never really goes away. Just as burning one book doesn’t burn all of them. One is not more permanent than the other, they’re much more similar to each other than many would like to believe. And really, books won’t ever go away. Sure they may be read less, which will be sad, but they have been such a large part of our history that they will always shape the medium that come along after them. Even now, hypertexts are trying to be like books, movies are based off of books, audiobooks are merely books read aloud and recorded. Books will shape the future of reading for a long time to come, and I don’t believe that we will ever forget our roots. It’s impossible to, after they’ve had such a large part in shaping how we view storytelling.

Hypertext, eBook, audiobook, film, television, and the book, all different genres of storytelling, none of them better than the other, just that some are still in development, still pushing forward, growing, while some are already old and familiar to us, and we fear them being displaced in the world. Birkerts fears for the future of the book; Murray doesn’t, although she also is excitedly moving new methods of storytelling forwards. So what’s the point? We don’t have to read in fear, we can take a deep breath, relax, enjoy storytelling in all of it’s forms, without worrying that reading itself is vanishing. We can be safe with the knowledge that stories and those who tell them will always stick around, no matter how much the media used to tell the tales changes.

 

 

Bibliography

Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994. Print.

Murray, Janet. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace.   Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997. Print.

Carpenter, J. R. “The Cape.” 2005. Electronic Literature Collection Volume One. Web.    29 April 2012.

 

Honor Code Statement: I pledge my honor that I have completed this work in accordance with the Honor Code.

Rough Draft of Writing Project 3

Jane Lippman

04/27/12

 

Books Are Dying… Or Are They?

            Almost everyone nowadays knows that books are under siege. There are newer ways to go about reading: eBooks, hypertexts, audiobooks. Less and less people are actually reading a book made up of bound pieces of paper, words printed with ink pressed into the pages. Sven Birkerts thinks that the situation is dire, that the time of the death of the book is upon us. With hypertexts like The Cape out there, it is easy to panic and take up Birkerts’ view. However, I don’t believe that books are dying or will be forgotten as this new medium takes a greater place in the reading world; books will merely become a form of reading, a genre of medium to choose from.

Birkerts claims, in his argument against the hypertext, that “to make a mark on a page is to gesture toward permanence” (Birkerts, 157). However, he does not apply this permanence towards a hypertext, or any form of medium that isn’t tangible—to use his word, “opaque” (156). In other words, he claims that words are only worth as much as their appearance, as the clothes (medium) that they wear, and that they have no deeper, innate meaning.

I find Birkerts’ argument puzzling. He doesn’t believe in the power of words, yet, we had spoken language long before there was ever a written word. Our memories used to be of greater capacity, and we could remember the spoken word much better than we can now. All we had then, were words. Birkerts would argue that we have made progress from that, and that by turning towards other medium we are regressing towards a world where words aren’t written in stone, that their meanings can be lost.

I can’t disagree with him more. The power of a word isn’t in the manner in which it was written, but in the connotations that we ourselves have given it, in the way that we let the words shape our lives. When I think of the word love, I don’t think about the four characters that I just hit on a keyboard that the computer just electronically inputted through a series of fancy programming rules into this word document. No, I think of situations I’ve experienced, of books I’ve read, of people and places and things completely outside of those 4 letter characters. Those are what words are—not printed charactesr, those are just their clothes—but ideas, powerful enough to shape all of human history.

Murray, in contradiction to Birkerts, states, “the computer is not the enemy of the book”, that the computer is merely “the child of print culture” (Murray, 8). She turned to hypertext and other medium because she found books limited, the manner in which they were written not informative enough. She wanted to have more information available to a reader, craved to live in a hypertext world where there is more than one way to tell a story, more information about elements of the tale accessible. She is “not among those who are eager for the death of the book” (8). She doesn’t even think that the death of the book is a real threat. However, she is open to other areas of storytelling, new ideas of how to write, and that is no sin.

I am torn between feeling as Birkerts does—that we are losing something special—and Murray (that we are entering a new, exciting form of storytelling, that is open to more creative manners and mediums of telling a tale). I can relate to Birkers’ youth, to the wanna-be-writer who spends all their time surrounded by books, writing in journals, living in secondhand bookshops: I do that too. I surround myself with books, consider them some of my very best of friends, and live for the day when my name might end of stamped on a cover of a novel. I’m stuck in this book-centered past, setting my dreams up in it, loving it and craving it to never be any less than it is.

As a storyteller, however, I can admit honestly that Murray’s favored brand of storytelling works quite well. Hypertexts give a lot more to storytelling.  Take The Cape by J. R. Carpenter. The storyline is easy enough to follow (you click on the pictures to move from ‘page’ to ‘page’), but there are added elements of moving pictures and audio clips that bring the story to life. The elements combine to create an overall work of art that would be less for the loss of any of its components. The piece is short, and definitely not a traditional ‘book’… but it is a story, portrayed beautifully, that captivates the audience and makes them care to discover more about this world that the author has created.

Perhaps hypertexts and such things aren’t books, but are closer to works of art. That’s okay. They still tell a story, and can be a great medium for storytelling, if the author is any good. Books, hypertexts, audiobooks, TV, movies… all of these are ways to tell a story. As such, I believe that someday in the near future, they can all be viewed as genres of the same thing (storytelling), and we can stop arguing over which is better than the other. The emergence of hypertext isn’t the end of the world, the death of the book… it’s just a new genre being added to the many that we already have. Sure, people will have favorites. Some people like to watch movies more than they like to read books. Others like to watch plays over reading. Some are bookworms. The addition of a hypertext only adds a new medium for people to love, another genre for people to pursue… or not to pursue, if they so choose.

Of course, some say that the book is dying, that these other genres will wipe away the importance of the book from society. We won’t be a print based culture anymore, but a people obsessed with our little electronic boxes and the stories they tell us. They worry that we forget our roots, or that we’ve moved on and are planting new ones instead.

Maybe we are. Really, though… so what? Books are just one medium of storytelling. It’s the words that matter, the morals that we learn from the story, the hope and fear and love that we take away from it that matter, not the medium from which it was portrayed. Birkerts argues that electronic medium isn’t permanent, like books, which nothing is set in stone. To the contrary—I can smash up marble. I can burn a book. Electronic medium however, even if I delete it from my personal computer, once it is put out onto the Internet for the whole world to see… it never really goes away. Just as burning one book doesn’t burn all of them. One is not more permanent than the other, they’re much more similar to each other than many would like to believe.

And really, books won’t ever go away. Sure they may be read less, which will be sad, but they have been such a large part of our history that they will always shape the medium that come after them. Even now, hypertexts are trying to be like books, movies are based off of books, audiobooks are merely books read aloud and recorded. Books will shape the future of reading for a long time to come, and I don’t believe that we will ever forget our roots. It’s impossible to, after they’ve had such a large part in shaping how we view storytelling.

Hypertext, eBook, audiobook, film, television, and the book, all different genres of storytelling, none of them better than the other, just that some are still in development, still pushing forward, growing, while some are already old and familiar to us, and we fear them being displaced in the world. Birkerts fears for the future of the book; Murray doesn’t, although she also is excitedly moving new methods of storytelling forwards. So what’s the point? We don’t have to read in fear, we can take a deep breath, relax, enjoy storytelling in all of it’s forms, without worrying that reading itself is vanishing. We can be safe with the knowledge that stories and those who tell them will always stick around, no matter how much the media used to tell the tales changes.

 

Sven Birkerts: Move Over Classics, Your Time is Over

Or, well, not.

Birkerts states that, “Writing tends to be seen not so much as an objective realization as an expressive instance. A version” (160). He says that writing has lost its permanence. He already mourns the loss of a whole culture, apparently already up and flushed down the tubes (excuse me, but I’m reading his complaints in a paperback–they’re certainly not going anywhere yet).

I know he feels he has reason to be worried; I am too. The recent rise of ebooks has mind-boggled me, and I’ve stuck with the comfort of my nice paperbacks and hardcovers. Nothing’s ever made me want to make the change, to up and buy a kindle or nook or whathaveyou–I’ve never seen much of a point to it. If other people want to read books on that format, they can be my guest, but I still prefer the smell of paper and the nice rustle of a page that comes with reading a book. But I don’t think that other formats of reading are wrong, something to send me running to the hills, bag of books slung over my shoulder.

Birkerts seems to have taken this approach.

Admittedly, he’s not talking about ebooks–such things hadn’t quite existed, back when he was writing The Gutenberg Elegies. He’d been focused primarily on hypertexts, which I hadn’t even heard about until last week, when we started learning about them in class (again, just more information that made me feel that Birkerts had been overreacting). I gave them a go, though, and found–much to my surprise–that I don’t hate them, fear them, or have any extreme love of them. They’re just… okay. Some of them are quite difficult to get through, flashing by one’s eye in mere seconds (Star Wars; One Letter at a Time). Others were a bit of a puzzle to put together, and it felt more like playing an interactive game than reading. None of them were terrifying, and none of them were extremely exciting. I guess you could say I’m ambivalent towards hypertext.

I don’t, however, think that it’s going to become this immensely popular form of reading that will wipe the book away from existence (if anything, the ebooks are doing that). I don’t feel, though, that even if paper books become a less popular form of media, that they will vanish from the world forever. There will still be bookworms like me who like love thumbing through the paper pages, using the jacket cover as a bookmark, or dogearing pages down. There will be people who want to write inside books. People who want to stare at the beautiful covers, or at the accidental ink splatters on a page. There will be collectors, and students, and poor people, and rich people, all of whom will still love books.

The paper book is, as I see things, alike a Classic (the genre). It has certain qualities that makes it what it is, and the new forms of ‘reading’ lack this. There’s a certain timelessness to paper books (a quality of a Classic, as well), that hypertexts and eBooks as formats, I feel, are lacking in. I feel that they’re okay as ‘genres’ in their own right, but they’ll never really be ‘classic’ material. And isn’t it okay to think that way? And isn’t it alright if I’d rather read a ‘classic’ than, say, a ‘memoir’? Really, I feel that that’s all these new mediums will amount to be. I can’t really see the huge fuss that Birkerts is making about the ‘death of books’ as turning into a reality; we’re expanding is all (where he gets the notion that we’re in fact REGRESSING is beyond me).

The Computer Brings us More Imaginative Storytelling?!

“As I watch the yearly growth in ingenuity among my students, I find myself anticipating a new kind of storyteller, one who is half hacker, half bard. The spirit of the hacker is one of the great creative wellsprings of our time, causing the inanimate circuits to sing with ever more individualized and quirky voices; the spirit of the bard is eternal and irreplaceable, telling us what we are doing here and what we mean to one another.” (9)

This statement, toward the end of Murray’s argument, was the most shocking and disagreeable part of her quite terrifying opinions for our future. She claims that the computer can bring us more imaginative storytelling, that there are ways to express oneself that were previously unknown to us. She says that this is better than a book in many ways (not that she’s craving the death of the book, she claims not to want that, but I only see her argument as furthering the book’s demise), and that children are already clamoring for more technology, for progress.

Well, they’ve received it.

Murray’s article was written in 1997, far before the invention of iPods, or Facebook, or SmartPhones. Technology has risen quickly, and is a far cry from the isolated, cold room that a gigantic computer would have taken up when Murray first entered the scene. We’ve made progress quickly, always thirsting for more, more quickly… and we’ve gotten it.

What terrifies me, though, isn’t this quick progress of technology, but the idea Murray has that it is a more creative platform than pen and paper, than bound pages, and that we are heading towards a new age of storytelling.

I love writing. I love reading. My room back at home, I can hardly find the carpet for all the piles of books strewn all over the place. There’s pads of paper laying around on the bedside table, pens that have fallen under the bed that have little hope of being used again. And there’s my computer.

Murray probably would say that I write on the computer, that I use it’s vast resources to make a more creative story than would be available to me by just putting pen to paper. I don’t, though. If I try to write on the computer, for the most part, I’m taken up by the speed of typing, by how fast everything moves, and the words I churn out aren’t half as decent as the ones that I come by when I write things out more slowly, by hand. Storytelling on the computer doesn’t make me more creative, rather, I feel it makes me too fast, too haphazard, willing to sacrifice more complex words for those that can be typed out quickly, more willing to abandon a half-formed idea because I don’t give it enough time to process fully, to think it through.

The computer doesn’t enable my creativity, it limits it.

The fact that Murray suggests that the computer is a great power source for creativity frightens me, simply because I haven’t found it to be that way, in my own personal experience. For all I know, it may be a great enabler for others, might free up their creative juices to let them pound out their third novel or some such thing. But it inhibits me, cripples me, and for all I know it just means that there’s no place for me (and those who think like me) in the current day and age. I’m a dying breed.

All hail the computer, a creative genius. And don’t you dare look back at what was there before, because you might just realize that the great works of genius that you see before you aren’t so brilliant after all, and that humanity has only lowered its expectations, forgotten what real creativity was like.

The Medium is the Massage: Progress Pulls Books Up-to-Date

“The goose quill put an end to talk.”

-The Medium is the Massage, Marshall McLuhan, pg. 48.

In The Medium is the Massage, Marshall McLuhan argues that electronic media is just the next stage of an ongoing process, the newest change in the way ideas are spread. Before there were books, there were plays. Before there were plays, there was word of mouth. Before words… well, I guess people had a way of communicating, although whatever it may have been is beyond me. The point is, mankind has always been pushing forward, creating new and improved ways of communication. There are those, however, who would say that it should stop here, with the book, that we shouldn’t take another step towards progress and leap into the digital age (yes, Berkirts, I’m talking about you).

How can this even be possible?

I understand that progress can be scary, that change is hard to accept at first. But the notion that moving forward isn’t better… it just baffles me. I’m sure the same sort of debates must have sprung up in the past, when the goose quill was first invented, then the printing press, etc., but we’ve still made it this far, haven’t we? To just stop here, to give up… it’s mind boggling.

If the fear is that books will die out, that no one will use them anymore, I can understand some people’s hesitation. Books are a large part of our history, and beloved by many (personally, I adore them, nothing I like better than a good book). The idea that they can be so easily replaced, that they’ll be forgotten and no longer loved, is terrifying. I still, however, wish for society to go further, to adapt to the new future of reading. So long as we actually truly love books, there’s nothing to fear–they’ll still be made, purchased, read, passed along, taken out of libraries, etc. God knows I have a feather quill and ink back home that I use sometimes, just because it looks and is cool. Well, in an uber nerdy sort of way.

That said, though, I still didn’t like The Medium is the Massage. I felt that it was jarring, that you had to read too far into the pictures, that it was disjointed. At one point, you had to flip the book upside down to read, at another you had to read the book in a mirror. The whole thing made my head ache. Perhaps I’m just not cut out to the new styles of reading ahead… or maybe this book was just not done properly. But I know that if this is the future of reading, I’ll have to despair over one larger, more important point: the author took a whole novel to state what could be said in, essentially, a single sentence. He babbled, gave us interesting information at points, but I feel that the presentation had no order to it, that things didn’t flow. Even in the computer world, things have a certain orderly flow to them that was missing in this book, which left me feeling out of place and disjointed.

Of one thing I can be sure: progress is not bad, but if this novel is a forerunner of what is to come, I don’t think I’m quite cut out for it.

Hugo Cabret

“‘Maybe it’s the same with people,’ Hugo continuted. ‘If you lose your purpose… it’s like you’re broken.’

‘Like Papa Georges?’

‘Maybe…maybe we can fix him.’

How do we do that?’”

The Invention of Hugo Cabret, 374-375.

With these words, Hugo Cabret loses its capacity to be a “Frankenstein book”. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was all about overstepping your bounds, about knowing one’s place and the danger of seeking for too much knowledge. It was about monsters, or rather, humanity’s monstrosity. Nothing in Frankenstein is about fixing what is lost, about trying to mend what has been created. Frankenstein is a tale of loss and woe, and full of warning to others not to follow along Victor’s footsteps. The Invention of Hugo Cabret, however, is a tale about saving things. Not only the automaton, which was broken by time, by fire, by a long fall, but also Hugo himself, as well as Papa Georges and Madam Goerges, all undergo a process of being saved throughout the book, of being fixed.

The automaton is the most easily fixed. Metal parts are found to make the gears run, new pen acquired for it to write with. No matter how many times it suffers a setback–being abandoned to the wear of time in a museum attic, left to fend for itself in the flames of a burning building, being dropped to the ground after finally being completed–it is always rebuilt, always goes on.

Hugo Cabret breaks/doesn’t have a “purpose” for most of the book. His world shatters when his father dies, leaving him as an orphan in the care of is drunkard uncle. It is all he can do to survive day after miserable day, locked away inside the walls of the train station. He steals. He longs for days long gone. He survives (living, however, is another matter). Then, however, he meets Isabelle, and her adopted family, and he starts to heal himself, whilst trying to save them as he healed the automaton. He saves an entire family, as well as himself, in mending the broken will of a great magician.

Georges Méliès was another broken man, who later became whole. His spirit, the part of him that enjoyed and thrived off the magic of the movies, was shattered, brought together by the perseverance and belief of young Hugo and a few others who believed in his work. He is also, however, another one who is able to save others, to heal them. He saves young Hugo from his life at the station, adopting him and taking him under his wing as son and magician. He returns the favor, in a way, giving Hugo a new life away from the horror of his past, a chance to fulfill his purpose in life. To be a working piece of the great clockwork of the world, as it were.

Even the Station Inspector, while chasing Hugo about, trying to arrest him, saves him in the end, rescuing him from being hit by an oncoming train.

All in all, The Invention of Hugo Cabret is a story about rescue, about love, about fixing what is broken. Frankenstein is only a tale of woe, a warning from a broken man telling others of his best errors, of all that he broke. There is nothing, in my mind, that could make The Invention of Hugo Cabret a “Frankenstein book”. Sure, there are some similar images–there are eyes mentioned in both books, as are creations of an inhuman nature being made by human hand. I don’t believe, however, that these things make Hugo any more alike Frankenstein than it would be without them. Many books have eyes. Eyes are a great symbol in writing. They’re said to be the ‘window to the soul,’ a place full of emotion. Eyes tell you much about a person. It’s no wonder that the feature was included in such great stories. As for the creation of two non-human creatures by human hand; this is hardly irregular. If I were to write a book, I would have created something. If a baker makes bread, he has made something. None of these things are human, yet they are made by human hand. It is in human nature to create (and, sometimes, to destroy). Just because these two things occurred in both Frankenstein and Hugo does not make them the same kind of story. Hugo is about saving things, about trying to fix the ills of mankind. Frankenstein is about breaking things, about wandering down the wrong path… without a way back.

Paper 2 Final Draft

Self Reflection: I feel that the strong point of this essay lies in the citations and sentence formatting. I also feel that my use of logos is more developed than in my first paper. I think that the thing I need to work the most on is my conclusion, as well as varying the language throughout the paper. If I return to this essay later, what comes next will be adding in the similarities of scene, and trying to see if I could predict the future outcome of Frankenstein from having a previous knowledge of the Coleridge poem.

 

Jane Lippman

3/23/12

 

Man Cannot be as Gods

            Mankind likes to overstep our boundaries. We like to strive to be more, to try and exalt ourselves from those who merely live, to those who have a say in who lives and who dies. Mankind likes to play at God. In Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein falls prey to this flaw of human nature, just as the Ancient Mariner did in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. When one looks into it, the characters of Frankenstein mirror those in the poem quite a lot, with only one difference to the parallel—Victor Frankenstein choose to create, not to kill.

The first resemblance between Shelly’s Frankenstein and Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” appears early in the novel, within the character of Robert Walton. Shelly quotes Coleridge’s poem directly in one of Walton’s letters home to his sister:

“I am going to unexplored regions, to ‘the land of mist and snow;’ but I shall kill no albatross, therefore do not be alarmed for my safety, or if I should come back to you as worn and woful as the ‘Ancient Mariner?’” (Shelley 33).

Walton is quick to say that he is in no danger of becoming alike the Ancient Mariner, and yet his character is most alike the Wedding Guest, to whom the Mariner felt compelled to tell his tale. Is Robert really as safe as he claimed? The Wedding Guest certainly was not completely out of harms way. The Mariner told his tale to the man because, “that moment that his face I see, I know the man that must hear me: to him my tale I teach” (Coleridge 589-591). The Mariner tells his tale to those in danger of becoming alike him, of recreating his mistakes, his sins. Victor, telling his tale to Walton, mirrors this action most closely, and proves our friend Walton to be more in danger of wandering down the wrong path than he’d previously believed.

And then there’s Victor Frankenstein, the second coming of the Ancient Mariner. Poor man. He shot no albatross, true enough, but rather created one instead. Ever since the creation of his creature, he was cursed much alike the Mariner. The creature vows to, “work at your destruction, nor finish until I desolate your heart…” (Shelley 129). The creature wounds Frankenstein by murdering his loved ones, by leaving a sea of death and loss around the man. The revenge of the albatross leaves the Mariner in a similar position:

“The many men, so beautiful!

And they all dead did lie;

And a thousand thousand slimy things

Lived on; and so did I.” (Coleridge 237-240).

The Mariner, like Victor, felt haunted by his sin (his murder rather than his creation). He felt, “Instead of the cross, the Albatross/About my neck was hung” (Coleridge 141-142). He is much alike Victor, who felt haunted by the creature’s, “dull yellow eye” and felt its gaze lingering upon him (Shelley 60).

The creature itself is, in my opinion, a variation on the Albatross. It’s a being that at first is all kindness and love, which firmly believes that, “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous” (Shelley 94). The Albatross too, at first, is all kindness—it brought the wind to blow, and made the crew merry. Both are rebuffed by the world, however, and change to beings of revenge and sadness, brining death in their wake.

The largest, and perhaps only difference in the parallels between these two works lies in the contrast between Frankenstein’s creature and the Albatross. The Albatross was a creature that was already living (if you can call such an ethereal creature alive), that was shot dead by the Mariner. The creature, however, was a being made up of dead parts and given a spark of life. In this manner, the sins between the Mariner and Frankenstein are different—the Mariner was ready to kill, whereas Victor wanted only to create, to step into God’s shoes and make a living being out of nothing. (He didn’t succeed—his creature was made of bits of dead humans, a thing made of recycled parts. Humans, if I have my religious background right, where made as something entirely new, out of nothing.) Both actions, however, shouldn’t be a mere man’s right to decide. Who lives and who dies—that’s something that no one person should have control over.

Frankenstein wanted to have a world in which no one died, probably due to the death he experienced early in life of his mother. That wouldn’t be right, though, the new creations wouldn’t truly be human—life burns all the brighter, perhaps because in the end it needs be snuffed out. One cannot be hasty, however, alike the Mariner, and prematurely end a life. Both decisions aren’t supposed to be made by a single person, and so these two who have sinned in such a manner end up facing a world of death and terror.

Human beings are just that—human. We live. We die. We love, laugh, cry. We create art and music and stories. We do our best to be remembered, once we’ve gone on. But none of us are permanent. No one is immortal. And no one is a god. The sins of Victor Frankenstein and the Mariner were in trying to break down this barrier, and become something higher than what they were.

 

 

Bibliography

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Ed. Johanna M. Smith. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s: 2000.                        Print.

Coleridge, Samuel. “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” The Oxford Book of English Verse.      Ed. Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch. Oxford: Clarendon, 1919; Bartelby.com,             1999. Online.

 

 

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