3.3.08 | Danielewski [day1]

1. 3.3.08 | Danielewski [day1] • Business • Questions about Papers [due Fri @ 5pm]? • Why this book? • What is this book? • What are we doing with this book? • HW • Keep reading! • Questioners, please post a question by 1pm tomorrow.

2. Calendar • This week: • Danielewski. Finish the book for Friday • Discussion questions on GoPost • Thursday will be our last class meeting. • Finish Danielewski/ Wrap-up course discussion • Field questions about the Final paper • Course evaluations. • Papers due Friday@5 • Next week: • Papers will be returned via CollectIt, hopefully by Wednesday if not before. [I’ll email when they are posted] • I will be stationed in the ReBoot Cafe [upstairs] from 1:00-3:00 daily. • These are open office hours. Please come with drafts, outlines, ideas, previous papers, questions, concerns, etc. as you prepare you Final Papers. • Last quarter students found this writing week really helpful and these open hours we jam packed. I hope you all find them equally useful. • Finals week: • Final paper is due Monday by 5pm via CollectIt. • I’ll be available by appointment. • Good luck on finals, Enjoy Spring Break.

3. Paper • Due Friday at 5pm on CollectIt. • Assignment • Exact same prompt and task as last time; we are looking to build from a small observation into a large concept discussion. • You can find the prompt on the course website under “Requirements” • The central analysis should be on a text from Emerson to Danielewski. You may refer to any others you like as long as significant work is done on a text from this section of class. • Emphasis • We are focusing on Stakes, on entering your analysis into a larger discussion. This doesn’t change the assignment, just how I will be reading it. I recommend trying to be as overt about what you see as the place of your thinking in a controversial topic • With that in mind, last time several people wrote quite uncontroversial arguments. Look for a topic to write on that there might be some disagreement about!

4. QUESTIONSABOUT THE PAPER?

5. A word about stakes… • Remember, this is nothing more than stating what makes your analysis interesting/worth reading/important/worth caring/ worth writing about for a particular community [in this case, our 200-level English class at the UofW]. • When you are thinking about a topic, really think about why you thought it was worthy of note. What makes you think that this topic is worth spending however many hours you will take to write on it? If you can’t think of a reason, why write on that topic? • Be specific in your explanation. For example, if you were writing your last paper about how Auster “let’s reader’s decide,” take the next step to say HOW and WHY this way is an intervention in the discussion. • Try to avoid turning these works into moral tales. For example, Danielewski’s play with textual variation doesn’t mean he is trying to teach us that reading normally is bad. Similarly, Auster is not trying to warn us against thinking that identity is static. This is a good way to turn a complex discussion into a one-way street.

6. Some Weak Stakes, and why they are weak. “stakes” problem Every book ‘leaves it up to the reader.’ That is Barthes whole point! This is possibly recovered by talking about HOW this book opens the text and WHY that is significant. The only person who probably cares about ‘connecting with a larger audience’ is the person trying to sell the book. Moreover, what would be the controversy about this? That it doesn’t reach a larger audience? This could be recovered by talking about just that discrepancy. Even more fundamentally, this seems to be a question of form, style, and rhetorical strategy, which, my guess is, you probably don’t care much about and are only writing because you think it is good for an English class. This argument is a way back into the one, central message style of reading we have done so much work to avoid. Ironically, this “stake” is often stated by people arguing for polyvalent meaning. I can’t think of a way to save this one. • “This is important because through it the author LEAVES IT UP TO THE READER” • “This is important because it CONNECTS WITH A LARGER AUDIENCE” • “This is important because it gives us the FULLER MEANING OF THE TEXT”

7. QUESTIONSABOUT STAKES?

8. House of Leaves: Why this book? • Where we have been… • Theory Week • The Sign • The Author • The Sensible • Symbols & Evidence • Scarlet Letter • Moby Dick • Poe • City of Glass • Words | Reality • Nature – What is the relationship between the human mind and nature? • Poetry – how do I use words to express reality? • Famous Men – how can I hope to objectively present a real person to someone else? • House of Leaves takes up all these ideas and more.

9. Why this book? • Theory Week • The Sign – Charles De Gaulle • The Author – Who wrote this? + Faked books, fake authors • The Sensible – No central experience, The Physical act of reading, the emotional thrust of the story coming through the layers of critical mediation. • Symbols & Evidence • The mystery of the house, its status as symbol and of what? • Words | Reality • The central question of the book asks us to think about media, mediation, and our relationship to the real. • What happens when we encounter the uncanny? • What is media’s role in helping us record/understand it? • This ties into questions of language, our position as readers who come to the book as our sole means of access to the uncanny house, etc.

10. Why this book? • “As Danielewski explains in an interview, the novel’s true protagonist is the figure of interpretation – that is, the act of reading or the embodied reader: Let us say there is no sacred text here. That notion of authenticity or originality is constantly refuted. The novel doesn’t allow the reader to ever say, “Oh, I see: this is the authentic, original text, exactly how it looked, what it always had to say.” That’s the irony of [Truant’s] mother’s letters [which are included as an appendix to the novel]: at first you probably just assume that, okay, this is the real thing, but then the artifice of the way they look starts to undercut everything, so you’re not sure. Pretty soon you begin to notice that at every level in the novel some act of interpretation is going on. The question is, why? Well, there are many reasons, but the most important one is that everything we encounter involves an act of interpretation on our part. And this doesn’t just apply to what we encounter in books, but to what we respond to in life. On, we live comfortably because we create these sacred domains in our head where we believe that we have a specific history, a certain set of experiences. We believe that our memories keep us in direct touch with what has happened. But memory never puts us in touch with anything directly; it’s always interpretive, reductive, a complicated compression of information.” Hansen, Mark B.N. “The Digital Topography of House of Leaves.” Bodies in Code. New York: Routledge, 2006. pg. 226

11. What is this book? • House on Ash Tree Lane, moved into by Will Navidson and Family. • Video documenting the move into the house • Zampanò’s critical assessment of the video and its academic footprint [in notes]. Z. by the way is BLIND, can’t read, can’t watch a video. • Johnny Truant’s compilation of the notes [with significant editorial commentary, his own spin, and revelation of his life surrounding the book] • In 2nd Edition. We get footnotes from the Editors. • Mark Z. Danielewski’s “A Novel” So what is the text? What are you reading when you read this book? How do you approach it? As fiction, as critical essay, as recovery project? Does it make a difference?

12. How do you read this book?Some quotations from Truant… • “This is not for you.” • “What did I know then? What do I know now? At least some of the horror I took away at four in the morning you now have before you, waiting for you a little like it waited for me that night, only without these few covering pages” [xvii] • “I know a moment came when I felt certain its resolute blackness was capable of anything, maybe even of slashing out, tearing up the floor, murdering Zampano, murdering us, maybe even murdering you” [xvii].

13. “Old shelters – television, magazines, movies – won’t protect you anymore. You might try scribbling in a journal, on a napkin, maybe even in the margins of this book. That’s when you’ll discover you no longer trust the very walls you always took for granted. Even the hallways you’ve walked a hundred times will feel longer, much longer, and the shadows, any shadow at all, will suddenly seem deeper, much, much deeper… Then no matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant or on some desolate street or even in the comforts of your own home, you’ll watch yourself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by” [xxiii].

14. “The way I figure it, if there’s something you find irksome – go ahead and skip it. I couldn’t care less how you read any of this… There’s just too much at stake” [31].

15. Our approach. • Since this book is so invested in giving you the reader a stake in confronting the house, it seems counter productive for me to direct discussion. Instead, we are going to conduct 8 discussions at once. • I am going to assign each of you a day, Tu. or Wed. for which you are responsible for posting a question to GoPost.Questions are due by 1pm on the day you are responsible for. • Questions can be about anything, though you should look for questions that will spur discussion rather than ones that can be answered by looking something up. • I will pick what seem the 8 most fruitful questions and print them out and place them on 8 tables upstairs. The writer of the questions I pick will received double participation points for the week. • When you come to class tomorrow, we will move to the café upstairs where you will pick a seat with a question at the table. You, and who ever joins your group, will discuss this question for 10 mins. We will repeat 3-4 times, changing seats and discussions each time. • Finally, we will reconviene downstairs in our normal room to talk about what we found. • Thursday we will open the floor for questions, after we finish all the business end.

16. Question days.Post a question to GoPost on your assigned day by 1pm. For Tuesday: For Wednesday: King,Dustin Peter Love,FronaC Malcolm,DanielleNicole Nussbaumer,MichaelJoseph II Pace,TimothyRobert Pak,JessicaMaggie Reinertson,DanaEvyn Rubery,ChristineElizabeth Sawyer,MichaelAlan Schulz,HunterPaul Shephard,AndreaRenee Delgado Smith,LaurenAudrey Sullivan,SeanMichael Tillman,CassandraMarie Tobin,MichelleLeann Wolfe,CaraMarie Woody, Robert • Baarslag-Benson,DavidEdward • Barker,JazminE • Bash,ThomasO'Neill • Brown,AshleySarah • Cano,Dzenana • Chen,Katharine • Chong,PeterNam • Chu,Kiffin • Dhaliwal,HarpreetSingh • Duckworth,SalyseMonet • Erickson,JulianaM • Farah,MustafaHassan • Galtung, Ingrid • Hord,AllisonRenee • Johnson,ElizabethLayla • Karnes,LoriLynn • Kim,JoyY