10.27.08 | Hills like White
Elephants
Schedule:
Goal[s]:
1. Attendance &
 Identify and evaluate the
Questions?
role of the reader in the
2. Writing reflection
‘realization’ of a story.
3. Where we are in the
course.
4. Reader’s role.
5. Discussion.
6. HW – Read Kafka.
Writing Reflection.
After finishing a major project, it is good to take a moment to reflect on what you have
accomplished and to think about what comes next. Since we just finished our
major paper, let’s do that now.
Answer the following questions in your notebook:
1. What do you think of the paper you just turned in?
2. What aspects of your paper do you consider a
success?
3. What aspects of your paper didn’t turn out as well as
you would have liked?
4. How can you build on your strengths to improve your
weaknesses? What can you do to move forward and
meet your writing goals?
Where are we?
• We have been focusing on immersion and
how it is produced by a variety of texts. Now
we are going to move on to consider some
other aspects/descriptions of the reading
experience that may challenge a notion of
immersion.
Ryan recap.
• “In the space-travel mode, represented by fiction
and now by virtual reality technology, consciousness
relocates itself to another world, and recenters the
universe around this virtual reality.”
• Requires you suspend disbelief to accept virtual
world as real.
• Key to this is transparency, because you have to
ignore the reality you know is true:
– “possible-world and make-believe theories of fiction
presupposes a relative transparency of the medium. The
reader or spectator looks through the work toward the
reference world”
As a result…
• Ryan’s theory suggests that the reader’s
participation in the reading process needs to
be ignored.
– She says we are so good at fiction reading we fill in
the gaps without noticing that’s what we are
doing; however:
– “When the reader of a postmodern work is invited
to participate in the construction of the fictional
world she is aware that this world does not exist
independently of the semiotic activity; hence the
loss in immersive power”
• The most immersive forms of textual
interactivity are therefore those in which the
user's contributions, rather than performing a
creation through a diegetic (i.e. descriptive)
use of language, count as a dialogic and live
interaction with other members of the
fictional world. I am thinking here of children's
games of make-believe, and of those
interactive hypertextual systems where users
are invited to play the role of characters.
BUT…
• Readers play an interactive role in whatever
they read.
• You are the one holding the book, looking at
the printed page, imagining what is described.
That’s all on you.
Wolfgang Iser
from the Johns Hopkins Online Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, “Reader-Response” entry.
• Iser still assumes that the text establishes norms guiding and
limiting readers: "The process of assembling the meaning of
the text . . . does not lead to daydreaming but to the
fulfillment of conditions that have already been structured in
the text" (Act 49–50); however, the text’s potentials, which
include indeterminate gaps, blanks, discrepancies, and
absences, disturb the structure and stimulate the reader’s
activity (98–99). Readers synthesize "perspectives" deriving
from the text’s narrator, characters, plot, and explicit reader,
but the text still signals, guides, directs, and manipulates
them, moving them to reinterpret the text and, more
importantly, to produce what it cannot: the experience of a
coherent, living whole growing out of "the alteration or
falsification of that which is already ours" (98–99, 132).
the reader’s role
• For the rest of the quarter, we will be talking
about the role of the reader.
– What are you doing when you are reading?
– What role do you play in the creation of the story?
– What is your relationship to the text?
– How is that relationship set up by the text?
– Etc.
•
•
•
•
•
In the short story, Hills Like White
Elephants, addressed a critical issue
on abortion that protagonists Jig and
her American travel companion
(significant other) emphatically
discuss. Throughout the text, Jig
wanted to carry their baby to term;
however her companion wanted her
to abort their child, so they could
continue with their travel ventures.
Questions:
Does their conversation regarding
abortion heighten your interactivity
within the context of the story (with
the characters, conversation, etc.)?
Within your interactivity within the
text, and knowing how each
character felt on this issue, did you
choose sides? If so which? And why?
Did you like how the story
concluded? If so, did this story leave
you interactively engaged until the
end of the text?
• Since "Hills Like White
Elephants" is a very
dialogue based story,
why do you think
Hemingway found it
important enough to
describe the scenery?
Do you think there is
any significance in that
there is a difference
between the land
surrounding the train
station and the land
across the valley?