Term Paper

The text I chose to write on is Maus by Art Spiegelman. There was so much of this text that I loved, and there were times when I was reading that I stopped and had to take a deep breath. There were times that I was so enthralled in the book that I found my self losing track of time. I think back to what I read, and I like the fact that I can relate to the book on different levels. There are not many books that I have had such a great connection with, and have had little or no problem understanding the message that was trying to come across to the reader.
One of the things that I really connected with was the fact that Vladek and Artie had such a weird relationship. Not just the fact that they had a weird relationship but the fact that they were father and son. They seemed to not know much about each other even though they were related. I look at this and I am amazed at that fact because I could see this in me and my dad. Sure I can talk to him about certain things but there is a lot I don’t think I can tell him. I see that in Artie in this book and especially in the part where Vladek finds the comic Artie made. Artie made this comic strip to express his feeling about his dead mother, and Vladek had no idea that Artie had those types of feelings. After Vladek read it and Artie found out he approached Vladek and apologized and Vladek reaction was very interesting. “It’s good you got it outside your system, But for me it brought in my mind so much memories of Anja” (pp. 104). All Vladek wanted in the long run was for Artie to get his feeling out even though they were hard for him to face. I thought about this part quite a bit and came to the conclusion that my dad would want me to do the same thing. He would want me to express my feeling to him even if it made him feel bad about something. All fathers want is for there kids to express their feelings and that definitely happened in this part of the book.
Another aspect of the text that really hit home for me was the fact that it showed the tight bonds all the characters had in adversity. There was a real need for family and if it were not for family they all probably would have gone crazy. There were times in the book where parts of the family were taken and the rest of the family seemed devastated by it. There was part of the book where Anja and Vladek talk of giving up their son and Anja wanted nothing to do with that. “I’ll never give up my baby, never” (pp. 81). In this line alone you could see that the family did not want to be split apart, and would do anything to make sure the family stayed together. Even if their family would be better off splitting apart they were very apprehensive to do such a thing. They believed that if they were together they would be alright. I look at this aspect of the book, and I don’t know what I would do because I know the importance of family. It is easy for me to read and think that it would be better if they all went their own way. If I were thrust into that position I don’t know if I would be able to make the decision to split up. So what they had to endure in this book and at that time of history is just mind boggling, and it is something I hope I never have to face.
The last thing I want to touch on in this section is the fact that Art Spiegelman’s use of the animal characters in the story line and how he viewed what happened. It was just a very smart way to get the reader to experience the book and the story in a different way. While I was reading I was able to look at the characters and realize what they were about because Spiegelman did such a great job classifying the characters.
Looking at the way Hayden White views metahistory is very interesting and really ties in with Maus. He argues that there is an underlying story that needs to be told using history. In the case of Maus see someone who went through the whole ordeal of going through the holocaust. On the other hand we see that person trying to explain what really happened through the whole ordeal, and we see Vladek want to show Artie what types of emotion were really experienced. I could see the story really gaining steam and interest when the feeling were shared in this book and you can see what truly was going on in this time period. Hayden White expresses that most of history is put into chronicles after the writer gains knowledge of the situation and then puts it into plots and stories. I could definitely see this in Maus, There were times that you could see that Spiegelman did a lot of research and took aspects of history and put them in the story. Spiegelman took something as serious as the holocaust, and put a different spin on the whole thing and did not lose any of the tragic nature of the event. He did a wonderful job putting in different aspects, he did things like using animals as characters and this put a great spin on the way we view this particular event.
According to Hayden White, “no historical event can itself constitute a story, tragic or ironic: it can only be presented as such from a particular historian’s narrative point of view” (1710). I look at this and I am kind of taken back by it, I have a hard time believing that a historical event can’t have a story. But the more I thought about it I could see that no matter what you do to the story it is coming from an author’s point of view. Unless of course, the person writing the story actually experienced what he or she is writing about. Then I could see that the historical event is an actual story to that particular person, he or she wrote about history but on the other hand they experienced it.
One of the secondary texts I am going to use is the movie Pearl Harbor, I know it is not the greatest movie of all time, but I think it has a lot to do with what I am talking about. In the movie we see a serious event like the bombing of Pearl Harbor and we see the movie try to incorporate a love story into it. There is a huge event and they try to down play it and make the audience take a hold of the love aspect of the movie. I can also see this in Maus a little bit and Spiegelman does it in a different manner. Spiegelman seems to use the relationship between Vladek and Artie as a cover up to what is really going on in the book. Spiegelman wants the reader to connect with something else besides the Holocaust, and I wonder if he wanted something else out in the forefront. Did he want the reader to see that the holocaust had more of an effect on Vladek, so much that that it hindered the way that he communicates with his own son? Another thing I could think of in terms of the movie Pearl Harbor was the fact that once it was time to get away from the love story you could really see the pain and anguish that the event brought the movie. Almost everybody that watches the movie has an understanding of the events that took place at Pearl Harbor. But after you experience them on the screen you really have a feeling of what all those people went through in that time and place. I spin it back to Maus, and it is the same situation. You as the reader know the story of the holocaust, but it takes reading the book to really experience what all those people went through. In both of these instances the reader or the viewer are shown what really happened and the trauma that the characters had to go through.
Another secondary text that I wanted to look at was the movie, Saving Private Ryan, and I wanted to look at the fact that the characters needed each other to make it. Looking at the movie a little closer you can see that the characters are all thrown into a stressful situation and they need each other to make it through. This is a lot like Maus, because in the book you could see a lot of instances where people needed other people to survive. For example, Vladek needed the help of others to hide him and his wife so they would not be taken away by the Nazi’s. You could also see that in the movie that they were from different areas of the United States, but yet they were forced to trust people that they barley know. But because they are in such a volatile situation, they are forced to trust the person next to them and hope that they can all take care of each other enough to survive. In the book you can see that Vladek has to put trust in people he barely knows, and people that at a drop of a hat could sell him up the river.
In the movie Saving Private Ryan, we as the viewer that there are many different emotions that the characters have to go through. We see that they are going through different highs and lows, and they have to roll with the punches so to speak with what they are experiencing. The characters have to go through a lot and they have to deal with so many demons and the thought that they might not make it through another day alive. This is the same in the book; you can see most of the characters having to deal with emotions that they are not usually faced with. Vladek and his family have to go through the realization that tomorrow might bring the end of there lives as they know it. This has to be a lonely feeling, knowing that the day you are living in, might be your last. You can see this feeling takes its toll on Anja, in the book because the stress that she goes through ends up killing her in the end. She could not take all of the stress and she killed herself because she could not deal with everything.
The historical event I have chosen to write and compare is The Gulf War. I found a few things that I can compare to the book. First of all, the Gulf war stems from the fact that Iraq invaded Kuwait and the things escalated from there. I could easily relate this to Maus because in the book it takes about the Germans taking over regions that they were not welcome in. In the Gulf war there was very little that Kuwait could do to stop Iraq from doing what they wanted. The people of Kuwait were in a bad situation and they had to do what Iraq said or they would have been killed. This same exact thing happens in the book and it is eerily similar. The people who were being invaded had no chance to stick up for themselves, and if they had they would have most certainly been killed. In both the Gulf War and in the book, it is a shame that the people that were being invaded had to deal with the realization that they could lose their lives at any moment. It is one thing to die, but it is another thing to have to think about death all of the time and know that it might be around the corner. There were so many times throughout the book where Vladek and his family felt helpless and they could not do anything to better there situation. This is also true in terms of the Gulf War; those people that are in that situation can do little to improve their situation. This is a very sad thing because those people more or less have their lives taken from them and have it put into the hands of people that could care less about them.
Another thing I saw was the fact that in the Gulf War you saw a bunch of different countries come together to aid another country. There was a common belief that what Iraq was doing was wrong and something needed to be done in order to save the people of Kuwait. Countries like the United States and Great Britain came to the aid of Kuwait and wanted the rest of the world to know that what Iraq was doing was wrong. In Maus you could see a little bit of this in terms of Vladek and his family knowing what was happening was wrong and something needed to be done in order to fix things. For example, there were times that Vladek and Anja were willing to do what ever it took to save the family. There was a time in the book where Vladek and Anja had to give up the children in order to save themselves and wanted the best for the children. It did not turn out the best for the children but at the time they thought that was the best for them. That is the bad thing about war and hard times; you do what you think is the best for everyone at the time, but only time will tell if it works out. In terms of people helping people I think you can see this in both situations, the United States helping Kuwait, and friend helping friends in Maus.
The last thing I would like to touch on is, the fact that the death totals in each situation were not really told accurately at the time. In terms of the book you can see that the characters were never really sure how many people were being killed. For a long time they did not know where anyone was being taken, and then as the book goes on they start to hear of all the places the prisoners were being taken to be killed. They never really know a number but it is downplayed by the Nazi’s and real numbers are really spoken of until later. In terms of the Gulf war it was the Iraqis that were the one’s who were untruthful about the number of people who were killed in the war. They were saying the number of people killed were really high so they could gain support of the Muslin nations, according to Wikipedia. It was the hope of the Iraqis to turn other Muslim countries against the United States and the allies.
As you can see there are many similarities to the book Maus and to the Gulf War. I think the reason we can see so many similarities is the fact that war and hard times bring out the worst in people, and in some ways brings out the best in people. We see people work together to save the ones they love, but on the other hand we see people do whatever it take to make sure they do what is best for them. It think that the book shows both sides of this, and shows what torment people had to go through in the times of the Holocaust.

Secretary

This type of literature was a little bit of a shock to my system. I could not believe what I was reading, and it kind of repulsed me in a way. There was a very realistic feeling to the story, and I could see this happening in the real world. Gaitskill finds a way to make the story believable on most levels. Taking a look at Debby's family life you could see that they were pretty dysfunctional and there was a sense of abuse there. It makes me think that all of the years of verbal abuse from her father just festered inside of her. After a long period of time I think she started to think that it was normal to just take what was given to her and like it. This leads me to think that she liked what she got from the Lawyer because she deep down likes abuse. After all that happened with the Lawyer, it might have flipped a switch in her head that she does not have to take abuse from anyone, anymore. It would be interesting to see what type of person she ends up turning into after this experience.

Programmed

It starts with music then moves onto TV and who knows what else. We are being programmed by big corporations to do what they wants us to do, and there is nothing we can do about it. The future does not look so bright because before you know it there will be no differences between one person to the next. We are given no choices to make on our own anymore, and we are all driven to think that we can not live without what these corporations are selling. It is a scary feeling to think that we might one day live in a world that is completely uniform and has no character. Before you know it we will all be robots that can't think for ourselves anymore. Who knows we might already be at that stage, we might be living in the matrix as we speak and there is nothing we can do about it. We might be just be walking around with no purpose listening and doing what everyone else tells us to do.

Technoculture

The future is here and it might be taking over the way we live forever. It is apparent that technology is going to play a huge role in the way we live and lead our lives. You can see it just by looking around and seeing the technology taking over. Everywhere you look you see cell phones and personal electronic devices and people use them everywhere. You can be in line at the grocery store and see two or three people in the line with phones to their ear. It is like people can not live without these devices. It is not just in real life that you see these things. There are many movies that show the way technology is taking over people's lives and it is not to far away. It is evident that if the trend continues technology will completely take over humans lives and maybe not in a good way. I think that technology might already have to big of a grip on culture to let go. People's obsession with technology might be what hurts them in the end. People might become to dependant on it and might not be able to survive without technology.

Kindred

Taking a look at the end of this book it got me thinking. What was Butler trying to say when Dana lost her arm at the end of the book? I thought about this long and hard and came to a couple of conclusions that might work. The first one I thought of was the fact that maybe the lost arm was a sacrifice for her freedom. She wanted to be free so badly that she was willing to give up something in order to have her freedom. I don't think that Dana wanted to lose her arm but it was better than a life with Rufus. Another thought that I had is that all of these slaves in that time were so used to being controlled that when they were freed it was hard for them to take care of themselves. It is like a bit of them was taken away from them after being enslaved for so long, they are not the same after they are set free. It will take a long time for the slaves to get there lives back if they ever do.

Kindred p. 9-160

While reading this I was finding myself very into the story line and actually feeling bad for the slaves within the story. I think that the things that are happening to the slaves and to Dana in the book are unbelievable. I think that Butler does a great job in terms of grabbing the reader and showing them the terrible side of slavery but does so by tying in science fiction. Butler also does a great job tying in slave narratives and does so in a way that grabs the readers attention. A few examples of this is the fact that she ties in reading and the fact that most slave owners did not want the slaves to have any education. The slave owners kept these slaves in the dark so to speak it was easier to keep them under raps. Butler and Frederick Douglas both show the fact that slave that have an education were harder to keep down and were dangerous to the slave owners. Another thing that Butler touches on is the fact that ignorance of the slaves is a big deal. Both Butler and Douglas reference the fact that they were left in the dark in a lot of things. For example, Douglas didn't even know his own birthday, and he said that the fact he didn't know his birthday made him feel less like a human being. Butler makes reference to ignorance just by the fact that she doesn't know what is happening to her and she doesn't know the time very well.

Blog Paper

I look back at my experiences in English classes and classes I needed to read quite a bit, and I can’t deny that I have had little to no success in them. I have always had this belief that I would never be good at comprehending texts that I read. It is not like I don’t want to understand, and it is not like I don’t try, but it just has been very hard for me in the past. It is something however that I want to be successful at in the future and I am working hard to accomplish it. I am at a place in my life where I would like to find a better understanding of texts so I can discuss them with other people. How do I do this though? First of all I have to evaluate where I see myself now in terms of reading development, and then decide how I can move up the ladder to the next couple of stages.
The stage I believe I was at when I started this class was definitely the text-self stage. I saw things as “I centered” and would always read texts and would relate them to experiences that I had in my life, or life around me. I remember reading The Da Vinci Code and trying to relate to my own life. I would try to put myself into the story and really didn't take anything out of the book itself. There are many times I have done this in the past and never really realized that I was missing some much within the story. I was in essence closing my eyes to most of the books I was reading. I was really only taking what I wanted out of the story and leaving other information behind never knowing there was so much inside some stories.
It is not only personal reading that I did this too. I have taken many English classes in the past and I have always been so behind in them because of my inability to see into the text. I took American literature right here at Cardinal Stritch and had a boat load of problems with it. I was always behind in the class and found myself being left out of the discussion in class. I was going to class and it seemed as though I was taking a different class than everyone else. I was so lost in terms of what other students were able to pick out of the text and what I was able to pick out. I was unable to see the story within the story. Other students had the ability to step outside of the text and relate it to other texts they had read in the past. I actually got so discouraged in that class that I almost dropped it. I didn’t drop the class but I had to work very hard to get by in that class and squeak by with a B in the class. It was not for a lack of trying in the class but it is the fact that I could not get past the “I” aspect I was bringing to the every text I was reading at the time. I need to take the next step and try to get more out of the texts I am reading.
What development step am I at now? I hate to say it, but I think I am at the same point now that I was at the beginning of this class. I might actually be a little further along but it is hard for me to say that I am much further now than I was before. How did I come to this conclusion that I have made little or no progress? Looking at my blog entries I found that I use the term, “I found” or “I saw” a whole bunch and I don’t really dissect the text very well. I can now see by my blog entries that I am still relating the text to what I see and I don’t look or bring outside texts into consideration. By looking at my blogs it is easy for me to see that I have a lot of work to do in terms of trying to make it to the next reading development level. I also refer to weather or not I like the text or not and I do that a ton in my blogs and this is a sign of being at the text-self level. I also relate the text to my life quite a bit, and no matter what I talk about it always seems to come back to what I thought or felt. To give an example of this from my blog, I will reference the blog on Moulin Rouge. I talked in the blog about the use of metafiction and how they used it throughout the film. I did a great job I thought of coming up with certain situations Luhrmann puts metafiction in the movie and then I end the blog with, “I will never view this movie the same way again”. I once again threw the “I centered” point of view in there once again, and it ends up taking away from the blog.
Even though I may be stuck in the first level of reading development, I do see some situations where I might be going to the next level. In some of my blogs I do see the fact that I am taking outside texts and relating them to the reading I am doing in class. There are not a bunch of examples of this, but I did find a few from my blogs. The first example of this is the fact that I saw Tarantino uses different aspects in Pulp Fiction that others have used in the past. It makes me think that if I could pick it up in a movie, there is no reason I should not be able to do it when I read. I also saw that in the blog I wrote about Auster I made reference to metafiction and how it was being used. With these two examples I see that I might be taking the first steps to the next stage of reading development.
So what is next for me and my progress to the next step of reading development? Well after giving this a whole lot of thought I decided that the first thing I need to do is read more and take my time when I read something. Just reading more won’t solve the problem I have but if I slow down and really think about what I am reading. If I take a step back from the book and realize that there is more to the text than what meets the eye, it will help me. I once had a professor that told me to stop every time I read something I didn’t understand and read it again. What I do a lot of the times if I don’t understand something is just keep reading and never really get a grip on the text. What I need to do is stop and find out what the author is trying to say through the text. Another option for me is to find a book club and learn different ways to interpret texts. I really do enjoy reading but I am lagging in terms of understanding the underlying story. I know not all stories have an underlying story, but I would like to be able to determine if there was one.
I will keep on working hard to improve my reading development and try the strategies I have come up with. I am determined to become more aware of stories under the story and feel more comfortable in conversations about certain texts. If I want to move up the ladder so to speak of reading development I need to take the time and put in the effort and I can do it.

Brokeback Mountain

I watched Brokeback Mountain for the first time even though it has been out for a long time. I was told by other people that I should not watch it because it would make me feel uncomfortable, so I never bothered to watch it. To tell you the truth when I saw we had to watch it for class I thought maybe I just wouldn't watch it and say I did. Well I watched it and I am glad that I did. There were so many aspects of the movie that were great. I loved the camera work and the scenery that was used in the movie. I also loved the story line of the movie and how the actors depicted the fact that homosexuals are not seen as normal. These two guys clearly loved each other and because of what they were taught by their parents and society, they thought that it was wrong and they needed to hide their love. It just makes me think that we as human beings are so driven by what others think that we deprive ourselves happiness to fit into a so called "norm". This film shows this and does so in a way that people can't help but take notice. I hope that someday that all of us can find happiness in being ourselves.

Maus p.5-69 By:Art Spiegelman

I took one look at the text we were going to read and I was very sceptical about how much I was going to get out of it. I have never really read anything like this in the past. So needless to say when I saw what a graphic novel really entailed I was worried I would not be able to follow very well. I found through the first couple of pages that I was having no trouble at all following the text at all and the pictures made it even easier to follow. That might make me sound like a young child, but the pictures make it easier to follow the characters. I found myself even more involved in the book than I have with other book I have read. It also doesn't hurt that I can read 20 pages in no time at all.

The text itself is very interesting and puts a different spin on all of the things that happened during the Holocaust. The use of different types of animals in the book is very interesting and very symbolic of the way people were viewed during the whole ordeal. I am a huge fan of the book and I cannot wait to find more time to read more.

Screenplay or child's play?

When we were all told that we would have a chance to take a part of the book and write a screenplay I was excited. I was excited to the point where I thought that writing a screenplay might be easy. How hard could it be? I went into the exercise thinking, just take any part of the book and put some action to it and there you have it, a screenplay. Well needless to say, that was not the case. When we got into our groups I could see that it was going to be harder than I thought. We all thought we had a part of the book that would be interesting and easy to write about. We were all wrong. It started out fine and we all thought we had a good start, but as it went on it got harder to keep it going in the right direction and keep it interesting. As our screenplay went on it kind of fell flat and boring. When the exercise was over I realized that writing a screenplay is not child"s play, and is a whole lot harder than I ever imagined.

Intertextuality or plagarism?

Intertextuality is the shaping of a text by using another text or texts. This kind of sounds like plagiarism to me, it sounds like you are taking another person work and making it your own. But on the other hand I guess that there are only so many ideas out there, and you can take an idea and almost make it your own. For example, in Pulp Fiction Quinton Tarantino takes things from movies that he has viewed in the past and he puts them in the movie. I will give it to Tarantino he takes those things he has learned from other movies and he places them perfectly in the movie. For example, when Bruce Willis' character is trying to pick out a weapon he looks at weapons that influenced Tarantino in the past. Tarantino is not the only one to use intertextuality, if you look at the New Testament there are references to the Old Testament throughout it. Intertextuality is everywhere we look.

The New York Trilogy By: Paul Auster

While reading the fist part of this book I was wondering how to tie in metafiction. While reading it came to me. Every time that you read about the character Paul Auster it makes you take a step back and realize that the character is also the name of the writer of the book. No matter what was going on in the book as soon as I read the name Paul Auster, I take a step back and think about something other than the storyline. Another thing I found interesting was the part of the story where Virginia is talking to him by the door and she kisses Auster with a very sexual kiss. It is funny that would happen to the character of Paul Auster, it might be the authors way of putting himself into a erotic point of the novel.

Moulin Rouge Directed by Baz Luhrmann

I can't remember the last time that the moon was singing a song right along with me. That's right, that is because it has never happened before. In the movie moulin rouge this type of thing happens a lot. The use of metafiction is apparent in this movie and it is used often. The definition of metafiction according to wikipedia is; it is a type of fiction that self-consiously addresses the devices of fiction. It is apparent in this movie that they wanted the viewer to know they were watching a fictional film. Some of the ways they showed metafiction was the singing moon and dancing on a cloud. I also thought that it was interesting to see that the set was very elabarate and a little rediculous. For example, the elephant that she lives in and shots of the city were not to scale. It was easy to see the metafiction in this movie and I will never view this movie in the same way.