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.