Barth, Lity) Hello, My Name Is Fadi

¶ … Barth, LITY)

Hello, my name is Fadi Awwad. Apologies for the late submission -- for some reason the due date was not showing on my Blackboard! The most recent book I read that really subverted the concept of Freytag's Triangle was probably The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. In the spring semester 2014, I wrote a research paper on Pynchon for a course on postmodern narrative here at UHV. Pynchon is considered the postmodern novelist par excellence, so it is no surprise that The Crying of Lot 49 subverts traditional narrative structure.

Pynchon's short novel tells the story of a California housewife, Mrs. Oedipa Maas, who is given the duty of being executor for the estate of an ex-lover, Pierce Inverarity, who has just died. The central plot of the novel, however, hinges on whether Oedipa has inadvertently discovered the existence of a vast conspiracy called "The Trystero" -- basically a secret underground post-office that exists in defiance of the established government. Pynchon is very careful about establishing two separate possibilities for the reader: one is that the Trystero is real, and Oedipa has discovered a conspiracy, and the other possibility is that Oedipa is paranoid, and the entire idea is a figment of her imagination. As she herself says late in the novel, "Shall I project a world?" It is impossible for the reader to tell if this is what she is doing or not.

It is important to note that the book does not exactly subvert Freytag's Triangle as the reader goes along-in fact, it is structured rather conventionally like a California noir detective story, with the housewife uncovering clues and interviewing a series of eccentrics. The subversion comes at the end. Pynchon structures the book so that the ultimate revelation -- the proof of whether the conspiracy is read, or Oedipa is just paranoid -- will come in the last chapter, at an auction of rare stamps. (This is the "Lot 49" of the title, and the "crying" is the technical term for an auctioneer calling for bids on the lot.) But the book ends at the exact moment when the auctioneer is about to start -- and he is described as raising his arms like a priest for some strange religion, making it clear that the revelation of the plot has taken on a numinous significance. The reader is therefore placed in exactly the same position as the protagonist, with either of the two possibilities (a real conspiracy, or an paranoid fantasy) active in the mind as the book closes. So the ideas of "closure, resolution, and explanation" that are implied by Freytag's Triangle turn out to be the subject of this short novel -- the entire book is structured to dangle the possibility of finding such resolution before the reader (and the protagonist) and then frustrate this expectation.

DISCUSSION BOARD 2

I'd like to focus my discussion on "Lost in the Funhouse" on the most utterly unconventional of the first five stories-if it can even be called a story. This is Barth's "Frame-Tale," which is a sort of microfiction which outlines Barth's theme of cyclical repetition in the most abstract possible way. The complete text of "Frame-Tale" is as follows: "ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS A STORY THAT BEGAN / FRAME-TALE / Cut on dotted line. / Twist end once and fasten / AB to ab, CD to cd."

It is worth performing a close analysis on this text. The "body" of the story (after the two titles given in all capital letters) is not actually a story: it is a set of instructions. These instructions -- as most people who have ever taken middle-school geometry should recognize -- describe how to build the paradoxical structure known as the Mobius Strip. In other words, take a long rectangular slip of paper, and twist the paper once, then fasten the ends together. If the ends are fastened together without the twist, you would get a standard wrist-band (like a yellow Lance Armstrong bracelet) that has two sides. But the peculiar property of the Mobius Strip is that it only has one side. If you were able to crawl along the Mobius Strip like an ant, you would start at one point and eventually walk in a straight line until you reached the same point again -- it functions as a perfect loop.

So what is the relation of these instructions to the all-caps chapter headings that precede it. Obviously the first part is the most obvious form of narrative beginning -- "ONCE UPON A TIME" -- that immediately leaps into self-referentiality. Normally we are told that once upon a time there was a boy named Jack who lived with his mother and a cow, or once upon a time there was a girl named Cinderella who lived with her wicked stepmother, and the story follows from there. We are not normally told "ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS A STORY THAT BEGAN"-because, of course, stories themselves begin with "once upon a time." In other words, this first sentence invites readers to turn it into a kind of Mobius Strip construction, where we continue looping the text in our minds: "once upon a time there was a story that began 'once upon a time, there was a story that began...'..." And so on.

Similarly the actual title of the story, "FRAME-TALE," is also self-referential. It is a technical term about the structure of storytelling. For example, book like Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" has a frame-tale and a main narrative: the frame-tale takes place on a boat on the Thames, where Marlow is telling a story about a journey he took up a river in Africa, to find a man named Kurtz. The main narrative -- i.e., the plot of "Heart of Darkness" -- is the actual story Marlow tells, but the frame-tale lends structure to the main narrative. (Marlow is interrupted at least once by his listeners in London.) This structure is not uncommon in many classic narratives: "Frankenstein" or "The Turn of the Screw" also feature frame-tales. However, a frame-tale is usually used to lend structure and verisimilitude to a story. The three examples I have listed of literary classics with frame-tales all use the frame-tale to make a shocking or supernatural story sound plausible, and to explain how the story came to be told in the first place. Barth's "Frame-Tale" is not serving the function of any of these frame-tales at all: it tells the reader how to build a Mobius Strip. But this means that the "Frame-Tale" here is being used only for structure-we are being told that the narratives we will encounter are in some way circular, that they may only be "one-dimensional," that they may end where they began, or loop back upon themselves.

As we begin to read the stories that follow "Frame-Tale" we realize that, in some sense, these are not going to be conventional narratives. The story that immediately follows, "Night Sea Journey," looks like a parody of Melville or Conrad, but is in reality an extended allegory about the voyage of a sperm-cell trying to fertilize an egg (carrying its "Heritage" or genetic material). But this only becomes evident over the course of reading "Night Sea Journey" and to a certain extent, the Mobius Strip instructions of "Frame-Tale" are useful: by the end of "Night Sea Journey" we realize that it's not a seafaring tale but an allegory, which basically requires the reader to start over again at the beginning and re-read the story, knowing what it is about. In some sense, the cyclical nature of the Mobius Strip is being applied by Barth to the process of re-reading: after we gradually figure out what "Night Sea Journey" is describing, then we want to return to the beginning of the story and re-read it, to confirm this knowledge.

NEW LITERACY

Why is it new?

*New technology has changed meaning of literacy and types of text

*Texts include not only print forms of communication but also nonprint forms that are digital, aural, or visual in nature." (p. 7)

Why it literacy? | Why is it important?

"Literacy has come to represent | *Old paradigm assumed a synthesis of language, thinking, | teaching literacy meant and contextual practices through competency with (e.g.)

which people make and construct textbooks meaning." (p. 7) *Learning how to use Ebay

or YouTube is a form of literacy

EVALUATING WEBSITES

Nonlinear

*Hypertext requires a kind of literacy that is non-linear

*This is not possible in a paper-based literacy (p.38)

*Skills: IDENTIFY, NAVIGATE

Socialized | Interactive

*Website literacy is a *Internet-based sources multimodal activity (p.37) respond to critical inquiry

*Context of website within by being interactive larger environment helps *Skills: COMMUNICATE

to establish value

*Skills: CRITICALLY

EVALUATE, SYNTHESIZE

CONTENT LITERACY

Prior factors:

*Student's pre-existing knowledge and interest in the subject

*Reason student is engaged in learning about the subject /

Content factors: | Literacy factors:

*Text writers make *decoding assumptions about their *fluency readers *vocabulary

*Text structure organizes *comprehension strategies

information in certain ways

TEACHING WITH TEXT

Framework

*How to find information relevant to the purpose of reading /

Organization | Elaboration

*How information *How students can be

is presented to enabled to elaborate upon promote retention the information received

ADOLESCENT LITERACY

Traditional literacy:

*many adolescents have difficulty comprehending academic texts

*much of what adolescents encounter comes from information and communication technologies

Teaching strategies: | Adolescent strategies:

*Comprehension instruction * Motivation/self-direction

*Instructional principles in content *Collaborative learning

*Strategic tutoring

BLOG.

My content area is English literature, so for an example of a blog I'd like to use the personal English lit blog of Jenny Davidson. Davidson is a Professor in the English Department at Columbia University in NYC, and is also a Young Adult novelist (The Explosionist and Invisible Things).

http://jennydavidson.blogspot.com/

Davidson's blog is particularly interesting in the way that it combines the ordinary process of a blog -- providing links to published content, with some commentary from the blogger -- with facts about her daily work as an Ivy League English professor. On Sept 5, 2014, for example, she offers the full syllabus for a graduate seminar she is teaching on women's fiction in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

WIKI.

My content area is English literature, and last semester at UHV I took a seminar on postmodern American fiction, and wrote my term paper on the novelist Thomas Pynchon. Because Pynchon attracts a devoted academic fanbase, there is a designated Wiki site devoted to annotating and discussing his work.

http://pynchonwiki.com/

The useful thing about the Pynchon Wiki is the provision of linked footnotes to all of the novelist's books. As a result, Pynchon's novel published late in 2013 -- Bleeding Edge -- already has a substantial list of footnotes provided by the academics and knowledgeable fans who maintain the Wiki. The notes explain references in Pynchon's books, but also provide links and images for these references also.

WEBQUEST

For my sample WebQuest for students of English, I would propose a question about a major English poem. Does John Milton's preface note to his poem "Lycidas" indicate that the poet thought he could foretell the future? The links provided for the WebQuest would be as follows:

https://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/lycidas/text.shtml http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vates

http://classicsnetwork.com/essays/virgil-and-the-messianic-eclogue/824

This is posing a complicated -- but fun -- question to the students, but also is intended to present difficult matter (the influence of Classical literature on Renaissance-era English poets like Milton) in an accessible way. It helps to explain why "Lycidas" -- a poem about a dead friend -- is presented with the fiction of pretending the friend was an Ancient Greek shepherd (hence the title). But it also shows how the ancient conception of a poet as an inspired "bard" -- who had powers of prophecy -- may explain Milton's note at the beginning of the poem, where he notes that the poem "foretells" a major event of the English Civil War in the 17th century.

TECHNOLOGY LESSON PLAN.

Given my focus on English literature, I think a useful technology lesson plan would involve teaching students how to use the Oxford English Dictionary. As a result, I think the assignment I would pose is to ask students to read John Keats's short poem "To Sleep" and then tell them to use the Oxford English Dictionary to argue whether the last line refers to death:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173752

http://www.oed.com/

This is, of course, a trick question. Students often assume that the word "casket" in the last line of a poem about sleep is a reference to death. But the proper use of the Oxford English Dictionary can prove otherwise. Historically speaking, the word "casket" means a jewelry-box, and did so for John Keats (who was English and died in the early 19th century). The use of "casket" to mean "coffin" -- familiar to all students nowadays -- is shown by the OED to be a mid-19th century American usage. As a result, American high school students wrongly assume the use of the word in this poem makes reference to death -- whereas this association around the word comes from a different country and a later time period.

NATIONAL ASSOCIATION.

Because my content area is English, the national association relevant to this area is the NCTE, or National Council of Teachers of English:

http://www.ncte.org/

One extremely useful and interesting resource provided by the NCTE is their "Intellectual Freedom Center," which gives resources and advice (and sample writings) for how to challenge censorship of books on the secondary level. Apparently such well-known novels as The Color Purple and Bridge to Terabithia have been subjected to censorship bans by certain school districts, and the NCTE helps to support teachers (and students) in their First Amendment rights to have access to literature, and to help support instructors in their efforts to demonstrate the value of teaching controversial books.

DISCUSSION BOARD 3

For me as a reader, the story in Barth's "Lost in the Funhouse" that is most successful in fashioning a new form of narrative out of old tropes is "Echo." I say this because it is interesting in taking up an ancient Greek myth that is already clearly allegorical -- the myth of Echo and Narcissus clearly has a meaning for its original hearers. Part of it is "Just-So Story" meant to explain from whence comes the phenomenon of reverberation that to this day we call an "echo" -- it is the supernatural presence of a departed nymph. But another part of it is clearly meant to illustrate some kind of human tendency -- Narcissus falls in love with his own reflection in a pool. And what is most fascinating about this ancient allegorical myth is that it actually persists today in our own understanding of human psychology: it would be hard to discuss certain types of personality without employing the English word "Narcissism," which refers to a kind of pathological self-love, but which has ensured the immortality of the mythic figure just as surely as the word "echo" has perpetuated the other half of the myth.