One of my sources is the book Modernist Fiction and News: Representing Experience in the Early Twentieth Century by David Rando.  We have talked a lot about storing in this class.  I want to share some quotations from the book that not only apply to my paper, but also furthers some discussions we have had and takes those discussions to a different literary era.  

"The early twentieth century was the first period to face the impossibility of adequately storing, remembering, and prioritizing the avalanche of information that new recording technologies and mass communication networks pressed upon consciousness, thereby, altering not only human experience but also reality itself." (1) 

"This book thus defines the modernist novel and narrative prose as that set of writings that first responded to the technological possibility of total information storage." (4) 

In Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, some of the main characters are described as composing one main form of writing.  Jake, the narrator, is a journalist for a newspaper.  We see him writing telegraphs, but, he is introduced to us in the novel sitting at his desk trying to finish up some stories.  As a journalist, his job is to report some event that the people might be interested in.  We can also infer that Jake's job as a journalist is not just to report actual "news," but that he can report any kind of story available.  In the second chapter, Jake asks Robert Cohn if he knows "any dirt" (17).  This suggest that Jake's "news" is also gossip.  

Jake is our narrator for the novel.  Everything that we get comes from his point of view.  As a modernistic character and an emotionally charged character, we are able to question Jake's point of view of the events happening in the story.  We know what side he is on, or says he's on, with the situations in the story because we only get his take.  Like a gossip column, we question Jake's authenticity of the events.  

            For my final paper, I have chosen to investigate writing in Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises.  With Hemingway being considered an author of the modernist period, his writing cannot be estranged from the influence of the time period, nor is it.  Within the novel, many characters are authors.  The main character, Jake, works for a newspaper, writing stories.  The type of “news” that he writes about is one to question from early in the book.  He cannot think of anything to write to see asks his friend if he knows about any “dirt.”  His friend, Robert Cohn, is also a writer who had much success with his first book, but is greatly struggling to produce a second one.  Other writers are mentioned throughout the novel.  Another form of communication that appears often in the novel is the use of writing and sending letters and sending telegraphs. 

            I have different ideas and questions that I would like to address for the novel.  For one, Hemingway is a writer influenced by the modernism movement.  I want to look closely at the relationship between his writing and the writing of his characters.  What are they influenced by?  Why does Hemingway have characters that are writers?  The telegraph is definitely an avenue I want to investigate in this novel.  In particular, the telegraph that Jake sends to Brett at the end of the novel because it reminds me of Gertrude Stein, who just happened to be influential on Hemingway.  Since Hemingway uses these telegraphs in his novel, they obviously are being used in the world.  I would like to look at the relationship between the telegraph and writing letters at this time and within this novel.  Is this relationship affected by modernism?  How does one affect the other?  These are my beginning thoughts to my approach to this paper.     

     In Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour," a lot of attention is placed on the transmission of messages.  One avenue that this can be explored through the placement of doors and windows in the story.  The first time a window or door is mentioned is when Mrs. Mallard goes to her room and sits in the armchair "facing the open window" (1).  It is during this time that that Mrs. Mallard begins to feel that  "There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully" (1).  Whatever was coming to her, we know that it was apparently coming from the outside to the window because Chopin states that "she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air" (1).  That "something" was the feeling of freedom that she now possessed because of the death of her husband.  She receives this message through the open window.  

For this distant reading project, I chose Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, which was published in 1871.  The only prior knowledge that I had of this book is that it can be considered a sequel to Alice in Wonderland and that it is linked to children with disabilities.  My prior knowledge of the text allowed me to understand some of the word choices found in the novel. 

            Since I knew that the novel was about Alice from Alice in Wonderland, I was not surprised when Voyant calculated that “Alice” is used 434 times in the texts.  Some other words like “tweedledee” and “tweedledum” did not surprise me, either.  If this had been a text that I knew was not about Alice, I would definitely question those words’ place in the text. 

            The title of the novel is Through the Looking-Glass.  I decided to see how many times that “looking-glass” is used in the text.  The term is used 20 times throughout the text.  Some similar words were used less often than “looking-glass.” “Glass” was used 7 times and “glasses” was used 3 times.  I wanted to draw a conclusion about what the “looking-glass” referred to.  Because of the title stating Through the Looking-Glass, I thought that the term might be used for a window.  I used the word frequency search in Voyant to find that “window” was used on 6 times and “window-panes” was used once.  The frequencies of those words are not high compared to other words used in the text.  However, I allowed a “window” to suffice as a synonym for “looking-glass.” 

            I wanted to make sure that I tried every synonym that I could think of for “looking-glass,” so I searched for the word “mirror,” or its plural form.  Not one time did Voyant show that “mirror” is in the text.  I thought that this would support my theory that “looking-glass” is synonymous for “window,” without reading the text.  Just looking at the text by the word frequencies, I believe that is a logical conclusion.  However, I was wrong.  When I used the “Keywords in Context” search tool on Voyant, it showed “looking-glass” being used in the following statement:” …held it up to the looking-glass, that it might see how…”  The corpus reader took me to the spot in the text where this passage is at.  I read the entire statement that says, “She held it [the kitten] up to the looking-glass, that it might see how sulky it was.”  Contrary to my inference, this statement used “looking-glass” to refer to a mirror.  Some of the uses of the word in context after that one did not give any inference to whether it is a mirror or window. I was not able to decipher until I found “looking-glass” used in to describe a book that Alice lifted to another looking-glass so that the words would not be backwards.  This, again, proved to me that “looking-glass” is a mirror. 

So, the title of the novel that we are reading is In the Cage.  The title itself suggests something other than human.  When we think of cages, we think of humans.  However, the beginning of the novel starts with the narrator explaining how the girl compares herself to a caged pet: "It had occurred to her early that in her position-that of a young person spending, in framed and wired confinement, the life of a guinea-pig or a magpie..." (117).  Her position in the P.O. keeps her separate from everyone else in the world, like an animal in a cage.  

These two topics have been on my mind a lot, lately.  The other day, I was developing a lesson and then a controlling theme and rationale.  I chose objects and registers as my topic.  The reason I chose registers rather than symbols is because a symbol was formed because of the register that we gave the object.  To take it further, the registers begin because of the distinctions that are made.  I think that by looking through text or the world through distinctions and registers, we make the world much more complex and then we can understand how me turn something in to a symbol. 

*First off, have you seen the All-State commercial with the man sitting at a table with the little kids and he asks them what the highest number is that they can think of?  When one little kid replies with "infinity times infinity," the man makes a noise and motions with his hands that are to say "mind blown."  That is how I felt at the end of the book.*  

On another note, when I was listening to chapter 16, my attention was really caught by the passage "But how wild, how almost laughable the fatality- and yet how continually it comes to pass, thought Hepzibah, in this dull delirium of a world- that whosoever, and with however kindly a purpose, should come to help, they would be sure to help the strongest side!" (172).  I thought of the King James version of the verse John 3:16: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." I thought it might have been because both passages use the word "whosoever." However, in rereading both chapters, I feel that there is more to that. 

So far, The House of Seven Gables is a good book.  However, I have read to chapter 9 and I feel like I am finally getting to the start of a big event, maybe. 

The title for this blog comes from chapter 2 of the novel.  Hawthorne is explaining about Hepzibah Pyncheon when he says the above quotation.  I chose this because it goes well with, in my opinion, what I have read so far.   

From what I have read, I feel like to this book is one to reread multiple times in order to better understand the novel. 

I have to start out by saying that overall, I liked doing the screencast much better than writing a paper or doing a formal presentation.  The point of an archive is to give visual information to the public.  We were able to showcase that without losing the academic aspect of the project. 

At first, I was not very pleased with the Take Note archive.  I found it to be just a scatter of information that made it seem not very user friendly.  It did take much time and playing around with the site for me to get a good understanding of what the site's purpose and what the site has.  Once I was able to figure a method to madness, I was able to appreciate the interesting artifacts and descriptions exhibited.  The aim we took with our screencast really supported the existence of a site like Take Note. However, I  do not think that the archive is a great research tool.  It is only aimed for people doing research on the subject of note taking.  There is not one particular person or interest that is highlighted on the site.  It is just a collection of note taking artifacts found. But, it does serve as a site to dive into some interesting findings and information. 

The preface of The House of Seven Gables emphasizes the difference between the author writing a novel and the author writing a Romance.  It goes on to talk about the moral purpose authors try to put in their writings, as well as, the historical significance in an author's work.  The preface concludes that the work, Hawthorne's The House of Seven Gables, would be better read if the reader would focus on the work as a Romance and not the locality and historical significance of the work.  Hawthorne is telling readers how they should read this particular work of his.  

So, why does this matter?

When I read this, I though about the countless movies, television shows, and pictures that show a person looking for some kind of message and when they look up at the stained-glass window with the sun light coming through, the message the person was looking for comes to them. 

To be more specific, I started thinking about the movie "The Last Song," which is based off of a Nicholas Sparks book.  Like I described earlier, the girl in the movie looks up to the stained-glass window and sees the sun shining through which she perceives to be her father telling her that she can play....the last song-the last song that he wrote before he died. 

What intrigues me though, is how powerful this, essentially, piece of glass is in so many films, shows, and pictures.  Glass as a window connects to the outside world without us having to be on the outside.  Glass serves as a medium between us and what we could call the unknown, the outside.  So, we see glass depicted in these ways as giving messages to people from the "unknown," which, in turn, is such a powerful part of those people's lives in which we often see in tales of film and show versions. 

In chapter 24 (page 165) of Poe's Pym, Pym is once again faced with losing his life, but this time, he is dangling from a cliff.  Poe describes the incident in a way that would also reflect someone that is struggling with a writing tasks before them; especially someone that is having to write in order to save themselves from some type of destruction.   

Until the end of the book when death finally conquers Pym, Pym survives many close encounters with death.  These reoccurring run-ins make me wonder if that is the little bit of hope, yes hope, that Poe is holding on to for himself in his writing.  His career was under stress, therefore the reason he wrote this book.  However, he attempted the "vast depth yet to be descended" and wrote the novel.