1st weekly entry
September 4, 2009
After our second week of class, I can say I am feeling mildly overwhelmed by the different number of different concepts we have covered in class. For me, their were two interesting concepts we discussed this week that stood out to me as more interesting than the rest. The first concept was framing, or what I tried to pinpoint as the “style” in which the story or novel was written. The second was a concept taking from the Abbot book, which said that a narrative doesn’t tell you what to think, but is a machine for how to formulate your own thoughts.
As I just articulated, I tried to say framing was the “style” in which a narrative is written. Going on the assumption that I am correct, I think the style in which a narrative is told is equally important to me liking the story as the quality of the plot. I will elaborate on this idea with a movie a recently watched called Momento. This is a story of a man with an injury that has left him incapable of forming new memories. The plot takes place by telling a story going forward in time, revealing new information with each photograph, or Momento. The other story moves backward in time, eventually converging with the first story. To me, this wasn’t that great of a story except for the unique way in which it was framed.
The second concept I will illustrate with a book I am currently reading that is called Blink. The premise of this book is that, at least for people with knowledge of the subject matter, that perfect decision are able to be made in the split second after they are presented to a person. This book is a wonderful example of how the same narrative’s can mean such different things to different people. My brother read this book, and took away from it that he needed to stop spending any amount of time making decisions. This is sort of what the book is about, so I can say my brother interpreted it correctly. I on the other hand, interpreted it differently. I took away from Blink that in order to be successful, I need to make it my perrogative to work hard and learn as much as I can about as many different things as possible.
