I sometimes enjoy watching Ted talks to learn about aspects of the world I don't know a lot about or to hear the opinions of really smart people. One talk I watched recently struck me as particularly pertinent to what we've discussed in this class. It's delivered by Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, who discusses the influence of stories on people and society in general.

Obviously, stories have huge value to humanity, as Cowen notes. They can pack lots of information into a small space, they have social power, they can be beautiful and speak to our deepest emotions. They condense the vast amounts of information our brains process every day into something we can understand and address.

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For my final project, I have opted for the analytical route. I would like to write a narratological explication of Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves. Although we briefly discussed some narrative fiction early in the semester, for the most part the focus of this course was on forms of narrative that have not been explored in as much depth as standard prose fiction. And while writing a paper on your average novel would probably not be a very fruitful exercise (in the sense of fitting with the parameters of this project,) looking at House of Leaves offers an array of potential sources for narratological analysis.

For instance, the layered narration of the novel subverts the standard narrator/narratee relationship - when we have one narrator of one thread of the story, and a second for another one, what narratological implications does that have? The fact that Johnny Truant is relating a story from a text he found that was originally written by Zampano also leads to questions of historical narrativity. What is the impact on stories when they are passed down to different narrators? How does this affect narrative as we understand it?

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In deciding how to create a visual representation of the Choose Your Own Adventure book Treasure Diver, I came to the realization that the best way to achieve that representation was surprisingly appropriate considering the subject matter of the story. Treasure Diver follows the adventures of four scuba divers searching for treasure, and the external-exploratory form of narrative (which this story is) is best visualized by representing the various strands of the story as bodies of water breaking off from each other, with the reader cruising down them on a boat.
We began with say, a lake. This is where the story begins. We are then offered two choices: the equivalent of two rivers branching off from the lake. These two choices will lead to a string of new choices, tributaries of the original two rivers, and in turn choices that spring from those tributaries will lead to new branches (creeks maybe?) Eventually, these tributaries of narrative will reach their conclusion, flowing into the finality of the ocean.

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      You may not be aware of this but there are a number of highly respected physicists who are proponents of a theory in which there are many parallel universes coexisting as part of the fabric of reality. The idea springs from quantum mechanics, which is an experimentally proven school of physics. Quantum mechanics says that we can never know with certainty where any particular microscopic particle of the universe is at a give moment - we can only know a probability of where it is. Each particle has a "probability wave," where the higher the wave is, the more likely the particle is to be there, and the lower it is, the less likely it is to be there. When someone measures a particle, it will settle on one of these multiple waves - but what about the other waves? The many-worlds interpretation argues that the other probability waves - where the particle might be if you hadn't measured it - make up alternate universes.

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     One of the positive things I've taken from this class so far is the possibility to apply narratological concepts I've learned to different aspects of the world around me. Last night, with the election results coming in from Virginia and New Jersey, I was struck by the potential narratological implications of the political world. 

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     In Chapter 2 of Avatars of Story, Marie-Laurie Ryan mentions a sub-genre known as "New Journalism," noting, "this movement represents an attempt to introduce narrative techniques typical of fiction, especially those of the nineteenth-century novel, into journalistic reports of real world events."  I've enjoyed many of these so called "non-fiction novels," including such diverse works as A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers, The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson. 

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 Take a look at this picture:

Okay, you see spirals, right? Spirals of blue, green, and orange(ish). The blue and green spirals are the same color. The explanation is here: blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/06/24/the-blue-and-the-green/

Key quote: "The reason they look (like) different colors is because our brain judges the color of an object by comparing it to surrounding colors. In this case, the stripes are not continuous as the appear at first glance. The orange stripes don't go through the 'blue' spiral, and the magenta ones don't go through the 'green' one."

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      I've never been a huge fan of "serious" comics - graphic novels, manga, the Marvel stuff, and so on. I know that this sub form of comics enjoys a strong following and is still a vibrant sect of the comic world. I'm more familiar with the standard comic strips that have always appeared in newspapers, "the funnies." Having looked at the dazzling visual displays of Windsor McCay's Little Nemo for the first time, and also having some familiarity with the surreal, otherworldly qualities of George Herriman's Krazy Kat, I'm struck by how much the medium of newspaper comics has declined since the golden age of the early 20th century.

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         I just read Sasquatch's blog post, and I wanted to respond to some of what he says, because I disagree with his fundamental argument. While he's right that technology certainly introduces all kinds of new problems (Pandora's box, right?) I think a basic cost/benefit analysis of almost all new technologies that become common will show that, on balance, technological progress is a good thing.

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In his essay on televisual narrative complexity, Jason Mittel's denotation for narrative complexity is, roughly: the intersection of episodic and serial storytelling. While reading MIttel's essay, I was reminded of an essay written by David Foster Wallace, "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" in which he argued that the attempts of American fiction writes to co-opt the jaded irony of TV shows was leading to vapid and insular novels. Wallace wrote that essay in 1990, when for the most part, narrative complexity was not very common in television. There were a few shows such as Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere which fit the bill, but it wasn't until the nineties that narrative complexity truly proliferated on TV. I wonder if, now that TV shows have more sophisticated narrative structures than they did when Wallace wrote that essay, there is a more positive influence exerted by television on other mediums, like film and novels.

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