1. 11.5.08 | My Body Schedule: 1.Attendance & Questions? 2.Revisions 3.Barth Discussion. 4.Shelley Jackson 5.HW – Play with the Mateas & Stern. Goal[s]:  Identify and evaluate the role of the reader in the ‘realization’ of a story.  Analyze the interactive capacities of digital media.

2. Revision Make significant and meaningful edits to your paper, responding to my comments. Write an accompanying guide to your revisions. Use this document to highlight what you changed, why, and how you feel it improves your paper. Obviously, you won’t mention EVERY change. Just the significant ones. Revisions are due before Tuesday of next week. Successful revisions have the potential to earn half of the grade points lost in the original grade [if you got a 3.0, you could get a 3.5].

3. Barth's story contains three distinct voices. these include the author's narration of the events in the story, the author's self critique, and the author’s presentation of possible critique from the reader. “Let’s ride the old flying horses!” Magda cried. I’ll never be an author. It’s been forever already, everybody’s gone home, Ocean City’s deserted, the ghost-crabs are tickling across the beach and down the littered cold streets. (Barth, 7) So far there’s been no real dialogue, very little sensory detail, and nothing in the way of a theme. And a long time has gone by already without anything happening; it makes a person wonder. We haven’t even reached Ocean City yet: we will never get out of the funhouse. (Barth, 3) The last of these acts as a substitution of the author’s thoughts for the reader’s. the author appears to be telling the reader what to think. Why does the author include this type of voice? How does this affect the reader's role in relation to the text? Does the author destroy the interactive experience by forcing his thoughts upon the reader? Or does this promote interaction in a different way?

4. Shelley Jackson’s My Body How did you read this? Obviously, the reading experience is different for every reader. As you all say “its up to the reader.” What can we talk about then? If we all read a different text in a different order, are we even reading the same story?

5. Jackson uses this method of hyperlinking different parts of her thoughts in a narrative to parallel her own discoveries of her body. As I went further, I found more and more not only about her and her feelings about being her own person, but about how she came to find this out herself. Ex: “I looked at my own body: flesh still growing is almost spirit, it clasps the bone, doesn't hang from it, you hardly recognize it as a substance. Grown-up flesh has more and more in common with sand, bark, old canvas, rust and mud. We resemble inanimate things more and more, until one day we become one.” Her text creates for the readers a way to feel as if they have a part in what they are reading by being able to navigate through each part of the body at their own pace. How much did this ability to control what you read affect the interactive experience? Or, did the fact that each body part didn't connect with any sort of master plot, but rather came together to create a voice or image of Jackson as a whole, make the interactivity of the story less relevant, as the her autobiography seemed more like a collection of shorter reflections on her body?