Sunday, September 16, 2007

Blog Assignment #4 (Group 2)

I'm sketching out several possibilities briefly; it'll be up to you to flesh them out.

1) If you believe that interactive fiction (Zork, etc.) is, or can be, a legitimate art form, explain and defend that position, with at least brief attention to what you value in art. Note: don't take this option if you don't think it is, or could be, a real art form. That's too easy.
p.s. You might use the moments about the nature of art in any of the texts we've read so far to help make your position (yes, Lyotard, Davis, Joy and Twain all address the nature of art, at least implicitly).

2) There are obvious ways in which Hank Morgan fits into the prototypical American character of the confidence man (perhaps developed best in Melville's novel The Confidence Man, which is about 5x more challenging than Moby-Dick, but I digress). One characteristic of confidence men as narrators is that they are conning the reader, as well as recording their cons for our amusement.
Using specific passages, analyze the/a con that Hank is pulling on us.

3) Using specific material (I hesitate to say "passages" or "quotes" with Zork) from both Twain's novel and Zork, take a position on whether it is useful to discuss both under the same umbrella of "narrative" - or whether it is better to separate them into different categories (which then presumably you will enumerate).

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