Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Midterm Draft

Okay, first off: I would have posted this sooner, but I hate computers, google, Vista, and Microsoft Word.

Now, as some might know, I am writing a story that in some ways questions gender and touches on sexuality in a way that most people wouldn't. In my case, I am trying to show the significance, correlation, and modular/functional/aesthetic overlap between gender thought and gender in practice. The reason I chose to explore both hetero and homosexuality because it changes the role of our gender in relation to others.

So in practice: The quotes are meant to have gender implications, and so are the actions of the character. The thing is, I don't explicitly define either, but hopefully the reader will be able to give them gender in order to see the functional and gendered correlation in these quotes.

Also, I kinda hate what I have written so far, so please criticize it to death, I want to fix/improve this writing. I can be a little bit "out there" too, so if anything sounds like the result of delusions or hallucinations, I can rewrite it.

Link to document!

7 comments:

Adam Johns said...

That's a long draft - it took me a while to get it commented.

Here's the commented version

I find it quite interesting and ambitious: my comments circulate around the problem of literary form (that is, the technologies which this particular (anti)narrative is and could be employing.

Emily said...

I think your story will be more interactive (if thats what your going for) is if you changed all the I's and me's to 'you'. I think it will make the reader more involved in the series of events.

I have really bad grammer so spell check is better for you there than I am. I will think of more ideas for you and as they come I will post them on the blog.

Jessica S. said...

Thanks so much for the feedback!

I am not sure sure about the idea of changing "I" to "you" since it makes a lot less sense to me. Maybe it's just my subjective reaction, but most people I don't think can really identify with the character on that level to really feel like they'd follow the same path(s).

I am going to work hard to give this better form and develop it better. I hope the direction I take it polishes things off. I am enjoying working on this enough that I'll spend a good bit of time on it (not that I haven't -- reading all those books and meditating took a lot of time, too).

Adam Johns said...

I see Emily's point about the "you" -- if your point (and I know it's not that simple, but bear with me) is that gender is imposed on us, then _making_ us identify with Alex has its merits.

I'm not saying it should literally be changed to "you," but you might want to think about ways to get that same effect.

Jessica S. said...

I will certainly try my best to see what I can do to achieve that.

The effect of the imposition of gender, and gender's creation from nothing in a Taoist sense, are two goals that are really tough to pull off.

Adam Johns said...

It may be that it's hard to reconcile the two in one (relatively) short piece - there'd be no shame in retrenching and really focusing more narrowly on one of the two ideas.

Jessica S. said...

I know it's late but I figured I'd reply anyway.

Before you posted your last comment, I had already done your above advice by focusing on one of the ideas instead of both. Especially given your earlier advice, I didn't want to kill myself on this assignment since it wouldn't get completed if I did.