Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Final Project Proposal

Final Project
My final project is going to help me deal with the challenges and difficulties I have faced throughout this course. The challenges have been due to the level of reading and games that have been played in this class. Unlike any other class I have taken the works read in this class, challenged me more than I am used to. I had to go out of my comfort zone and find other perspectives in order to properly understand these books.
             From reading house of leaves the concept of “Ergodic literature” struck a place for me. I felt like the whole concept of Ergodic literature applies directly to this class. From DADES to Marcuse to HOL and even games such as Dear Esther and Zork, all these forms of art in my opinion would be considered Ergodic literature. While some people find them to be mediocre, I find that the reason why they do not understand these works is because they are completely different from what they have previously experienced. With all the books or games played in this class, I feel that an open mind and a different perspective would be the best way to understand them. Reading these works takes a lot of patience and work; the authors make the reader work for their understanding. By having multiple connotations and several interpretations, it is up to the reader to piece together the individual parts of the book together.
            This is why I feel that researching the concept of Ergodic literature, and relating it to several of the works that we have read in this class would be the best final project that I can do.

In order to relate Ergodic literature to the works read in this class, I intend to
1.     Research the meaning, and origin of Ergodic literature
2.     Each book that I will relate to Ergodic literature will be discussed briefly to give the reader a background for why this concept is important to them.
3.     Research several books read in this class, to get feedback on the difficulty that readers had while reading them
4.     Then I intend to relate that difficulty or the challenges to the concept of Ergodic literature.

                                   Bibliography
Some of the research I intend to use in this paper include:
7.     Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature By Espen J. Aarseth


1 comment:

Adam said...

This is a good topic, broadly speaking. I'm also impressed by your desire to articulate your own response to the class as a whole . You don't yet have an argument (which is fine), though, so I'll say a couple things about how you can get from topic to argument.

First, one possibility to mention. You could write this as a standard essay, which is fine, or you could write it as a more personal essay - a discussion of your own encounter with Ergodic literature. Neither way is necessarily better than they other, but I wanted to mention the possibility.

Regardless of which approach you take (more personal or less personal) it's important that you not try to tackle everything. It will be easier to formulate an argument and pursue it in detail if you pick 1, 2, or at most 3 books/games that you want to talk about. I understand the impulse to cover everything, but inevitably you'll end up not saying much about anything in particular if you do that. You need to do find a particular thing you want to say about Ergodic literature, or your experience with it, focusing on a subset of what we've talked about. You simply can't do everything well.

The idea is excellent - it just needs to be a little more focused.