Today, on this first day of March, Ben began class with writing the program for the day on the board as he usually does. It reads that we will begin with Housekeeping, followed by a note on the Reality Based Community and the legacy of Hayek and Rand, after that there will be a discussion on Delillo- opening notes and finally the Difficultation of the day will be presented.
After this Ben lets us know that he is now up to date on difficultations and protocols as far as grading goes and has sent e-mails to reflect these grades. He then notes that on Thursday we will be diving deeper into the External Writing #2 assignment and discussing ideas for truths that could be used. That was pretty much as far as the housekeeping portion of class went.
Ben then asks the class what our opinions were in White Noise. He reveals that he had many ideas on how to begin class today but could not settle on just one so he created a collection of many different methods. One being mentioning the idea that we will begin to take a step back from the media approach we have been taking to the articles and books that we have been reviewing and instead taking a physiological approach to these writings and people. Also recognizing how every novel and other writing is shaped by current events and what we have been discussing, like the ideas and theories of Hegel, Rand, etc., even if these shapings are covert and we are unaware to them as readers. White Noise for example was published in 1985 and being written in the 80's the book was set in a world that Hayek and Rand envisioned. By 1985 the Western World, particularly the United States and Great Britain had leaders come to power who drew understandings about economies from Hayek and Rand, i.e. Ronald Regan and Margaret Thatcher. They favored the breaking of unions and to deregulate. Two influential and remembered quotes from Margaret Thatcher in particular include "There is no alternative." speaking about Market capitalism and involving the breaking unions and deregulation ideas. Also, "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families." This quote is still brought up and analyzed today, some agreers and some opposers.
Next Ben introduces a little show and tell portion, which is unrelated. He turns our attention to a website that has an article with the title 'Charlie Sheen v Muammar Gaddafi: Who's line is it anyway'. The article contains different quotes from both people and the viewers job is to pick which person they believe said the ridiculous quote. We do not go through the article but get the jist that it is quite amusing. Ben then shows us a blog that is titled Reality Based Community, the title comes from a 2004 New York Times article in which during the election politicians were name calling and came up with this phrase. Since then Al Franken has used it in a satirical way. In the blog it is stated that everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts.
After reviewing these websites Ben turns the attention back to White Noise. He asks us to what extent we found this book realistic, some people have issues with believing it to be realistic, such as the dialogue for a 14 year old or the possibility of this being literally realistic rather then just theoretically, but the majority of the class believes it to be realistic.
Ben then says that he believes there to be a traitor among us, Hongfa wrote in a comment on the blog that she did not see Ben's blog question to be one that adds to the understanding of the novel. She goes on to say in class that she believed that Murray had more of an opinion and stance in the novel on his ideas and thoughts about history than Jack. Others agree with her but Ben points out that as Jack is the narrator of this story he speaks a lot more to the audience and his ideas and biases are brought out in the way that he allows the perspective of other characters to be introduced and what light he sheds on them, also the way that he introduces scenes and things like that. However, Ben does admit some fault in that he may have possibly messed up the blog post and not allowed as much freedom as could have been possible but he wanted to see what we could have gotten from the narrative, pushing against limits, but he may not have explained in great detail what is meant by a narrative's "argument". This means that it is not just overtly presented in the way that Jack said things to other people but the small details again like the way things are presented through the bias of the narrator. Jack is a 1st person narrator and another type would be a 3rd person narrator which is often considered and omniscient. Wayne Booth introduced the idea that all narrators, no matter what form, should be considered unreliable and we should keep this in mind when reading the next books in this semester.
Then came the difficultation. We were instructed to take out a sheet of paper and to jot down thoughts or interesting things that stuck out to us about Delillo in his book White Noise, things that resonated with us. After doing this we were formed into groups of three that were already decided and we discussed the different things that we all wrote down about the book. Next each group was to pick out different cards that were placed into two groups on the board, one card from the category of people and two from different words and subject matters. With those three cards each group had to draw correlations and relationships between the three. We also were asked to answer a guiding question in our discussions: How do the relationships "build" a picture of being a "human" in the world?
Once each group had finished discussing a big piece of poster paper was placed in the middle of the room with markers. Jack was written in the middle and groups with Jack as a discussion point were asked to come up and make a webmap from his name with different keywords and discussion points that they came up with in their groups and tie them all together and to explain a little bit why there are connections. The first included how Jack was related to Sex and Hitler as well as Death and Consumerism, two topics in which almost everything could be connected to. More and more groups came up and added to the map but we ran out of time to discuss all connections. Next class period we will discuss more in depth all of the correlations that were formed.
Following this protocol is a photo of what the final product of this map looked like.
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