So I started thinking about life. About jobs and respect. About responsibility to self and to society. About the student who goes to class everyday getting good grades because she has been told that is right and good of children to do that. About her little brother who goes to school and gets into fights and gets detention because that’s what his best bud does. How much of our actions, habitual and unrevised, are even our own?

Let me try to make this point slightly more clear. I won’t do William James’s squirrel is to metaphysical disputes analogy justice but I will try to be as creative as possible…

            Thoughts of this paper were generated from the class discussion on 3/30/10. It consists of ideas that excited me at the time and continue to interest me today. And so, my task stands: I must formulate the March 30th, 2010 stockpile of raw brain material into a coherent paper; all of these separate thoughts need to have a connecting theme in order to make a strong and well-structured paper. What I have come up with is a larger theme running through this class as a whole.           

The style of Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis is striking in that it is so bare, composed solely of black and white images and somewhat caricatured in its simple portrayal of events and individuals. Satrapi employs a purposeful minimalism and understatement in her approach to graphic narrative. This approach emphasizes the degree to which much of the horror and alienation she experienced as a result of growing up in an oppressive and war-torn society cannot be expressed or represented in any form. Instead, the reader is brought into a stark world of black and white that implies what cannot be fully communicated visually or textually.

Preface and Explanation

The following paper originally included photographs of pages from Marjane Sartrapi’s graphic novel “Persepolis.” I used these images to demonstrate my points to the reader. Upon glancing over the images, however, it occurred to me that I might make an even more effective point by attempting to describe the images in prose, rather than to demonstrate them in their original form.

For this project, I took one of what Gertrude Stein calls her “plays,” and considered what would happen if I were to try to stage and direct it. After reading through it, I attempted to break it down into characters, lines, and to imagine a setting in which it would logically take place.

But first, let’s look at “Captain Walter Arnold” just the way Gertrude Stein wrote it, without any additional directions from me.

Captain Walter Arnold

By Gertrude Stein

Do you mean to please me.

I do.

Do you have any doubt of the value of food and water.

I have not.

Can you recollect any example of easy repetition.

 thewilltobelieve.wordpress.com

   In the past the thought of a film adaption of a novel brought so much joy to my heart that I could barely contain the excitement. I hoped that by seeing my favorite characters brought to life on screen people like my sister, who did not enjoy reading, would be able to understand my love for the novels. Movie after movie was a disappointment. Ella Enchanted, “O”, Harry Potter, Cruel Intentions, The Joy Luck Club, North Country, Apocalypse Now, To Kill a Mockingbird, etc. I either found myself whispering “that never happened”, or “I promise it was much cooler in the book”. Frankly my heart could not take it anymore. I stopped hoping and learned to expect the worst.

 As some of you from our class know, I had originally planned to write a more ‘Choose-your-own-adventure’ style narrative as a conversation with William James, with several different choices leading to different outcomes, depending upon which philosophical direction the readers’ conversations with him took. However, due to my own difficulty grappling with and understanding his texts, I (and our Professor Anne) decided that this was perhaps too ambitious a project for me to successfully complete, so I scaled back quite a bit, and ended up with a one-way conversation with Mr. William James (yes, not quite as exciting as three-way, I know…).

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