11.24.08 | House of Leaves [day4]

Schedule:1. Attendance & Questions?2. Calendar3. Immersion paper4. Inside the Hallway5. Large Group6. Discussion groups,

revisited7. HW – Keep Reading!

Goal[s]: Identify and evaluate the

role of the reader in the ‘realization’ of a story.

Relate role of the reader to the discussions raised by the text.

Interactivity Paper• Due by Monday. • 3< X < 4• MLA formatting, citation, and bibliography.• THERE WILL BE NO OPPORUNITY FOR REVISION. • Really try to build off your experience with the

last paper. – Answer HOW questions. – Use the TEXT to support your positions. – Think about the kinds of statements you are making

and what kinds of EVIDENCE you need.

Example: Pages 426 – 460

• With a partner answer these questions:– WHAT is happening in this pages? Describe

literally what is on the page. – HOW does manipulating the page like this affect

the task of reading?– SO WHAT? Is it just a neat trick or is there some

resonance with the themes of the book? Some larger issue?

• Large Group.

In the story, there seems to be many hidden messages within the passages. From research done on the book from wikipedia, it seemed that if you go through the first letter of footnotes 27-42, it would spell out the author’s full name and same for foot notes 46-57 which spells out his surname. 27 Mitchel Nadine Goetz 32 Declared Martin Heidegger’s 28 A selection of personal 33 And here’s the English 29 Rita Mistopolis 34 Neatly translated 30 Keillor Ross 35 In Appendix II 36 Easily that whole bit 31 Zampano. 37 Look at David Conte’s 38 Edith Skourja’s 39 Walter Jospeh Adeltine 40 Something like 41 Know what, Latin’s way out 42 In an effort to keep Another code that seem to be hidden in the passages of the story were the portions that were written in alternating short and long paragraphs which turn out to be Morse code that correspond to the text. I believe this could be found on page 97-106. More hidden codes could be found on page 64-65 from the long list of random names given. If you put the first letter of each of the individual's last names together, it would spell out the phrase "A LONG LIST". Knowing that this book have many hidden codes within its passages, does it affect your interactive/immersion with the reading or does it increase your curiosity with the book making you more interested in discovering where and what the codes are of?

• Many people will claim that House of Leaves is an interactive experience, often defensively citing the varying approaches readers take when reading the novel, for example. Does the ability to skip reading certain sections really conform to the idea of "interactivity" as you understand it? What would Ryan say?

tl;dr -- is it really interactive to simply choose what parts of the book not to perceive?