Final Paper Ideas

I recently stumbled upon an article regarding sympathy vs. empathy; the article suggested that sympathy is more a process than a feeling that a reader undergoes. The article also suggests that "sympathy denies what empathy most highly prizes, namely the fusion of self with other"(Grenier). I think this concept can be directly applied to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. The article also suggests that it is our sympathetic response that is what makes characters feel more real to us as readers. By using this article, "Thinking of Me Thinking of You" as well as Vermeule's article "Why Do We Care About Literary Characters?" I hope to further explore the ideas of sympathy and empathy as presented in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. 


I may also not use The Curious Incident but instead focus on a poem, as the "Thinking of Me Thinking of You" article equates sympathy to metonymy and empathy to metaphor. I haven't not fully decided but I am hoping to make some progress regarding this tonight.

Actual vs. Virtual

The article "Virtual Laboratory" really struck a cord with me. The idea that virtual reality is in fact very real to us as humans was surprising to me; I always thought that I would be able to separate between virtual reality and reality. What stood out to me the most, however, was the stigma study in the article. The fact that we as humans react the way we do to just simple facial birthmarks shed a lot of light on Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime and why Haddon specifically did not state that Christopher was autistic. If we as humans react the way we do to virtual reality, it can be suggested that we do the same with literature; it seems that Haddon was trying to avoid that immediate stigma often associated with autism, and was trying to allow the reader to form their own opinion about Christopher as a character. If you take this article and translate it in such a way that it can be applied to literature, it definitely shines a lot of light as to why authors may write the way they do. In order to avoid stigmas and labels, authors may leave some ambiguity in regards to their characters to allow the reader to insinuate what characteristics of the characters are.

On a side note, I really wish that autism was not associated with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. I feel that my reading of the novel would have been completely different had I been able to read it with a clean slate and no pre-conceived notions. 

A World of Metaphor

My oral presentation mainly focuses on the familiarity of metaphor and the article "Neural Correlates of Metaphor Processing". To distant my blog post from the same concepts, this post will mainly focus on a section of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" that I really enjoyed. The section I found really beautiful is the section discussing the yellow fog and smoke. I mention this in my presentation, but mainly to use as an example in class rather than discuss the actual metaphors present in the lines and how many layers there are in the poem. I felt the yellow fog was a metaphor for his thoughts. While the idea of an animal, such as a cat, are present through the language, I feel that that is the metaphor at the surface. Once you dig a little deeper, you realize that this section is in fact directly discussing consciousness, and is using the metaphor of a cat, disguised by the metaphor of fog, to explore this. This suggests that there are many layers to metaphors; I would never generalize to say that each and every metaphor has another layer, but it does suggest that we as critical readers must explore metaphors at a level more than simply what immediately strikes us. The window panes seem to reflect the brain and how our thoughts and consciousness envelope our brain, just as the yellow fog is enveloping the window panes. 

Gaps

Key aspects of narrative are missing from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime that is the result of Christopher's narration. While Christopher is not specified as having any cognitive condition, the way he narrates the novel suggests he may have Aspberger's syndrome. Although the novel is classified as a narrative, the fact that key aspects of the typical narrative are missing suggest that this classification may not be the most appropriate. We as the readers are required to fill in the emotional gaps, because while Christopher attempts to explain emotions to us, he doesn't necessarily communicate the emotion well. Additionally, Christopher has difficulty understanding sequential events, and thus sequence is often interrupted, leaving it up to the reader to piece together the events occurring in the novel. While some readers may find this annoying, I personally think it creates more of a connection to the novel. I also think it truly helps to develop the reader's individual reading of a novel. The emotions a reader applies to a novel where the emotions aren't spelled out says a lot about the reader, and how they interpret the novel. I think that an interesting experiment would be to compare how readers read the novel, and whether or not the emotional response is similar. It'd be interesting to see if our brains read the novel as an autistic individual would or if it would just be differing emotional responses.