Throughout the course of this class and the novels we have read, I noticed a recurring theme among the experimental techniques used by the novels’ authors. It stemmed from the questions asked in class-how is this novel experimental? How is this other novel also experimental, and how do the experimental techniques differ from of complement […]
Considering we have been interacting with the House of Leaves/A Million Blue Pages page a lot this semester, I have decided to use it as my exhibit of evaluation for this assignment. Using the criteria listed on the Museums and the Web 2012 (MW2012): Best of the Web: Review Criteria, I have I decided to […]
How did this assignment affect your reading of this novel? I thought the original assignment of reading House of Leaves would be a chore in itself. Knowing I had to go further and create five nodes made the idea seem a little more tedious. Instead of enjoying the novel for what it was, I was […]
House of Leaves has to have been one of the most difficult books I’ve ever had to read. Actually, scratch that; The Fountainhead is the most difficult book I’ve ever tried to read, but for a much different reason, and one that I honestly won’t try to go into at this time. House of Leaves as a […]
This assignment helped shape the way I experienced reading House of Leaves by taking something un-graspable, such as text, and making it tangible and physical. In a sense, this project made what wasn’t real, real. This was helpful in understanding the text because it allowed anyone reading and creating at the same time to explore […]
Some parts of this book were extremely difficult to get through. To be 100% honest, I still have not finished it. Making the nodes for the A Million Blue Pages project definitely helped me through what I have read so far. Thinking of how to turn certain parts of the book into a node made […]
Danielle: I feel like the A Million Blue Pages assignment really made me pay close attention while reading House of Leaves. The text itself is incredibly complicated and required a lot of extra attention, but then looking for something to make an object out of- a meaningful object- became a much bigger part of the challenge. […]
As a second time reader of House of Leaves I was expecting the Million Blue Pages site to affect me more than it did. I went into the project very excited to share knowledge and ideas with people across the country who enjoy the book as much as I do but left feeling disappointed. Lack of […]
Being a part of A Million Blue Pages and contributing objects to the page made the experience of reading and analyzing Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves so much more interactive and dynamic. Just as the novel forces the reader to see and interpret the book as an object, creating the objects made me, as a […]
When I first thought about this assignment, I can admit that I wasn’t that thrilled. I mean, the book was (and still is) so confusing to me and I didn’t really enjoy the read because it frustrated me most of the time. But, as I began to make my ‘objects’ and begin to think about […]
When I first started reading House of Leaves, I had no idea what to expect. As a first time reader, I was overwhelmed with the amount of reading and differing narratives. I had a difficult time figuring out what to pay attention to. In the small picture, I feel like this project was a great […]
The first time I read House of Leaves, I felt like I had been handed a textbook with no spine, none of its pages numbered, graphs and charts without tidy explanations at the bottom, and you get the idea. The second time around, however, I find I can enjoy the book a lot more because […]
From our experience with House of Leaves, we found that the reading experience is generated from more than just the words typed on the page. Since it is such an experimental book by nature, interacting with A Million Blue Pages creates a much more rich and communal familiarity with the work as a whole. Our […]
I was really excited this semester to be in a class with a focus on learning about a text in unconventional ways. A course where we get to tweet in class, and the teacher is totally fine with it? Sign me up! I realized pretty quickly that the projects we were assigned were, in fact, […]
For the final reflection for this course we were asked to talk about a number of things regarding the projects we took on, namely if we liked them, how well they did or didn’t work, and something we learned because of an insight brought on by the projects. I’m going to start by saying that, […]
Taking a course on experimental literature, I expected to encounter books with unfamiliar formatting, interesting graphic components, and quirky content (like footnotes and appendices). What I did not expect were experimental assignments. I am comfortable with traditional essays, so completing projects with components that were unfamiliar to me was pretty intimidating. And while some projects […]
Our group was fortunate in the line up of projects with book subjects. It’s actually a lot more difficult to pinpoint projects that did not lend themselves to highlighting and analyzing thematic aspects of their literary counterparts. Specifically, I’d like to explore how the following projects worked and did not: House of Leaves as a […]
Final Reflection Assignment For each of the books we’ve read this semester, I was painfully aware of how I had previously had superficial understanding of language theory, and this course made me want to know more about how language evolves. Before this course I understood in theory what these great thinkers like Derrida, Wittgenstein, and […]
I decided to investigate the significance of the various names used in the House of Leaves. Since there are so many hidden messages and meanings within Danielewski’s work, the names themselves likely carry some sort of significant meaning in this novel as well. Starting with Johnny Truant, the first thing that comes to mind is […]
What I thought I would do for my second blog post would be to take a slightly different look at something we have talked on extensively in class, trying to discern just what is real. This site contains an observation that, as a class, we may have briefly touched on. It is the idea that we […]
Having finished House of Leaves I still find myself begging for the answer to one question. Why all the colors? From first opening up the book, it quickly became apparent that colors were a huge part of the story, even if all that was noticed was the word “House” in blue. This I found was the easiest of the colors […]
Being well-read and knowledgeable students, I am sure that most of us are familiar with the story of Jonah and the Whale. There are a lot of parallels to be drawn between this story and House of Leaves, like how the house is prone to swallowing people up until they think the way it wants them […]
There are multiple disturbing stories or aspects in The House of Leaves, and there are a few parts that continue to haunt me. Near the end of the book in the appendices, several letters from Johnny Truant’s mother, Pelafina, were included. Throughout the book, there is mystery that shrouds Johnny’s broken past venturing from one horrible foster […]
“Self-Exploration,” we’ve all heard and used this term over the course of our lives. Typically using it to explain away our short comings, and flounderings in the great sea that we call life. We accept this as an aspect of growing up and learning, and we tuck it away as quickly as we had called it […]
In chapter X of ‘House of Leaves’ we are introduced to a new stylistic choice by the author, Mark Danielewski. It is the inclusion of vast white spaces between very brief lines of text, or even individual words. As I read this and watched it continue in subsequent chapters I found myself comparing those open […]
“House of Leaves” is a very physical novel in many ways and essentially causes us to rethink the way we read and interpret texts in general. It is very different from other reads, in that it makes us literally turn, shift, move, and jump from page to page in order to follow the text and […]
Between pages 74 and 75 of House of Leaves lies the curious Chapter VI. Curious because it only spans a page, really, unless you count the quotes at the beginning by Ernest Becker (from his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death) and Christian Norberg-Schulz (whose source I could not pinpoint, although he is a […]
In The House of Leaves, it is quite evident that while Johnny Truant’s mind is almost entirely focused on The Navidson Record, Zampano, and his own private hauntings, he has a very specific trend in regards to his extracurricular activities: sex. Truant is either obsessing over The Navidson Record, getting high, or having sex. Most […]