Look In With New Eyes
This blog is is response to Shelley Jackson's "The Body."
Personal Reflection:
As I read through this hyperlink-rich text, I couldn't help but fall in love with the author's frank and fetching tone. It seemed to me as if she were writing to a dear friend. Her comments ranged from funny to thoughtful to philosophical to endearing. Reading this site was truly better spent than most anything else. Jackson is most certainly a person of another kind and I am in awe of such a personality as the one shown within her writing.
Close Reading:
Throughout the text, Jackson uses a plethora of descriptive words that draw the reader into the text in order for the reader to see through Jackson's own eyes. Combined with the tone of her writing and the structure of the text, Jackson conveys to the reader that it's possible to see the world in different ways.
The visionary words that Jackson uses compel the reader to re-evaluate how they see the world themselves. Everyone has the ability to choose for themselves the manner in which they view their surroundings; but not all can define that view without incorporating outside influences. Jackson's text exemplifies her own frank and perhaps curious look of the world while words like those used in the quote above keep the reader engaged in the text.
Even the homepage of the site represents Jackson's particular view in that the eyes look at you frankly as the body reveals itself without pause.
Another recurring theme I found that ties in with thinking/seeing things for yourself is that what is on the outside doesn't matter nearly so much as what lies within, whether you can draw it or not.
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I really liked this one too. It was as if she was writing a confessional diary. The language wasn't ambiguous or weird, so I could concentrate on the text.
What I liked is that the early links were superficial stories about her self-consciousness. But, as the reader clicked deeper into the body, the stories added depth. Self-consciousness became wonder, which lead to discovery, and acceptance of the self. It was as if Shelley has mapped out her entire adolescence for us to explore.
If you think about it, the style is a metaphor for the way we take in information. We cannot choose what information is presented to us, but we can choose the order in which we take that information in. You can show me a car in person and I cannot change the fact that a car has been shown to me, but I can choose to look at the muffler before the headlights before the steering wheel. Weird example, I know, but traditional writing does not leave much room for this, while hypertext writing does.