Hey all! This blog is mad early because I have mad work to do this week and all through next week, so here are my thoughts thus far!
These presentations have been really wonderful this week, yet again! I love being surprised by the range of topics that people have read about and are doing research on. The books covered on Tuesday were: Then We Came to the End and Trans-Sister Radio. I enjoyed how different these books were and I found the covers online to be very provocative. The sticky notes as the cover for Then We Came to the End is really creative and appropriate for the story. I am interested in the cover for Trans-Sister Radio because it shows a naked person, whose gender is not explicit, facing away from the viewer.
Group four focused on Then We Came to the End, which interestingly takes place in an advertising corporation. I have never personally read any novels or even memoirs about a person, or peoples, experiences in a corporate position so this presentation captured my attention immediately. I have studied corporate America in a great deal of my classes and for some reason it never occurred to me to read a novel about it! This novel is written in the plural first person, which is called the “corporate we.” The character development must be extremely interesting to analyze in this book because even listening to the summary I could feel how suffocated and claustrophobic this particular workplace is. I like that one person is going to look at character development of Lynne, who is leading a lonely life with breast cancer. The group brought up a great point that by having the middle section focus on Lynne through the first person the story is made less comedic. The narrative lacks individuality when the corporate we is used versus the first person. I am intrigued with her character and learning about her struggles with breast cancer and being alone makes me want to read the book further. That sounds completely morbid, but we all enjoy a sad read, yeah? I loved the idea of looking at disease in the workplace socially, like gossip, and in the literal sense, like the workers who develop severe depression. Disease can be analyzed through many different lenses in literature and is a really creative road to pursue. Advertising is such a complex job position to have, but I can’t imagine it at a corporal level. I would probably be going insane like the characters seem to be. I feel that a lot of psychology goes into creating an advertisement because the point is to appeal and please people.
Group five talked about Trans-Sister Radio and it seems that many are going to be talking about the complexities of gender in some respect. The character Dana is interesting within herself because she is transitioning in a community that does not seem to be accepting, and she also has a girlfriend throughout her transition. It is very rare, in what I have read and studied, for a person’s partner to stay with them if they are transitioning. This brings to light the question of what sexuality and gender means. The group, taking into account the social and individual meanings of gender and sexuality, is covering this question. I myself do not know the answer to this as much as I have studied gender and sexuality in college and outside of college life. These two social constructs become harder to understand when you have both the accounts of society and an individual, and more so when you have a massive spectrum of individual definitions. Many people who transition don’t consider themselves the “opposite sex” or the “opposite gender” and some do not even call themselves transgender or transsexual. They just are. This is something a lot of people have a hard time understanding because as human beings we tend to automatically put labels on people so we can socially understand who they are, not necessarily individually. The topic of nature versus nurture greatly plays into the idea of gender because there is no one answer to which is more influential. The study of archetypes in literature and within this book is going to be a really great paper to read. I never would have thought of this as a possibility to focus on and it makes complete sense! What I am most interested in with this area of interest for the paper is where Dana, the character who transitions, fits into this archetypal spectrum, which is segregated into men or women.
