Final Project Proposal

For my final project I would like to explore the character of Robert Neville if he had been a classical hero and then I would annalyze in an essay the differences along with the origins of the classical hero. I found the discusion about whether or not Robert was a hero very interesting and I want to explore how the story would change if he had the characteristics of a real hero.

Interview post 1

I thought that reading the book from the point of view of the vampire gave me a lot of sympathies with him. Usually in vampire novels the vampire is the subject of the story but not the narrator. we never really get to see the their inner workings. In Louis's case, he was upset by what he had to do to survive and he was sure he was damned because he had to kill and because he enjoyed it. Vampires are usually portrayed as monsters maybe because we cant see their motivations and thoughts. I also thought that the relationship between Lestat, Louis and Claudia was strange in the fact that no one saw them as strange. I would think that in that time a male couple with a child would cause some uproar. I know that the relationship was not sexual but that would be how it would appear to outsiders. The fa

Zombie U (extra credit)

I have to say that I know nothing about video games and this presentation used a lot of technical jargon that I could not for the life of me follow. I think (hope) I got the general idea.
The speaker, Brian Greenspan, had some of his students create a Zombie themed video game because he was trying to figure out why college aged youth are for lack of a better word obsessed with zombies/ zombie culture. I thought the video game sounded interesting, it was a game that instead of being played with a controller in someone's house it is played by walking around campus interacting with the environment. They used Google maps to create areas with stories set up in them so when the players walked around campus they would get stories to go along with what they were seeing. (I have to say that I might play video games if they were interactive like that)
The idea of the game is that the student population was infected by an email (?) that went out from the corporation that "owns" the school. That idea fits with his conclusion of what the zombie represents. He sees the zombie as consumerism. Or society embracing consumerism. He said society because a group of zombies has one goal brains (or whatever it is in the creative work they are used in) but they also have individual desires and they are made up of many different people. He also said that the need for brains can represent how corporations and universities need student for their cognitive capital. Ideas are fed to students through their professors and then they spread them out into the world when they graduate. So his theory as I understood it was that Universities are becoming more and more consumerist with all of the advertisements that come at students from all sides telling them to buy this, drink this, wear that, see this, and that along with the teachings of their professor creates ideas within the student that combine consumerism with whatever ideals the university holds (one that he focused on was innovation.)
Now he says that Zombies video games are popular with students because they are you (gamer and character of the game) against society so the individual against conformity.
He also said that zombies signified (in our technological era) our lack of control over nonhuman networks (the internet and more specifically search engines) I did not really understand this since I am technologically illiterate but I thought it was an interesting idea that would be good to learn about but I would need it spelled out to me like they were talking to a five year old.
He gave us some history on the Zombie. He said they had an interesting start. They did not come about in a book and then move to movies and then games. They started in movies went to video games and then finally books. This is a different progression then things usually take. It just shows that the zombie was born out of a technological and digital era.
They came about in the sixties and represented conformity and the projected fears such as nuclear weapons, race, aids and class. They are the tension between alienation, inclusion within a society.


I did not really see a connection to literature except the brief reference to how the zombie came about but I did see a parallel to the vampire. The vampire can be seen as representing race like we can see from the article for this week but usually the vampire signifies the "other" where the zombie represents society.
Overall I thought the presentation was interesting but I had some trouble following it because of the technical jargon and because it seemed like he was reading off of a journal article so the language in general was not very casual. I think it would be interesting to play this video game and also to look into these ideas in greater detail.

I am Legend Post #2

I really liked Matheson's Dress of White Silk. I liked the way he played with the grammar and sentence structure so that I could imagine a young child speaking. It did however, trip me up a few times like on page 225 where it says "No she said she was so mad and red it has a hole in it." At first I could not figure out the subject the sentence. It took me a little bit to realize that it was a combination of two thoughts. Even though I now know there are two ideas represented in this sentence, I still as not quite sure which thought "red" is part of. Because the story changes a lot depending on what "red" is making a reference to. Red could refer to the fact that the narrator pinched Mary Jane which was why she was angry but it also could refer to the dress as in
" 'It is too, white' I said, 'all white, and clean, and silky'
'No,' she said, she was so mad 'and red, it has a hole in it'"
The first time I read it I thought it referred to the dress so my reading on the whole story was a little different than it had been the second time I read it. The first time I read it through, I thought that the mother had been murdered or with going with the theme from I am Legend, that she was killed by vampires or became a vampire. The whole in the dress with red or blood, I saw, as either being caused by a gun or knife if she had been murdered, or a stake if she had been a vampire. I thought the daughter might have been a vampire because of the last couple of lines "She wont let me out. Well Im not scared. Who cares if she locks me in a million billion years? She doesn't have to even give me supper. Im not hungry anyway. Im full." That combined with the ambiguousness of what happened to Mary Jane makes me think that the narrator killed her. "There was something else because I think I heard some one call don't let her say that! I couldn't hold to the dress. And I had it on me I cant remember. Because I was grown up and strong. But I was a little girl still I think. I mean on the outside."
The narrator also thinks that the room smells good but Mary Jane is disgusted by the smell so that makes me think that a vampire would think that blood/death smells good.
The second time I read it I decided that "red" most likely went with the pinch the narrator gave Mary Jane so that takes the blood aspect out of the dress but I still read that the narrator was a vampire, it just made me see the mother's death a little differently.
I definitely thought this story was a vampire story so that is the connection I draw to I am Legend and I am not sure this story is a horror story because it does not add an element of horror until the very end when the narrator gets mad at Mary Jane and gets locked up. I thought it started out innocently enough with a little bit of sadness over the mother's death but I really did not get a scary sense from it until the end.
In all of the other stories I saw a connection with the elements of the macabre that can be seen in all of the stories or at least a supernatural quality. Most dealt with death but the carnival one only hints at more sinister idea with the missing knives but no one dies in it.