When an author creates a text, he or she takes images, sounds, feelings, smells, etc. from his or her imagination and describes them for the reader. The reader then takes the descriptions from the author and recreates said sensations for his or her self. Say for example, I, as an author, wrote this description for a minor character: a young girl with strawberry blonde hair and freckles in an oversized college sweatshirt. From there, it’s your responsibility as the reader to fill in the details. What exactly does her face look like? Her body shape? Her eyes? What does her voice sound like? How does she walk? These are questions that no author can fully answer in words, the reader simply has to use his or herimagination to turn the phrases into characters (or places or items for that matter). The result being that each reader’s mental image of any given character will not look exactly the same as the author’s or any other reader’s. What this implies is that the reading process is highly subjective. That it is not only shaped by the author’s words, but by the reader’s previous knowledge and experiences. For example, the earlier description of the young girl with the strawberry blonde hair perfectly matches my best friend, so when I read that description, I see her. Another reader might see a beloved actress, an old elementary school bully, or a completely unfamiliar face. This not only affects the visual depiction of the characters, but how the reader experiences the charactersas a whole. If I picture a character as identical to my best friend, I am predisposed to like the character. So if the plot takes a completely unforeseen turn and she turns out to be a vicious, baby-eating monster, I’m going to be a lot more distraught than the person who saw a carbon copy of their elementary school bully. If I saw the character as beloved actress and another wildly different looking actress plays her in the movie, I’m going to be hard-pressed to enjoy the movie the way I did the book. Thus the work done by the reader to visualize text results in its own unique story different from any other readers’.
Saturday, June 30, 2018
Blog Response to Prompt #4 (Wood)
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I remember being so frustrated in middle school after I read the Hunger Games series and then saw them as movies, because they seemed so wrong and different from what I had initially read in the text. I have always heard that the books are better than the movies and I've always believed it to be true. One of my favorite movies ever is Call Me by Your Name, although I had no idea that it was a book already. It has been interesting to read the book of a movie I already love, and since I am familiar with the actors who play the roles, I am able to do less imagining and forming my own unique vision of what the characters or setting looks like and spend more time digesting the story in a whole new light/depth that the movie did not touch on. I firmly believe that once you know the plot of the story from the movie, the book will not be as interesting. This is the first encounter I've had where even though the story line is spoiled, I still cannot get enough of the way that it is actually written and how descriptive and beautiful it is in ways the movie was not able to achieve.
ReplyDeleteBecause we each have different experiences we each take what the author has given us and do different things with it. For example, when I read the description of a young girl with strawberry blonde hair I pictured a complete stranger because I do not know anyone who fits that description. This does not mean that one of us is wrong and the other is right, only that we each took the description in different ways due to our own backgrounds.
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