On Wednesday I attended Dear Reader and Part of Your World. I would like to say that I thought both panels were fantastic, and the papers were very interesting. I would like to focus on the first panel I saw -- Dear Reader.
As many of the papers in the panel discussed conclusions of their piece, Katie suggested that this panel be renamed "The End of the Rabbit Hole?" I think this name is particularly apt to describe Kara's paper, "Climax: The Power of Indeterminate Ending." Kara's paper discussed the relationship between the Dunnes in Gone Girl, and focused on the unsatisfying/unclear ending of the novel. Kara's paper questioned the finality of narratives, and life, and undermined the notion that closure is inherent in endings. Kara responded to Katie's suggestion of renaming the panel, saying that the end of the rabbit hole would lead to another rabbit hole. I found this answer interesting, yet unsatisfying as the cycle would simply continue. I thought Aaron brought up an excellent point in responding to the same question, stating that even though his subject came with a more definitive ending, no literature truly has an ending because it is always there for us to reexamine.
Another major idea this panel discussed was reader compliance/guilt from watching movies or reading novels. In particular, Nim, John Henry, and Chung's essay all made arguments that the reader was guilty of something when reading the novel. In Nim's essay, the audience was responsible for the scopophilia in Black Swan, and in Taxi Driver, the viewer was guilty of playing the role of the flaneur, a wandering observer of crimes, which he argued aligns the act of watching with moral complicity. I found these essays to be convincing, but I was interested when someone asked if it was possible to not be a compliant viewer/reader. I would like to think one is not made automatically guilty by viewing the movies, and the consensus answer seemed to hinge on the moral approach the reader took to the material. I thought this was an excellent answer, as I don't think everyone who views Black Swan is guilty, and likewise I don't think all the audience of Taxi Driver is a flaneur.
-Andrew T
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