I really enjoyed the two pieces by Harris, We Feel Fine, and The Whale Hunt. I remembered them from the 325 seminar last year, but looking at them now, along with the current readings about authorship really made me dive deeper into the meaning and have a greater appreciation for it.
“The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author” (Barthes). This ending quote to Barthes piece really stood out to me both in wrapping up that reading as well as connecting it to the two pieces that Harris created. What I gathered from the reading on authorship, Barthes was saying that the author puts words out there, a story out there, but it is up to the reader to hold the pieces together, to gather information, make their own assumptions, and create the story.
In The Whale Hunt, there were three options in which to view the story: the mosaic, the timeline, or the pinwheel. Giving this option to the reader, at least in the way I saw it, provided a different reaction for each. For the mosaic option, I was overwhelmed by all of the pictures and chose specific ones based on color similarities. The pinwheel and the timeline were similar in their appearance, showing spikes where excitement occurred, however, this made me more interested in the pictures in those areas rather than all of them.
I was skipping over pictures based on similarities and excitement and therefore missed parts of Harris’ story, creating my own based on my own interests. And although Harris had captions that explained what pictures were, the actual events going on, the dialogue, and thoughts were absent, thus leaving me to my own creation.
As for the We Feel Fine piece, I felt somewhat the same about authorship. However, instead of just one author, there were millions of people contributing to a streaming of emotions. Through each line that I read, I was able to create a sense of background in their story. “I am to address this suffering I feel I have to first come in touch with my perception of believing.” What is this person suffering from? What do they need to believe in? It is up to me to answer these questions, thus creating the loss of the author.
This site also provided various ways to view the text, like in a stream line based on the time they hit the internet and in categories of connections like feelings and other words that tie them together somehow. This put many different thoughts and feelings together, coming from different backgrounds, but as a reader, you can assemble them to fit into one, or to create one story as well as several individual ones. I liked We Feel Fine more than The Whale Hunt, because I felt that I had more responsibility as a reader in creating storylines and interpreting what I read.
Both of these pieces initiated reader responsibility, giving more leeway for creativity.
I’m really intrigued by your penultimate line:
It’s the word “responsibility” that draws my attention in particular. I don’t disagree with you at all, but I’m interested in teasing out the various meanings of “responsibility.” Usually when speak of responsibilities, it’s followed by either a preposition (responsibility toward) or an infinitive (responsibility to X). So when we read, what actions are our responsibilities and to whom are they directed? And do these aspects change depending upon what we’re reading?