:)

late blogger

OK i had bookmarked the wrong link for our course site and kept wondering where everyone's posts were. Oops!

I will add more later as I took a ton of notes but a crazy work week has kept me from typing them up, but here's a lil blurb for now. And i have to say that, like Ryan, I've had kairos on the brain.

Having taken a (Creative) Nonfiction course last Spring, I could not help but think of that experience when reading a few of these works on autobiography. In that class we were assigned various prompts and did not necessarily have to write about our own lives, but the idea that Bruner states near the end of his essay couldn’t summarize my time in that class better. He writes, “I persist in thinking that autobiography is an extension of fiction, rather than the reverse, that the shape of life comes first from imagination rather than from experience” (55). This emphasis on imagination also supports the points made in Bird and Dardenne’s work on the narrative qualities of the news. While journalists may struggle to maintain his/her code of ethics when trying to write a story that still uses their imagination in a way to attract readers, a struggle nowhere better portrayed than in the film Shattered Glass, this essay’s focus on the cultural and social factors that influence the writer’s available framework was most interesting to me, especially since I have spent the last few weeks relying upon print/online sources for coverage of Hurricane Katrina rather than televised reports. Who and what has been the focus of various television networks and the stories that have been repeated more than others prove Bird and Dardenne's point that "news stories, like myths, do not 'tell it like it is,' but rather, 'tell it like it means" (71). Of course, having had friends send me first hand accounts of their evacuation stories and tales of their returns to the city to save pets also offers me quite a different picture than what the media tends to focus on, and that is where the concept of citizen journalism--what I take B&D to call for in the "media reshaping" they mention on 82--may come in, but more on that later.

posted by phdaisy @ 5:40 PM