Jojo's Adventures

  Something I think about in There There is how it diminishes the use of Chimimanda Ngozie Adichie’s idea of a single story. There are so many perspectives that it allows multiple perspectives. However, as I am writing this I am remembering that Tommy Orange said that he infused the characters with elements of himself. So it really is not a collection of stories, just a plethora of his own accounts. Hmm. Maybe it is a single story then. But this does not even matter because any Native American story needs to be heard, because there are so few of them. We need them as much as he, as a writer, needs an audience. Another thing I just thought about is how Tommy Orange writes about the lives of female Native Americans. How can he know what it is like to live as a female in an environment like the one depicted in the novel? I mean sure, people can tell him stories but it is not the same as living it for yourself. I wish he acknowledged this at some point, maybe stating that the perspecti...

The notion of pictographs is so interesting because it is so similar to Egyptian hieroglyphics. And, the ancient Egyptians were thought to be extremely advanced, so why is there the stigma that Native Americans were underdeveloped compared to Egyptians. Maybe because the Egyptians did a better job at maintaining their translation properties. I am not sure. Another thing I thought was very interesting was the concept of medicine bundles. I am a little confused as to what they are, but to my understanding they are a collection of things that tell a story or portray a symbol of some sort. I wish I had a picture to better illustrate what they are. I understand that they are sacred, but there are so many sacred aspects of other cultures that are shared in order to educate the greater population. However, whatever actual Native Americans think is right is obviously the course that should be followed. I think these are a little different than the medicine boxes in There There because in the n...

  One of the things I found interesting was the idea that the print history of There There is so short. While this is obvious, it is interesting to think about where the future of the print history will go. Maybe one day, the print will be obsolete and you can only access it from a digital source. However, this short print history is paralleled with a long history of Indigenous American storytelling. Typically oral, there are codexes that explain stories, however they are not easy to understand to the untrained eye. Another thing I found interesting/sad was the lack of distinction between tribes in history lessons. In my educational experience, we did learn about how Native Americans in the past had rich culture and history, but not how each one is different from the other. We kind of learned about a collective whole. Another interesting idea is how indigenous stories in an American sense can be wrong. For example, the Pocahontas story. I never knew that story was so wrong. We real...

  I am going to be honest, I have not done much more work dedicated to only my final project aside from finding a majority of my sources that I think are all usable. However, in doing my 3rd research excursion (medicine in the Arab-Islamc Golden Age) I have learned some things that could be useful for my research, mainly various scientists and works published by them detailing various medicinal issues. However, this does not entirely align with my intertextuality project on mental illness throughout history. In terms of a form, I think I am going to do a super serious paper to practice for future classes. (Maybe I will even include an abstract). I did find one idea that is VERY interesting that I would not have come up with on my own. Essentially, the idea is that ancient Greek characters represented different mental struggles without naming them. The most easily understandable is that of Narcissus (from which we get the name for Narcissistic Personality Disorder). There are a few ...

  As I mentioned in my other blog post, something I do not understand is the meaning of the title. What does There There mean? Am I missing some grammatical play on words? Another question I had was about page 56 where the mom is described as sleeping weird. At first I thought she was dead. But then it turns out she’s not dead? I am wondering what was wrong with her. (Maybe it was just indicating drunkenness). I also was confused about the Alcatraz reference. I thought that was a top security prison for criminals, so how were they able to walk in? Also, how did some kids commandeer a boat and drive around if it was so top security? I probably just need to do more research on Alcatraz and what it is. Some things that were surprising to me were the instances of violence. I did not know there were social groups where violence is so common (though that sounds very tone-deaf). Also, the amount of death present in the book is sad (death in the book and mentions of people who have passed ...

  I am going to be honest in saying that when I read this article it did not make total sense to me in the context of the book. I have only read a little bit of the novel, however I do not understand the larger theme of changing places in relation to what we have read so far. I also do not understand what “there there” means. Even in the context of Stein's larger quote and the context of the book, I still do not fully understand. I think maybe it means that there is no here nor there (the absence of consistency), but I am not entirely confident in that answer. In regards to the map, I really enjoyed reading the tribes where I am from. However, my hometown is actually very good at acknowledging the land of those who were there first. Instead of pointless land acknowledgements, they taught us in school how to identify Native American artifacts if we ever came across them. We also learned in depth about the tribes in the area (specifically Cherokee), like how they lived and what sport...

  I definitely think that it is option 2, “the improvement of human reasoning over the course of evolution”. I think this because there is likely a translation error, where improvement means development. Though I cannot assume that, it seems much more likely than the alternative, “the improvement is given by the book itself to its readers”. In what way does the improvement impact the reader? The religious obsessions and notions are archaic, and do not apply to modern society. It is possible option number one once applied, but it is no longer the case. In the past, it is possible that, in an educated male sense, people were encouraged to alter their learning habits in order to open their minds, but now we see that Hayy was just obsessed with being invited into heaven. So in reality, everything he did was from a selfish standpoint. What time of advice does that impart onto readers? Number two seems more applicable, because that is essentially the story, a comparative look at the impr...

  Overall, I love the topic of my final project. My original topic, castaway tales, was just not very engaging to me. Now, my topic is mental illness as seen throughout history. Starting with 1550 BCE, with the Ebers Papyrus, and finishing up in the 21st century, with Home Fire, it is safe to say I have culminated a range of sources. It is especially difficult, however, to find texts from a while ago and in different languages because of translation barriers. For example, mental illness was a term coined quite recently in the scheme of things. So when doing a google search for mental illness in literature, nothing predating the 18th century comes up. Instead, I had to go backwards, finding compilations of works that had to do with mental illnesses. A wikipedia page I found proved to be extremely helpful. A topic that I read an article on that is very fascinating to me talked about how Greek gods and deities and mythological characters represent different disorders. Narcissus, obvio...

  I think the premise of Hayy Ibn Yaqzan was to condense the evolution of the human mind into a short story. To me, (someone who does not understand the text very well), the ending where Hayy meets the other people seems out of place and not conducive to the story line I had pictured in my head. Maybe the religious creation story at the time involved a man growing up alone, but I do not know that. As for its purpose, I think we can look at the book with a past lens as well as a current one. In essence, the purpose for its publication is different than its purpose as to why it is still around today. As for its purpose of publication, I think, as I said previously, that it was just to show how humans evolve. An alternative is that it shows how, as we discussed in class, different learning styles allow someone to reach a higher level of learning. For example, Hayy, having learned everything on his own, was able to reach a godly state of learning, so high that he essentially ascended i...