Posting Assignment #5 (due Sunday 10/25, 11:59 P.M.)

Thus far in class we've talked a lot about reading and writing and telling. Only this week, though, did we start talking about feeling. Feeling, as we saw, is key to how Aristotelian tragedy works: if the audience doesn't FEEL pity and fear for the tragic hero, s/he will not develop an empathetic relationship with that character, and therefore will not take his/her side, and will not experience catharsis when s/he ultimately experiences catastrophe. Feeling, I will argue, is equally important to other kinds of literature. (That is, an author writes in a specific way, in order to provoke some kind of feeling in the reader. If you're not thinking about this in terms of your own writing, you should!)

So, in this week's posting, I'd like you to consider the following:

How does Snow Crash make you feel? What do you feel while you're reading it, and how does Stephenson makes you feel that way?

In your answer make reference to the way Stephenson creates:
1) at least one character,
2) at least one space/place/setting, and
3) at least one moment of empathy (cite a specific passage).

And pick your examples carefully: they are EVIDENCE for your ARGUMENT about how Snow Crash makes you feel and how Stephenson makes you feel that way.

And again, let's please not all pick examples from the beginning of the book. That gets really boring to read...

Two last thoughts: a) if you're anything like me, this book may make you feel a whole lot of different things all at the same time -- that's perfectly acceptable; just describe this set of feelings and then start thinking about how Stephenson does it; b) we have not formally discussed the concept of TONE, but it is something I imagine many of you are familiar with. If you are, you may want to consider what the tone of Snow Crash is; a text's tone has a lot to do with how we feel about it.