After reading through all of the blog posts that I submitted throughout the semester, I looked at a few trends in my focus. The first thing that stood out to me across a few blog entries was the attention I paid to boundaries. Sometimes I spoke of those between genres, themes, topics, and even authors. It was interesting to uncover, by looking at all of the posts at once, the probing into established criteria that I included. I focused on how a lot of seemingly-distinct lines are blurred often, and that works that blurred those lines effectively were the most meaningful and enjoyable.
Additionally, the way people tell stories was a source of inspiration for my posts. All the different works we looked at were bound together by their storytelling nature. Starting with the Choose Your Own Adventure books going all the way to Pry, we examined the how of storytelling, and that flowed in and out of my blog posts. When reflecting on general ideas for the semester, I think it’s also important to consider the various ideals for which different authors and creators strove. Of course such aspirations are subjective and unique to each creator, yet there’s more overlap that one might expect. I think that’s a big part of my development through these blog posts; recognizing that the categories that I came into this class with aren’t nearly as rigid as I had perceived. That continues in the fascinating comparison between print and electronic works. What’s gained and lost in each medium, and what continues throughout both.
The main thing that I recognized when going back through all my posts is how much of an outside understanding I had for the entire realm of electronic literature. My first post definitely reveals this— there were a lot of basic observations as I basically just took note of what was happening. As the semester progressed, my appreciation and understanding of the techniques enlisted certainly developed and I was able to better articulate and analyze the works we discussed!