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How has your definition of SF changed throughout the course of this class?
All readers are shaped by their own “internal library,” or the cumulative effects of all the texts they have read.
How have your reading tendencies, practices, knowledge, and awareness changed over the course of this class?
What is the most useful thing, story, idea, practice, etc. that you have gained or experienced in this course?
And finally, for fun: what’s your favorite SF narrative, either inside or outside this class, in any format?

My definition of SF has changed throughout the course of this class because all I knew about SF before this class was based on television shows and movies. I learned about SF from classic SF books, which really gave me a new perspective on how wide the genre of SF can be. The stories we read we not all just aliens and space ships, but also technology, monsters, and robots. My reading tendencies, practices, knowledge and awareness changed over the course of this class because I learned how to read a text closer and think of it in totally different terms than I am used to. When we would discuss each text in class, my classmates and teacher prompts would raise questions and topics in the text that I never noticed when I read the short stories. I would literally be sitting in class thinking "how on earth did they get that from the text?" until we moved further in the class and it happened every discussion. I started to realize how much I learn from just talking about a text with other minds. The most useful idea I gained from this course is that a story can be ANYTHING the author wants it to be, and a good author, makes their story more than they ever dreamed it would be. Also I learned that fiction always benefits from going outside of t he standard storyline box. Throughout the whole course my favorite SF narrative was "For a Breath I Tarry" by Roger Zelazny. This is the story I chose to write my paper on and the story I feel i identified with most. I loved the main character Frost and his mentality and "heart". He knew what he wanted, and even though the odds were absolutely NOT in his favor, he persisted.

Thanks for everything AP! I really enjoyed your class!...which says a lot because I left my dorm at 7:30 to walk there every morning :D

Setting

Please address setting in at least one of the stories from this week ("Vaster than Empires" and "Bears Discover Fire"). How does setting help accomplish the work of the text? Why does setting matter?

In "Bears Discover Fire" by Terry Bisson, the setting that the story takes place in is Virginia. The main characters go from place to place though, including the highway, their home, a nursing home, the median, and the woods. The setting helps accomplish the work of the text because it adds character and flavor to the story. If the bears did not come on to the highway with their torches or sit around a campfire in the median, and stayed in the woods, the story would not be as comical. Also if the setting of the mother was not changed (from nursing home, to around a campfire with the bears) her death just would not have been the same and the overall effect of the story would be different. The main character, (I could not figure out his name) would not have felt so sentimental towards the bears had he, his mother, and his nephew not spent the evening with them, on the median, in the woods, around the bears' campfire. Overall, the setting in this story was not particularly far out there, but nonetheless unnatural. Bears do not normally congregate on logs around a campfire, while passing berries in a hubcap (haha).

I really enjoyed this story, I do not really know what the "point" to it is, but it was an enjoyable read nonetheless. I felt very at ease and amused as I read it. I want a bear friend with fire. :D

Nature and Enviroment

In class this week, we talked about how “nature” and “environment” are rather slippery terms. We also read an article that introduced ways of thinking about literature that discusses the nonhuman world. For this week’s blog, I’d like you to find something that uses one of these terms, such as a piece of writing, an advertisement, an image, a video (or movie, or TV show) etc. and discuss your source’s use of that term. How does this relate to our classroom discussion? Or to the reading we did for Tuesday? Please don’t forget to cite or link to the source you choose!

The source I chose for this blog post is the advertisement for REAL cigarettes posting in the course readings. REAL cigarettes is advertising a "natural" cigarette. What the company means by "natural" is that there is nothing artificial added to it, implying it is all tobacco which is a naturally occurring plant in the environment. In relation to our class discussion on what the meaning of "natural" is, I do not think these cigarettes are natural or apart of nature. Yes, cigarettes are made of tobacco and tobacco grows all on its own in nature, but cigarettes do not occur on their own in nature. Not to mention that the word natural usually implies healthy in this day and age, and there is definitely nothing healthy about cigarettes; artificial ingredients added or not.

On a different note, I do not think nature or environment can ever have a specific definition, as demonstrated in our "heated" class discussion (haha). There are so many different views on what nature and environment mean and they are all subjective. An indian that grew up in the jungle would have a totally different idea of what nature is compared to a person who grew up in New York City. Individual definitions of nature and environment depend on one's personal experiences in life and ideas about existence all around them.