Blog 5

Christopher Caruso

Blog #5

During my first Blog post, I listed about five different possible research projects that I could execute, all of which contained a central theme of either literature or how certain individuals process literature.  Of these possible projects, one of the first ones that I brainstormed was the idea of "the experience that one has when reading a story vs. watching a film adaptation of the same story".  Of this idea, I already have several approaches and factors to measure in this project brainstormed, such as: 

1)  How visual of a reader the individual is (i.e. how vivid the images in one's head are when reading a story and how important imagery is to the reading experience).

2) How certain people react to the story when seeing the film adaptation before reading the book adaptation instead of the other way around,

3) How the ability for a film adaptation to stay close to the source material or take a few liberties has an affect on the experience one has while watching the film.

4) How pre-existing stories have a direct correlation to the expectations people have of thefilm adaptation.

5) How individuals "read" the visuals and physical reactions of the solid actors vs. how a reader imagines the characters and physical action in his or her mind.

These are just a few of many ideas I have for the possible project, but there is a reason why I am listing them now.  In the introduction to my research project, there are plenty of different terms that I will have to define or explain in order for my reader to gain a better understanding of what my study is trying to accomplish.

First, since my possible research project has literature as one of the key factors of the study, it would be absolutely crucial to explain to the reader the idea behind Intertextuality.  This will be due to the fact that I will be making several references and call-backs to pre-existing literature as well as their film adaptations.  On that note, it also would not hurt to convey to the reader a brief synopsis of the story that is being formatted in both book and film form.  That way, the reader has a slightly stronger grasp of the references that will be made about the stories throughout the project.  One other crucial topic that I will need to discuss is the idea of Discourse and how how language is made up of more than our vocal speech but also in the ways that we as people behave or dress.  With that in mind, I find it more important for me to discuss the idea of Discourse Community in my introduction.  That is due to the factor that, since I will probably be interviewing and speaking to several individuals whom have both read and watched the story, I might be interacting with true fans of the content.  As such, there is always the probability that several of these individuals might clump together to form similar and mutually agreed upon beliefs about the content material, thus forming a fan community of sorts.  It would also be beneficial to touch upon the different definitions of literacy, and how one "reads" the content on the big screen can compare to how one "reads" the information presented in a book.  It would also be very important to define the ideas behind ethnography.  Since this study is a very community-based study, it is highly possible that the observer (me) might become directly involved in some way, whether it be interviewing participants or personally contributing in the study myself through my own experiences.  Defining the many ways of ethnography is crucial to having the reader understand how the study may be executed.