So this week in our English 3010 class, we were assigned to read David Foster Wallace’s ‘Host’. To comment on the reading I went to be honest and said that it was a ridiculously long reading assignment and was way too confusing as well. The first thing, I noticed about the reading were the crazy arrows and boxes. The boxes served the same purpose as the footnotes but it looked nothing like the footnotes. Footnotes generally lie at the bottom of the page and they are just 3-4 lines. But the boxes were as big as a paragraph. So the strategy that I tried to apply was to first read the entire article by completely ignoring the boxes. But the boxes were less ignorable because they were right in the middle of the main text for most times. In case of the footnotes, I, like most readers, would be more inclined to skip them. But in cases of boxes, one can’t do that. So the author does the good job of making the reader pay more attention to the sub-text. For the most part, the boxes were as big and fat as a paragraph. They broke the main text visually, and you had to read over the box to get to the next paragraph of the article.
The concept of boxes was completely new for me. I never came across a reading like this before. I had a tough time reading the boxes along with the paragraph. So I read one paragraph, then, read the boxes pertaining to it. I skipped a few big boxes in between which made my reading even tougher because some of the boxes that I did read, referred to the boxes, I hadn’t read earlier.
I found the reading little funny at few places. For example, on page number 319, there is a ?! inside a box. It was the smallest box of the entire reading. It was funny in a bizarre way because those two characters are just lying there inside the box. You can’t even ignore looking at it, because it’s right in the middle of the main text. Another thing that I thought it was funny was that, in some cases, there were boxes inside the boxes which were kinda cool. Sometimes, the boxes contained more humorous information related to the articles. Due to the boxes, it seemed like you, as a reader, were sitting right to David Foster Wallace and you were having a live conversation with him. It seemed like the author himself was telling you a story (in a box) and while he was talking, he remembered another story (box inside the box).
This was pretty much what we did this entire week. Everyday we discussed the reading in a variety of different aspects of literature. I like the classroom discussion sessions like this one. Stay tuned for more next week!
