Digital Project Update

I have decided for the digital portion of my thesis to do a mapping project–location and travel are a huge part of the novels, and I would like to track the movement of the women I examine in my paper. Obviously, this project demands that I pay close attention to detail, so for now, I’m focusing on two major characters: Arya (who serves as a link between Westeros and Essos, east and west, two continents, etc.) and Daenerys, who also does a significant amount of traveling. The other characters–Cersei, Catelyn, and Sansa–stay within Westeros, with less significant travel (Cersei hardly leaves King’s Landing; Catelyn never leaves Westeros, though with the Lady Stoneheart storyline coming up, who knows what’ll happen; and Sansa does some substantial travel within Westeros). Most of what I’ve done so far is starting to plan out Arya and Dany’s travels–going through their chapters, starting from the first novel, and tracking their movement (and how it is significant to their storylines, their characterizations, etc.).

My highest priority would be figuring out what medium to use to do my maps–choosing the mapping software that allows me to use maps of the (fictional) Westeros and Essos, as well as what website platform I would want to use. I think that–and this is partially thanks to the Game of Thrones TV show–explaining my project to other people wouldn’t be difficult. Mapping and epic fantasy also have had a strong connection since Lord of the Rings, so my project isn’t too far out (I think).

McKinney Response

Something that I was stuck on in McKinney’s post is his mention of Marxist theory early on in the post. In the 19th century, when Marx was writing and theorizing, labor was quite clearly defined; in this day and age that includes the digital world, what exactly constitutes “labor”? McKinney, of course, moves on to argue that the real value is in “presence” (which he defines as “attention,” as “being there” and being recognized), not necessarily in labor itself, but it was an interesting thinking point for me. I can’t decide whether I fully agree with the amount of importance he places on presence–partially because I’m not sure I 100% understood his complete argument, and partially because I think he perhaps overstates the value of presence for companies that have websites (like page hits or clicks or whatever–I suppose you could say it’s good for ads, but most people I know avoid ads by installing ad-blocking extensions or programs).

Remember the Words: Repetition, Textual Analysis, and ASOIAF

Reading Ben Blatt’s textual analysis of The Hunger Games, I was immediately reminded of the opening lines of a piece Kurt Vonnegut wrote in 1966 about the Random House English Dictionary: “I wonder now what Ernest Hemingway’s dictionary looked like, since he got along so well with dinky words that everybody can spell and truly understand.” Hemingway, considered widely to be one of the greats of English-language literature (though I personally agree more with Kat Stratford), didn’t exactly whip out the five-dollar words or sentences in his writing. As Blatt points out in the end of his piece, Hemingway himself was pretty repetitive in his sentence structure. This got me thinking about the nature of textual analysis in general, and how it would apply to George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series.

Though I haven’t done any sort of official word count of the ASOIAF series–I both pity and applaud the soul who would undertake that mission–there are definitely a series of words or phrases that are repeated throughout the novels for great effect. The words of the Great Houses (“Winter is Coming,” “Fire and Blood,” “A Lannister Always Pays His Debts”), cultural and religious refrains (“Valar Morghulis/Valar Dohaeris,” “The night is dark and full of terrors,” “What is dead may never die,” “It is known”), personal vengeance (Arya’s list of names, Oberyn Martell’s refrain  of “Elia of Dorne: you raped her, you murdered her, you killed her sister” to Gregor Clegane), the many songs that are song (and related to the plot in some way), and the fan-favorite, “You know nothing, Jon Snow.” There is a huge emphasis on “remembering words” and repeating them. What gets repeated says a lot about the series: it reveals the medieval fantasy setting (and the social hierarchies within it), the political nature of the grander storyline, and the themes of war, violence, and Jon Snow being a generally boring and dumb little goon (who we love anyway). And even though my thesis does focus on (what we’ll call) a positive feminist analysis of the representation of female characters, the sheer amount of times Martin has Daenerys thinking about her “small breasts moving freely beneath her leathers” might point otherwise. I may not be an expert on epic high fantasy writing, but I am an expert on people with small breasts (being one myself), and I do not think of them at all nearly as much as Martin seems to imagine.