Project 3 Final with Metatext

Couch Burning in Morgantown Reduced as Compared to Past Years


MBA Scandal Shocks Graduate Students


Bob Huggins Return to WVU Exemplifies the Mountaineer Spirit


Below are the translated texts after they've been passed through the "Joyce Algorithm"

Couch Burners Anonymous


Free MBAs


Huggstown


For this project I wanted to take three normal journalist-y texts and pass them through my invented "James Joyce Algorithm" (posted above). I did this for several reasons. Number one I thought that this project needed a way to be interconnected while also using some of the ideas we've used on earlier projects. Number two is that when I studied Joyce last semester (that's "English 272: Modern Lit" in case you all are wondering) his writing style seemed incredibly good to me, but I thought that his ideas were askew as to my view of the world. The main goal of the Joyce Algorithm (although this is not a bulleted point in the algorithm) is to take the neutral, tone of apathy he uses in Dubliners and spin a positive story with THAT voice. The three journalism stories are stereotypical and happy in tone and content, all leading to a very tidy conclusion (like any good news story). The Joyce translations, however, all are much more personal, and leave the reader to come to his own conclusions about the characters and the events in the story. This is in sharp contrast to the news story, where the author (me, of course, but with a very different voice) just tells the reader what to think.

A major portion of the Algorithm is devoted to the idea about an "epiphany," an idea I also sampled from Dubliners. The characters in the Joyce Translations all come to their epiphanies, and in many cases these epiphanies are just as negative as the epiphanies in Dubliners, but my characters all convienently forget their ephiphanies, because I don't believe epihpanies are important. In reality we all come to an epiphany almost every second of every day, it's how we respond to these realizations that seperate the people who live in a beautiful college town full or spirit, or a grey, dimly light city in Northern Ireland where the even the living are really the dead.

I also tried to contrast Joyce's style in my own writing by attempting to inject a theme of passion at the end of the story. An image of fire or flames ends all my stories, and I use this image to represent not the fires of hell, but the fire that burns inside all of us, pushing us to break out of the decay that can sometimes come into our hearts. The fire in my story doesn't destory, but instead tempers the characters' spirits, allowing them to face the sometimes cruel and unfair world.

In conclusion, the main point of the algorithm was to translate something initially positive into a slightly cynical or depressing voice, and then allow the reader to realize that the outcome of this story doesn't have to be negative. Although the voice changes, and the reader knows more details than the newspaper articles give, the characters can still be living in a positive place- A Morgantown where the fire in everyone represents everything good about human nature.