(MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW. ONLY READ ONCE ALL OTHER POSTS HAVE BEEN READ.)
UPLOADED BY: ALEXANDER POPE
>>You there! Viewers! The Authors have failed – nobody has beaten Julianna’s game, and we will all pay the price for it. As I speak, my memories continue to rush back to me, but it’s too late for me to save the course of history. I am Alexander Pope, author and philosopher during The Enlightenment Age. Through a cruel twist of fate, the woman I mocked in my poem “The Rape of the Lock” – Arabella Fermor – has gained control of the flow of time, and orchestrated this entire game as revenge for my mocking of the scandal that erupted when a suitor cut off a lock of her hair.
>>She transported ten authors to a Realm she created where the Enlightenment continued on indefinitely to the point where she deemed everything to be perfect. She made me watch as these ten authors fought against one another in the mad pursuit of finding out which one of them was the real Enlightenment Author. As they were eliminated, the Realm around us began to crumble. In a world where the Enlightenment is fully realized, people stop questioning. People stop seeking truth, and they accept everything. This Realm is both everything the Enlightenment worked towards, but also everything the Enlightenment criticized. By decapitating the authors, Arabella effectively removed all trace of them and their writings from history, and therefore caused the Enlightenment to never take place. The world will never realize that a continual pursuit of truth and reason are the only ways we can survive. We will become docile. Submissive. Insignificant.
>>Unless of course, you solve the riddle. In keeping with the dualities (the time split, the different worlds, my essay…) there must be a second half of the riddle given to the authors. A second half to the answer that Herman didn’t understand.
>>You have all the pieces in front of you. Solve the riddle and protect the Enlightenment. Good luck.
Brian,
Okay, this blog got cray-zee. The creative energy–and just plain energy–behind it are impressive. The idea of bringing these authors together and letting them speak and debate in this purely contemporary kind of context was great. It ended up being humorous, thought-proviking, and twisted. The twisted part is the hardest to unravel; it makes the blog–and made your presentation–hard to follow. I think for this to be a “ready-for-prime-time” blog, it would need to be a bit more reader-friendly. You’d have to provide a map, or a guide–something like that. But, for the purposes of our class and for the purposes of profoundly challenging your professor’s skills at suspending her normal reading habits and learning to read in an entirely new, interactive way, the Blog/Labyrinth of the Forking Paths is very, very interesting. You exceeded my expectations in terms of exercising a creative engagement with our class materials, and you certainly made me think about those materials in new, unexpected ways–both goals for the project. So a very successful job with this blog. I loved it.
CS