During a lab from the previous week, I was expanded my annotation skills through utilizing a website known as Hypothesis. The website enabled me the ability to post public or private annotations to any online text or material. In class, the students were assigned a worksheet containing links to different articles regarding class readings. One task required me to create an annotation to an New York Times article reflecting Fun Home. It was interesting observing the various annotations and individual responses to each article because it revealed new and different perspectives. I discovered that online annotating provides an increased engagement to a piece of text through enhancing insight into others opinions or views. I realized reading the annotations of other people influenced my reflection of the article. The New York Times article revealed new information on themes contained in Fun Home. The article described the concept of home through revealing the prevalence of isolation among the family. It explained the diminished family relationships due to increasing interest of each family member’s individual pursuits. The father’s focus and dedication toward constructing his dream house refrained him from bonding with his children or wife. His kids began to feel like his personal workers or objects and believed the house received the most care and love of the family. It was interesting to read about the affect of the structure of the comic on the representation of themes. I support the idea that the use color and panels cause certain emotional reaction from the audience. The dull blue and grey colors in the images create negative or depressed mood. In “Fun Home,” the author’s color choices reflected the tone of the tragedy or sorrow described in the comic. The construction of the images combined this minimal sections of text increased my engagement into the story through viewing the physical appearance of the house and the characters. I enjoyed observing details of the house and the expressions of the family during different events.
I totally agree with the way you interpret the color scheme in Fun Home. I also love how the colors become slightly darker as each page passes by. I think it is a representation of the way we fall deeper into the world of Alison as we go farther in the text. I definitely agree with your idea of the colors portraying tragedy and sorrow as well. I have really enjoyed this text and it is nice to see that others in the class are as well. I found using Hypothesis a bit difficult at first, but now I really appreciate the tool. Like you said, I really enjoy how it changes my perspective on certain readings. It has become one of my favorite tools so far in class.
In this blog post I like how you connected the New York Times article that we annotated in class to fun home and I also liked how you talked about hypothesis and what we learned from the tool.
I find critiquing “the author’s color choices” to be fun, since it seems at first silly to talk about color in a graphic novel with essentially three colors. However, the choice of the colors itself, as you said, can already mean a lot. I can definitely agree that it helps to paint a depressed atmosphere, but does that take anything away? I might claim that having such a dreary color palette weakens the novel since it limits the scope of topics. It may be well designed to capture her father’s sadness, but it becomes almost incapable of contrasting with any amount of cheer. One idea it has made me think of is that Alison could have used this weakness to her advantage – the constant depressing colors throughout the entirety of the book could have made a scene of color very impactful. To have the very last page be full of vibrant color could have had a giant impact because of the novel’s lack of color. Probably too expensive to print, but it’s a neat idea that I got from your post!
It sounds like you got a lot out of using Hypothesis.is, do you think you will use this tool for studying in other classes? How many of the realizations you mentioned about the book were influenced by your use of Hypothesis.is? The web plugin was not working so well on my laptop so I did not really get the benefit of the tool, it took more time wrestling with the program then it would have taken to take regular notes on the text.
I think you made some really insightful observations about Fun Home in this blog post. For one, when you said, “The father’s focus and dedication toward constructing his dream house refrained him from bonding with his children or wife.” To me, I had always thought that Bruce (Bechdel’s dad) used the house and his obsession with it to shield him from his family (even though that is incredibly ironic); I do not think that his passion refrained him but more gave him an easy escape. With the ending of Fun Home, I think back on all of what Bechdel has revealed to us through her memoir and it baffles me how her & her father were never actually that close. Most of Fun Home is about her father, so I feel like as the reader I know him so well and therefore Bechdel must know him that well too. I think the tension between the author’s feelings towards her father and the opinions the audience forms about her father are what make this book a true masterpiece.
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