Sun, 11/18/2012 – 14:01 — Megan Cross
The “Re-Presentation” project that I was assigned essentially gave me free rein to choose any piece of writing available and do to it whatever I wished, as long as I altered the piece in some way. Initially, this seemed extremely daunting due to the fact that I had an entire vast universe of writing staring me in the face. So I first tried to decide what exactly I wanted to do with the project in general. I knew that I wanted to take a piece that was relatively short and well-known, in order to spend some time giving a close reading of the meaning of the text before I went about altering it. Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” seemed perfect to me because it is a work that is very emotional and thought-provoking, despite its short length. I was able to take Chopin’s work and spend some time mapping out the plot and all of its potential threads. The main component of Chopin’s work that stood out to me was its immense ambiguity. There are countless ways to interpret “The Story of an Hour,” something I’m sure that Kate Chopin intended. It was here that I saw how I could alter this work in an interesting way. I wanted to alter the story and attempt to cut out any ambiguous meaning, and force the viewer to feel the story in a very specific way. I used many audiovisual elements such as color, sound, images, and movement in order to shove the viewer down a specific pathway of interpretation that I chose. I also purposefully cut out and pieced together particular excerpts from the story that I felt supported the specific interpretation, and yet still kept the original plot of the text in place. I did this not only to create a concise presentation, but also to further persuade the viewer to one particular interpretation of the work, thus eliminating all of the original ambiguity.
Project Title:
Re-presentation: Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour