Scholarly Article #4

I have always thought that narratives are closely tied to the fundamentals of culture, whether that be a nation's culture, religious culture, or technology culture. But not only are specific cultures influential on the narratives being written, but narratives also inspire and cultivate the culture itself. I feel like Selfe said it best in her post: "we've seen increasing numbers of teachers and scholars... turn to personal narratives as an effective way of exploring the social, cultural, political, ideological, and historical formations that have shaped the literacy practices and values of peoples and groups" She is describing the impact that cultures have on literary components and literature itself.

Another component to this relationship is the people that bridge the culture and the literature together. We all come from different backgrounds and that affects not only what stories we write, but the transformation and identity we have formed in to get to this point. Everything that we have experienced and become, like Kraus says within Selfe's article, is "socially embedded, and readable" in our writing.

Like I have previously stated, not only does culture affect literature and vice versa, but the narrative affects the narrator, and vice versa. Putting into words our emotions and personal stories emphasizes and affirms certain characteristics about ourselves.

I found this article very interesting and it really just articulated how I feel about the mutually-defining relationships between culture, literature, narratives, and narrators.

Scholarly Article #3

My favorite line from this article is where it states that "we cannot continue with existing theories of meaning given the facts of the changes in the social, economic, and cultural domain." This is where design comes in because you can have the same content designed different in a variety of multimodal domains, but the demands vary and the design needs to meet the requirements. If you are trying to reach a very professional and wide variety of people with a lot of information, a video is not the best way to go. So understanding design and the correct dissemination of information is important, especially when you take into account the audience, the resources, and the social and cultural environment.

Aesthetics is just as important in the relaying of information as the info itself. And like the quote I referenced before, we can't keep doing the same things because we live in a very different world with different needs and resources.