Pro Media or Pro Message: Just Vote

Dear Fiction-ers & College
Across the Curriculum.

(Course W/O Borders series)

“Hills Like White Elephants”
(re: significant relationship whatever
the gender)

The STORY was about
a Conversation,
and the conversation
was about abortion;
and the academic
question entertained
was:

Are you pro story?
or pro conversation? .

For the sake of argument:

Just VOTE.

In other words: which
did your attention
efficiency focus on:

1. What The Story was
about

a Conversation

or

2. the story’s Conversation
About Abortion—and of course
IF it’s the abortion-topic that
grabs your attention, then
the question:

1. Pro Life or
2. Pro Choice
is put into play and we move
farther and father from
The Story which
was about

a Conversation

Not that there’s anything wrong
with THAT, just trying to Keep
Track

Do you generally focus

1. On message or on media?

2. On the token topic of a
conversation or on the
Conversation as
Conversation itself?

3. On a game of basketball or
The Game?

4. On the subject matter of
a significant-other fight or
the relationship relating
by means of the fight
club going on?

Often the message, topic, game,
subject-matter will eclipse if not
occlude the Media, Conversation,
Game, Relationship that actually
frames, structures, shapes, patterns
defines the message, token-
topicality, bottom-line so-called
content .

And so it’s only just a matter of
being “academic” here and
keeping track— differentiating
between (in this case) the Story
and the Conversation within the
story on the one hand; and the
converse- ation & it’s token topic
(a white elephant) which we don’t
even know to be “abortion” till
we finish the story and read the
commentary (unless we are astute:
IT concealed so efficiently so that
the story apparently focuses
successfully instead on

a Conversation

a much more profound focus than
mere abortion, true? Need we
argue?