Reflective Paper

     It wasn’t until I took this class that I realized how interesting literature can be. I usually like reading stories and poems but sometimes I would read a book and be bored out of my mind. What I learned from this class is to ask the question, “What is the author communicating and why?” I had never thought about this before and having this perspective helped me with looking forward to the readings. Before I would have been so bored with reading old English and Greek stories like Everyman and even The Tempest but breaking down the stories in class and explaining the symbolisms and references really helped. Sometimes I would even get confused when reading poetry such as “Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock” and “Coy Mistress”. If we did not break it down in class I would have totally missed the point of the story being told. Let alone understand what was going on!

            The stories I found most interesting were the cynical stories like “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” and the poem “Cinderella”. I found the characters very relatable but the way of their thinking as so abstract. Maybe because I am an optimist and the characters seem to be more of pessimists. The poem “Daddy” by far was my favorite of course. Some may believe that the poem is harsh and a tad cruel to read but I liked the honesty in it. Unfortunately not every child has a good and healthy relationship with their parents. I give Sylvia Plath props for not only realizing this but for recognizing how it affected her future relationships with men. Speaking of parental issues, Oedipus the King was another great story to read. For someone like Sophocles to create a story so long ago and yet be still relatable in today’s world is extremely rare. All in all, reading these stories and poems helped me understand how far we have come in the world yet how we morally think the same. 

All in all...

slaveforkey: