A Look Back (Final)

This blog post is for the course EL 266, American Literature 1: 1800-1915 that I am taking at Seton Hill University. Here is a portfolio in which I will showcase many different aspects of my writing that I will do for the class, hopefully growing as a writer as the course moves along. Here is the final product, with a few more blog entries and explanations.

Depth: These are the blogs that I feel as if show a more engaged thought process with the material we were asked to read.

One post that I feel as if more than qualifies for this section is my post on “The Wife” titled The Wife or the Child, and it look at how the title character, the Wife, is portrayed. The gender inequality is something that I look strongly upon in this blog.

The Congregation of the Devil  is another blog in which I feel as if I pushed to do more than the bare minimum. This post is about the similarities between the Church and evil ritual found in the story “Young Goodman Brown”.

With the post Irving, “Rip Van Winkle”, I thought that I made interesting points on why Rip Van Winkle is so respected by the townspeople of the future in the story of his namesake.

Another blog that I feel as if broke the minimum was Follow the Breadcrumbs, a post in which I look at Foster’s point that children’s literature is so important to the literature of everything else.

The last one for this category is A First Look at the Adulteress, which I think upon the importance of the way Hester Prynne is portrayed to the reader in the first encounter in The Scarlet Letter.

Interaction: The interaction section will be used to showcase instances where I have gotten ideas from classmates and vice versa. I don’t have very much in regards to blogs for this section yet, so I chose something from the Moodle discussions.

Calvin Yoder, after I had commented on his post about Dickinson, gave me a thought from another student which turned out to be me anyway! I thought it was quite funny, and also made sense, because he was able to connect the ideas I had. That post can be found here.

Discussion: This section is to showcase that I am willing to engage with my peers with their thoughts. Again, not much from the blogs, so I took something from Moodle.

Miriam Shenouda and I exchanged ideas about “The Defence of Ft. McHenry”, where I was the first to comment on her ideas, and it sparked a bit of a discussion.

Timeliness: These are the blogs in which I’ve completed on time, as per requested by the teacher Dr. Jerz.

The very first post, Practice 2: Blogging, was merely to test the blogging feature of the class. There is not anything of much interest in this post, other than what I am expecting to learn and experience from this class.

In Memory, Symbol, Pattern, I looked back on some thoughts I had on certain chapters of  Foster’s book, How to Read Literature Like a Professor. I explained what to me the three things, Memory, Symbol, and Pattern meant.

In both the blogs above, I turned them in by the requested time.

Coverage: These are the blogs which I just don’t think fit anywhere else, either because of the length or the timeliness (or lack thereof).

Monsters in the Mansion wasn’t a bad post, but it definitely wasn’t the most detailed one that I’ve ever written. I scratched the surface in response to Foster’s chapter Nice to Eat You: Acts of Vampires, in which he explains the prevalence of monsters in the books that we read.

The second time I looked at “The Wife” by Washington Irving in my blog A Second Look at “The Wife”, I was less apt to judge so harshly the portrayal of the woman Mary thanks to Dr. Jerz’s enlightening comments.

In A Second Look at “Young Goodman Brown”, I was able to connect the work to the life of the reader and why it matters that we connect them.

Here is the first portfolio of many to come, and I think I’ve had a great start to this course.