This class has been one of the best that I have ever taken in my college career and I am sad to see that is over. On day one I was a bit skeptical as to if I would like this class and I am glad that I stuck with it because it was an absolute blast. I have met many interesting people and the course material was splendid. I learned many new things over the semester, and I further enhanced my knowledge of some of the things that I already knew. We started out the semester with symbols and using them to interpret pieces of literature. That was very interesting to me because most times we are just told to find the meaning of the work and then pick out the symbols but using the symbols to interpret the work is so much more beneficial. I had great fun with symbolism throughout the semester because simple words that we may overlook can carry a lot of weight and help to interpret the piece of work. I personally don’t like poetry as much as other works of literature but by studying it through the use of symbols I had an easy time interpreting the poem I chose, God’s Garden, as well as Goblin Market and parts of Macbeth.
Blogging was one of the most interesting things that I learnt this semester. When I first learnt that all our work would be in blog format I was a bit worried but as the semester went along it got easier to blog my work and now I am quite good at it. Blogging is a very interesting teaching tool because it helps classmates to give constructive criticism to each other as well as helping one to submit his/her work from anywhere with internet access. In case something should happen and one cannot get to class he/she can still submit the required work on time.
Another great thing that I learned this semester was archetypes. Prior to this class I of course knew of heroes and villains and such but it was great to learn about the six main archetypes and to see which my dominant one was. It was quite awesome that the ones that were my dominant archetypes fit me so well especially the altruist one. It is also quite interesting to see the manifestation of all the different archetypes in myself. This is one concept that will remain with me forever and I find myself now looking for these different archetypes in characters in movies, books and TV shows.
The hero’s quest/monomyth was one of the most interesting things that I learnt all semester. Some professors would just give the concept to the students and they would have to figure it out on their own but we had it in several different works that it was quite easy to grasp the concept.I saw it in Coraline’s journey to rescue her parents and return with them to her own reality, in Spirited Away with Chihiro’s journey and even in my final project in Alice in Wonderland. Even looking back to the works in the beginning of the semester we can see it in the Goblin Market poem.
The final project also afforded us a great chance to be creative and did not confine us to just writing an essay analyzing a book or movie. Although I analyzed a book for my final it was great to know that I had the option to do something else creative in terms of making a video or something else if I so chose. Looking at the final projects there was a range of things that people did and that was excellent. I especially liked Jose’s final project where he interpreted the movie Brother Bear. He used the different things we learnt throughout the semester such as connotation, denotation, archetypes and symbols to write a well-written, informative and interesting blog entry on the movie. I can truly say that I will miss this class and that it was one of the best that I have ever taken. Tuesdays will not quite be the same anymore because I won’t have this class. Thank you again for your great teaching and have a happy holiday.
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