Blog 16; reflection

Throughout the semester, I have written total sixteen blogs including the one that I am writing now. Based on the class theme, “supernatural,” I basically analyzed stories, movies, and poems using different literature approaches and wrote essays about them. Having a common theme helped me to focus on the main topic of sources that I was working on. My first essay was about finding symbols and tone of a poem. I chose Greek mythological poem called “Medusa.” I can recall that I was very excited to explore this poem and for the following essay, I chose the similar poem from the same author called, “Medusa of the Skies.” These two poems were so much fun to work with. I read them over and over and tried to find every single symbol that could code for hidden meanings of these poems. Before this class, I never liked poems, but now I learned how to interpret and enjoy the poem. To me, reading a poem is like reading an author’s mind. As the semester progressed, I learned about monomyth which was very useful for analyzing heroic movies or stories. Studying the concept of hero’s quest was my favorite part of this class. It helped me to understand the lessons from the hero’s journey. Lastly, I worked on a story, “The Black Cat” using psychoanalytic literary criticism. This essay was the hardest but most informative essay I had written this semester. I had to incorporate psychological theories with the story and the author. This essay actually summed up the entire class because it was all about using all the literature concepts that I learned in the class to study the fiction in depth.

This class was very different from other English class in terms of using blogs. We all had to post our essays on our own blogs and this helped me to learn from peers. I liked how we commented on each other’s essay and gave advices to improve our essays. Also every activity we did in the class was so much fun. I learned literacy through watching one of my favorite movies, reading a book and studying poems that I chose. This class never made me got me bored, but helped me enjoy writing especially on a blog.