The Final Thought

So, it’s been eleven weeks. We’ve read, we’ve blogged, we’ve discussed (we’ve also not done a few of those things…no? okay just me then) and now it’s time to step back and reflect. Ahh…reflection. I always struggle with that part come week eleven. So, I do what any ‘respectable’ English major with a final paper to do, would do. I stall my little ass off. I might take my pee breaks, I might clean up a little around the dorm, I might fight crime (if I could) anything to keep my mind off of this last blog I have to do, who cares if I was diggin’ the class or not? I mean work is work…right?

But amid all of these distractions I seem to invent for myself, I can’t help but recognize just how much this class interjected itself in my decision making and value system this quarter. And when I look at the collection of everything we’ve accomplished in English 250, I know that this was a worthwhile experience.

I feel like this reading list, more so than most any of my English classes, hovered around some very, VERY weighty themes and struggles. For starters: the depictions and ambiguity behind the role of masculinity, the role of religion in determining the value system of a culture and the cultures that followed it, the role of the gothic novel in early American Literature and how it, sort of poo-pooed on everything the last thing I was talking about tried to accomplish. But c’maaan, when you really look at it there was some deep, dark, weighty stuff that this era in our history was trying to come to grips with. And it didn’t let up the farther we went down that syllabus (which might have been the effing coolest looking syllabus ever, just an fyi), we sized up the literature of sexual libertines and slave masters, then the psychological costs of both survival and oppression (yes, this is straight from the course description section of the syllabus I’ll broaden out I promise), or even the human want to evade society’s countless oppressions or expectations (see? Broadened out booya!). But this era of literature and its material had no choice but to be weighty, hard-hitting, and strenuous. It exists as the representative voice of a new nation’s sins and hardships that seemed to be never-ending, like a thread from the world’s largest ball of string. But underneath each of these varying circumstances, differing themes, when we examine the emotional baggage that dragged beneath each of these cultural contexts the literature emphasizes, similar words with parallel connotations spring to mind.

Words like endurance, perseverance, and struggle. But each of these words seem to swirl around the challenged state of the self in the face of society and society in the face of the individual.

So, life’s a challenge, big deal, like I’ve never heard or felt that before this winter quarter. But had I ever really felt it in a lit class? Or from discussion? I’d say yes and no.

Let’s face it, there’s only so much personality and honesty a person can put into a research paper, or a paper that they plan to turn in to a professor. After a couple of years worth of umpteen prompts and more research topics than you could possibly try to remember, writing papers in college for an English Major can often feel like a job, and it goes from fun to tedious pretty quickly. Not to mention the fact that papers also need to tackle course content with a degree of professionalism and attention to detail. While all of this is certainly essential and valuable when expressing opinions or trying to make a point, college students (especially creative college students) also deserve the opportunity to let loose in their interpretations, FIND THE JUICE without worrying about sounding studious or lucid to such a lofty degree. This is where class discussion comes in. And yet, some discussions prove to be more productive than others.

Never before had I really seen the opportunity to go through so many mediums and portals to reinforce or stir the themes that cropped up in the literature covered in a syllabus. Not only that, but never before had I had such freedom for personal input to course subject matter.

That’s where the blogging came in.

In most classes, I’m gonna be honest, here’s the routine. Read, class discussion, paper….read, class discussion, paper…..read, class discussion, paper…..then yay it’s spring! Pile on ten pages of hell and a random final and let’s call it a quarter.

Yeah, that’s fun. That’s education.

No, this class offered guidelines, structure, but within that structure the ability to roam around creatively and find influence from each other, our group members, in addition to the reading. And this process really felt necessary to do this course’s content justice…
I am going to be honest, I did not set out to embark on this blogging project with a set agenda. Hell, I’d never blogged before I was actually slightly intimidated come to think of it.

I figured, “Okay JT, just focus on this baby one blog at a time. It probably won’t make any sense at all when you look at the finished product but damnit it’ll get done and at least each blog will stand up okay on its own.” That’s pretty much what I told myself in January when I posted my first blog.

So, I posted. I put up pictures, I wrote the blogs from an honest place with personal and critical interpretations while trying to broaden out the best I could. One blog at a time I wrote, posted, threw in a picture and called it finished, all the while feeling like I had been neglecting the fact that most blogs have a set theme and mine had to look absurdly nonsensical.

And then, something strange happened…I noticed that without even meaning to, I was re-writing essentially the same themes from blog to blog. My pictures were, actually, going together with a want to-be Andy Warhol sense of fluency. The posts actually made sense together! And there they were! All of the course literature, my own interpretation of all of the literature sitting right there in front of me, and it all made sense somehow.
Me, the literature, and then everybody else and the literature working things out together and separately all at the same time. That’s what an English class, or any class for that matter, should be all about.

I’m not saying that course material in college doesn’t have this same amount of fluency or even the same degree of impact on a student. All I’m saying is that I had never actually noticed how much a specific course’s material impacted me, impacted other students in my class, tied in to discussion, or flowed together the way this blogging experience allowed me to visualize so vividly.

So, really, it was because of this whole blogging experience that I truly had the chance to take away and internalize the course content. I had a chance to see just how important self-reliance is and how it literally ties in to just about every theme in early American Literature. I get the chance to read a sentimental story about Tony’s high school experience, how he felt like a failure because he couldn’t get in to his AP English course his sophormore year or something ridiculous like that (I love you Tony). I got to laugh at pictures that made me think of The Coquette’s Major Sanford every time I saw a “House” episode (good call on that one, Bran by the way…House really is a ‘rake’ and pretty freaking dreamy I might add). The blogs were just a cultural medium to really put on display just how many things can and do relate to literature inside a classroom or outside of a classroom setting. This is why I am thankful for taking this class Suzanne. Thank you.

And as I sit back and look at all of the blogs, the stack of torn up books on my tattered bookshelf in my dorm room (books that today I found out I can’t return anymore by the way…sad story) I understand now just how much I DID take away from this course. I know that I invested both work and play to class content that I can guarantee you, I wouldn’t have invested under other circumstances or within other classroom settings. But I did, thankfully. It was rewarding, it was fun, it was educational and, most importantly, it was IMPACTING as hell because I can see based on my blog how much it pulled out of me. I don’t know if the other students in this class felt the same amount of reward but judging by the look and the feel of their blog I’m not alone. We got the JUICE Ashworth, and the juice was most certainly worth the squeeze. Cheesy? Indubitably. Is indubitably a word? You bet it is. Good luck next quarter everybody.