The past few weeks have been very segmented and unusual in class. We got lots of in class time to read Frankenstein, with short discussions with our classmates every twenty minutes. I did not find this helpful because everyone reads at their own pace so some people were getting spoilers and others could only discuss half of what they read. I also think a lot of people did not actually read during this class time.
Overall I really enjoyed Frankenstein and the discussions about it. My favorite article was the one that talked about childbirth and how this aspect of Mary Shelley's life impacted Frankenstein. When I was going through my 2nd read and annotations I found evidence of the monster being Frankenstein's "child" and it made me see the resemblance between Frankenstein abandoning his creation and Mary Shelley's mother dying in childbirth. It made me wonder if Shelley believed growing up without her mother had impacted her in a negative way.
Another thing I found interesting about Frankenstein was the similarities between Walton. the monster, and Frankenstein. All of them dealt with isolation, really wanted to find companionship, and were super into nature. I also noticed some similarities with Hamlet and Willy. Hamlet was extremely alienated, like the monster, and this lead to him being kinda crazy. His relationship with Horatio reminded me a lot of Clerval and Frankenstein. Both Clerval and Horatio seemed to be utterly devoted to their friends and have no lives of their own to live. Willy reminded me of Frankenstein before he built the monster because they both had such one track minds and were so devoted to what they wanted their futures to be like that they neglected the people that loved them the most.
As homework we were all supposed to watch a prezis on Literary Eras and Critical Eras. I thought both of these were really fascinating, especially the parts that talked about how people have viewed writers in the past. I had never fully considered how important writing is to not only our current society, but past societies also. Writing is immensely powerful because it can spread information to the masses which can be amazing, but also dangerous. These prezis also showed me how little I know about how writing has changed over the years, and it reminded me of how art is classified into different movements.
Hi Alice,
ReplyDeleteI agree that reading in class and discussing every twenty minutes was not the most effective. However, I did like having some time in class to read even though some of the time was wasted not reading. I remember being somewhat confused when I started reading Frankenstein just because I couldn't figure out who the narrator was. It was nice to be able to turn around and ask a friend was sitting there reading as well. What do you think about the in-class essays we wrote? Did you like the close prompt better or the open prompts that we have usually been assigned? Also, what do you think about the literary lenses and eras? I personally am not ready for the quiz that's coming up. Have a nice weekend!
Alice, I agree that it was not very helpful to have people read at their own pace and then discuss with others, but on the other hand, I guess we could have found people who had read up to around where we had rather than trying to stay in discussion groups with only our closer friends. I still didn't find it helpful, though, either. You mention that we watched two prezis, but what were the prezis about? Perhaps you could elaborate and include the topics and certain things you noticed or found interesting about the prezis. I think you could and should add a lot more to this post to show reprocessing of material rather than stating simple sentences that don't specifically show what we did and how you responded. Even the title "course review" shows this. Remember this is a response to course materials, so you did review, but you should respond more. I think you may have just misunderstood the prompt.
ReplyDeleteAlice,
ReplyDeleteAlthough, I appreciate being able to read on our own in class you are right. It does not work well with class discussions since everyone reads at different paces and end at different points ater 20 minutes. However I do think reading Frankenstein as a class might have taken a while, but the discussion would have been easier. It does not help at all when people do not actually read during this time either because the discussion is very limited. This was most certainly a problem in my hour as well. What did you think of some of the Frankenstein articles we red?
Did they affect your view on the novel? I think you did a great job on your post, however I think it would benefit if you added some personal opinion about the different articles we read. Also consider adding information about the different Kahoots we did. Overall nice post.