Bloggy - My Final Blog :]

As the quarter comes to a close, I find myself asking, "What did I learn?" (Mainly because we were prompted to do so). But throughout the quarter, through all the analysis of poems and stories, I'd like to think that I've become at least slightly better with the skill of textual analysis. As I revisit my blog postings, I notice that there is indeed progress, though subtle. I think it mostly has to do with my comfort level and analyzing the assignments.

At the beginning of the quarter, I was more frustrated than anything. I had no idea what things meant or stood for and many times just made something up in my blogs. I am not a big fan, well, not a fan at all of most of the types of writing we encountered and it made it hard for me to analyze because I considered it useless. I felt like, if people have trouble figure out what the author is talking about, it's not good writing. Of course, we talk about challenging the reader and such things, but intentionally being as abstract and vague as possible, leaving your writing open to a variety of interpretations, is not something I would ever write or enjoy reading. So, this presented a sort of block for me initially and can be seen in my early blog posts.

As the quarter progressed, I became more tolerant. When we finally moved off of poetry and into stories, I was excited. But the first few stories that we read were more pretentious than the poetry was. My blog posts seemed to become more and more cynical with each assignment. The only stories that I actually really enjoyed were "Milk" and "The Fix." I think this is because there is a literal value to the stories as much as there is an underlying message. My best analysis blogs were on these stories and that seems to be the reason why. I knew what the author was saying on the surface and was able to use that to dig up something deeper, rather than taking something so ridiculously vague that it could represent anything and attempt to derive some overly intelligent answer for why the author wrote it. Some people find pleasure in that and I don't mean to tear it down. I just can't force myself to like it.

The fact that this is a internet blog maybe affected how some people responded to the literature. It didnt' effect me so much in the aspect of what I wrote but more so in what I didn't write. I was unconcerned about people outside of class; it was only my classmates I was concerned about. There were times where I wanted to completely destroy a story and tear down the style, uninhibited, but I knew that some people in the class likely enjoyed the story and probably find the style appealing. So, more often than not, I kept my feelings in, sort of censoring myself, out of respect for differing opinions.

So what did I learn? I learned that textual analysis is not a strength of mine. I learned that I do not particularly desire to make it a strength. Though my skills to read underneath the text are a bit better. Looking through my blog posts, comments, and just thinking about class discussions, it is apparent that I improved but my cynicism towards the assignments likely hindered any further improvement.