Week 13, End of Semester Reflections!

This is my last post for English 1080 at Memorial University of Newfoundland with an awesome professor, Jonathan Parsons (whom I've had lots of trouble spelling his name). Overall, English 1080 has been a pretty awesome course, probably my favourite course out of my first ever semester at MUN. I'm probably a little biased, considering I love learning and analysing poetry and short fiction, and I have ever since I started school. My absolute favourite piece of literature we have discussed over this term is probably "Where Are You Going, Where Have you Been?" by Joyce Carol Oates. I found this piece particularly interesting because first of all, it has a lot of allusion. If you do not have some background information of this story, you probably won't understand it. If you do not have an underlying knowledge of the story of Eve and the tree of knowledge, or the story of Charon (the ferryman of Hades) you probably won't understand several of the allusions throughout this story, and this is why I particularly appreciate the time my professor takes to analyse the poems and short stories with his students. I wouldn't understand the poems or stories half as much without the analysing in class time with my professor and other classmates. The things I liked most about this class are what we focused on, like I said previously, short stories and poems. I liked how we have some freedom within the blog post, and I enjoyed how we weren't forced to read any annoying professor chosen books throughout the course which most of the time, I find distasteful. I do not want to read about things I have no interest in, which is another reason I enjoyed this course. If I did find something I didn't like, we didn't spend the whole semester on it, it was only a small part of the course, which I did appreciate. I do not tend to pay attention to things I am not interested in, and therefore, this course caught and held my attention because of how interesting, stimulating and new everything was.