Synthesis of Course Material #4 - Other

We've done some other things this year that don't really fit into the three major categories. The most obvious of these is all the time we spent studying our list of literary terms. This was especially helpful with our annotation, being able to recognize when an author was using certain things to help tell their story. Another of these was the presentations we made on Prezi about the literary eras. This was extremely helpful in recognizing certain themes and techniques used in texts that may fit into the eras in which they were written. Some of them I was learning about for the first time and on some, it was nice to get refresher as we studied them in American Literature. Another topic that doesn't fit is the Theatre of the Absurd that we studied when we looked at The American Dream. I found the concept of the Theatre of the Absurd fascinating but, as entertainment, I'm not a huge fan of most of the plays I've seen so far that fit into this category. We also talked about the definition of comedy and the theories on why something is funny. We looked at the different philosophies on tragedy, as well, and how it's changed through the years, from Aristotle all the way to Northrop Frye. The idea of every text being either Apollonian and Dionysian was extremely interesting to me, although I think that some texts have elements of both in them. We also looked at the different critical theories and worked on applying them to texts. We did this a little bit in Brit Lit but it made a lot more sense to me this year and I can see how you can apply almost every theory to a text and see it a little bit differently with each. All of these other topics, while they don't fit in the other categories, have really helped me in understanding the literature we've read, as well as in writing the essays.