British Lit.

I have learned quite a bit in this class. I must admit that there was a lot of reading and extra assignments such as the blogs. I am always grateful for a challenge though (especially in the long run where i will need a lot of practice with computers and MLA formatting.) Shockingly enough, one thing that I will remember for years to come is just how filthy those brits are (or were). Maybe it was just the lack of television but if these stories are an accurate depiction of what went through the average british person's mind in the 15th/16th century, all i can say is wow! they make me feel like a prude!

Paradise Lost

This was a fascinating read and I enjoyed looking back at the footnotes while reading and finding the biblical references. Out of all the classical literature, the Bible is one that I am comfortably familiar with and big epic poems like this one and Homer's works tend to reference a lot of things so it was nice to know some of the names Milton was referring to like the Philistine fish-god Dagon or Mammon which was the ?Greek? Hebrew? word for money. I particularly liked Milton's description of the demons as giants like the titans in Greek literature. It completely challenged my thinking about the physicality of these hellish creature - I guess I originally thought of demons as more bony, hunchback things haha!

The Taming of the Shrew

Ok, I may be remembering this wrong but I think this is the one that ended with the play and never went back to what was going on before the play was acted out. That was really weird- I kind of wanted to know what they ended up doing with the drunk/bum. With that said, I really like a lot of Shakespeare's stuff especially if there are supernatural elements such as the witches in Macbeth and the creatures in A Midsummer Night's Dream. However, Shakespeare can be a little hard to follow at times. I often find myself drawing little diagrams with the names of all the characters in bubbles and lines connecting each character - the relationship between the characters written out on the lines. It really helps - especially with stories like The Taming of the Shrew where there are a ga-gillion names. My memory is not what it was before the sixties... hardy har har!