Literary Nostalgia

This semester, our English 251 class at BYU has sampled probably every type of literary criticism and literary study imaginable, but with a twist.  We've combined the traditional ways in which to study literature with the new ways to study literature, and personally, I feel like I have benefited more from this practice than I would have, had I geared my literary study towards either one or the other.

Being an English Teaching major, I have always been exceptionally fond of literature.  That being said, I've found excessive literary study, i.e. "beating the book to death," exceptionally boring.  It always seems so removed, and just super, super dry.  Aside from the technology, blogging, and publishing that we participated in during the semester, we focused a lot on traditional ways to look at literature.  One thing that I found particularly unique and helpful was the "personal" look we were encouraged to take in regarding a poem or a novel.  From the very get-go, we were asked to analyze sentence structure and so forth, but we were also encouraged to put our personal thoughts into things.  Doing so greatly helped me, especially when reading a pretty difficult book, such as Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. 

I also felt like the resources and textbooks we were required to obtain breathed "a new life" into traditional literary study.  All the books that we read were definitely academic, but I feel that none of them were archaic. Overall, I feel like the biggest thing I learned regarding traditional literary study in this course is the fact that literary study doesn't have to be dry and boring.  


This class has been able to turn my ideas about the effectiveness of technology in a new direction by introducing the blogging process. Although we often discussed aspects of traditional literary study in our blogs, it was nice to be able to do so in a new medium.  Blogging brought new life into boring things and made me appreciate traditional things such as "analyzing the sentence structure of a poem" because the medium was so different. My ideas about analyzing a piece of literature might have been the same had they been written on paper, but translating them into blog form made homework more fun.

 I was pretty apprehensive about blogging at first because I'm a pretty quiet person and more of a "listener" than a "teller."  I was honestly nervous to post my writings online--not only would my fellow students see them, but anyone who typed in the right keywords online would be able to see what I wrote.  Instead, I found that it's actually great to post my own writings online.  I found that getting feedback from my fellow students was really helpful and encouraged me to read, write, and review my work more fully.  We also explored Goodreads and Amazon like there was no tomorrow.  Similar to my experience with sharing my thoughts while blogging, browsing sites and being encouraged to comment on them encouraged me to be more comfortable with the online world.  It was neat to be assigned comment on discussion boards.  I've come to see that introducing commonly-used secondary media into a curriculum can increase a student's desire to participate in the learning process.     

As I am pursuing a teaching degree, I hope I will be able to remember what I have learned in this class.  I hope to remember that a student can come to appreciate literary study of a novel such as Heart of Darkness by looking at it in a different light.  I also hope I can remember that Facebook and Twitter can be very effective tools if used appropriately.  Overall, I am very thankful for everything that I have learned in this class, and that they will truly be applicable to my future life and my future study of literature.