Main Concepts 4

Allusions and archetypes have been a large focus for this class.  We studied over the summer) the Bible, and different roman/greek myths.  I never realized that EVERYTHING in western literature makes allusions to either myth or the bible.  Spending time on the old stories and themes relates back to the sense of story that simply ingrained in all of our brains.
Escaping this (to a degree) is why the novel "Ceremony" escapes some of these plot elements.  We learned about the cool concept of circular story telling, and how different this was then our western system of making stories.
We studied Oedipus a lot.  (The story of killing the father/ marrying the mother, gouging out eyes) all that stuff.  We studied a lot of allusions I'll just always remember this one because we looked at it so much.  The summer project of connecting all of the allusions from the bible and myths to pop. culture today was very eye-opening considering how easy it was to find them all.

Main Concepts 3

Another concept of Ms. Holmes' class is that art is everywhere and are biases (and opinions) shouldn't get in the way of respect.  On her whiteboard is all of her favorite "pop artists".  We had a presentation on postmodernism (actually all the eras but mine was postmodernism) and I learned a lot about it.  This is especially helpful for me as a composer in todays world.  But luckily it's a pretty cool world of the arts.
The eras and history of literature is tied into music and art as well.  Most of the eras presented in literature had a similar sort of viewpoint in both art and music.  What's funny is how some predate others.  For example, romanticism in music encompasses  romanticism in literature, along with the victorian age.  It's interesting then how they all line up for a split second at modernism, and seem to leave together (very quickly) onto post-modernism.

Another subject that hits on all eras is tragedy.  I like how different ages have different definitions of a true tragedy.  The Arthur Miller definition was neat, because all of the cases in modern literature that our a tragedy fit perfectly (that I know of) into his essay.

Main Concepts 2

Another concept that Ms. Holmes stresses a lot in this class is how each text relates to each other in some way, and connecting to the world around each work.  For example, The American Dream, Death of a Salesman, and Ceremony all relate to the United States concept of aspirations, dream, and identities.  We were able to debate and reference all of these when discussing each work individually.  We learned a lot about Native American culture when reading "Ceremony" and about different times in history.  We learned a lot about 1800's England in "Pride and Prejudice".  Considering a lot of that novel was focusing on certain mannerisms of the time we got a grasp on the language, nuances, and norms of the time.  In "Ceremony" we received an education on present day Native (mainly Laguna) ways.  The information we gained from the reading and studying is very relevant today.

How to view Native Americans was somewhat clarified in "Ceremony".  My favorite thing I learned on this was about the sense of humor.  It's really cooler then ours (I think).  WIth everything in the world having some degree of humor in it I think we'd never take ourselves too seriously.