ENGL 215-50

I took ENGL 215-50 Monsters of World Literature in my Fall semester, Junior year, to complete a pillar honors requirement for Cormier Honors College. I was looking through the course offerings with my honors college friend, seeing if there was a class that we could take together, and this was a class we were both interested in and that fit for both our schedules. After taking this class, I am really glad I chose it. I had never heard of the professor before I signed up for the class, but I was talking to my friend after and she told me that she liked the professor but that many other students had complained about her multiple times and quite strongly, too. I have never really taken others’ words to heard when it concerns professors, and decided to see for myself how the professor was. I can say with confidence that the reason people do not like the professor is because of her no nonsense attitude and the fact that she will not hold your hand through the work. This is one of the things I liked about the class; how she would actually challenge you to think for yourself and to be engaged in the material and discussions. I ended the class with a 90.81%, an A-.

I love reading, but have found that for school it never really gets me that excited because the genre is not what I am interested in. That is not the case for this class, as we were reading fiction to learn about monters in world literature, and one of my favorite genres is fiction. There were some readings that I did struggle with, but I also remember happily reasing through some of the assigned books because I liked them so much, and passionately talking about the topics in class because I had so much to say about them. One of my favorite assignments for this class was when we had to find our own global ghost story. I did a lot of research to find a ghost story I was happy with, and ended up choosing The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In class we went over everyone’s stories and talked about the major themes, and we found that one of the major themes in these ghost stories was that it was usually focused on women as the supernatural. We also saw that many of the stories were caused by some form of miscommunication and traumatic experience. This project was still in the back of my mind days later as I was watching the show Grimm, and a scene came on talking about La Llorona. That made me think of our discussion and the parallels I could draw between school and daily life.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; Samuel Taylor Coleridge; 1798. A major English poem about the story of a Mariner who forever tells the story to whomever will listen of the journey of a ship and the death of an Albatross.