Goal 3: British Literature, ENGL 202

As a part of our Goal 3 for learning culture through literature, students have the choice of multiple classes, such as American literature or world literature. I, however,  chose to study British literature.

When anticipating what would come with this course, I initially thought that we would focus on Shakespeare, and writers of similar nature, which I would enjoy, since I never had trouble in understanding the language used in Shakespeare’s works. My expectations were exceeded and more, as this class quickly turned into one of the best English classes that I had ever taken.

In this class, we delved into poetry, as we looked into the various poets that dated back to before Shakespeare’s time, to people  such as Lord Byron, and even those in the 21st century. While many of my peers could not say the same, I absolutely love lookin into the hidden meaning and intentions of poetry.

What really caught my interest was our look into the different eras of literature as we looked at the history and ideals that were behind the writers of the things we focused on– especially as we looked into the first novel known to literature, “Oroonoko”, and at works such as Helem Oyeyemi’s “White is for Witching”. In addition with looking at such a wide range of books, as well as poems and plays, I had never looked into the background of the writers as much as I had in this class, and I loved it.

For this class, the artifact that I would turn back to would be one of the assigned essays we had. As a part of this class, we were given essays, in which we reflected on the given topic that the class would be on. In the example I have chosen, we went deeper into our own thoughts as to how the author’s poems could be interpreted, and how their history reflected that. I chose this to reflect on since I have never enjoyed writing essays as much as  I have in this class, since I was so interested with the content on this class, which is especially true when it comes to poetry. Overall, this essay reflects the main idea that our professor Brandon Haffner taught, which is that any idea that you come up with can be valid, as long as you find what you need to back it up, and that any unique thought should be appreciated.