For the general education literature requirement, I took ENGL 203, or American Literature, with Dr. Hursey. While I love to read fiction on my own time, I’ve never been a huge fan of the kind of literature generally assigned in English courses. While the readings for this class were still not quite my cup of tea (most were too depressing for my liking), I still greatly enjoyed the class. Dr. Hursey was always an enthusiastic lecturer and got the students to think and talk about the different themes in the short fiction pieces we read. It was interesting to see how ideas changed in literature throughout history, especially the American view of freedom, which was the key focus of this course. One of the major components of this course was our term paper comparing and contrasting the use and views of freedom in three different works. I’ve attached the paper below to demonstrate the analytical skills and insight I got from this course.