I don’t think this class achieved its potential in teaching me. This year I gained some skill interpreting literature, but it’s hard to judge exactly how much. I feel like I’ve gained some skills, but… If I’m listing who I was in September vs. who I am now as a reader and critic of literature, I think the description would end up being indistinguishable.

I think the angle that we came at studying literature in class wasn’t the best to develop my skills. I’m not sure if I’m already thinking at a higher level than the class is aimed at, or if I’m just thinking in a different way, but in any case, our class discussions seemed to just hand us the answers, or to encourage us to fall back on clichés. Students (me included) didn’t end up providing as many unique and interesting different angles of interpretation as I feel is warranted. I’d love to see far more discussion of how you extract themes and tell what’s a metaphor in places that are more subtle than Gatsby. If you use the techniques that you use on metaphor-heavy Gatsby on a normal piece of literature you’ll start seeing themes in places where there’s only mundane description.

But not all is negative. I did get to write a lot about the books we read, and that forced me to think in a different way about them. While the class seemed to incentivize following clichés in writing our essays in order to score better, I explored some interesting concepts, and several times did anaysis that I’m really proud of and that I think produced new insights instead of merely synthesizing old ones that I had been told. I got to read some really great books, and I seriously enjoyed acting while we read the plays in class.

Really, I feel that what had the most impact on me as a reader was just reading more “classic” literature as opposed to the (excellent) science fiction and fantasy that I usually read. Simply having the mindset to analyze what I was reading translated into how I read other works, even ones that wouldn’t normally be seen as “literature.”

I think the elements of fiction were the most important thing I learned in this class, and that anyone who wants to study literature needs to know how to look for them in a piece of media. I’m still very interested in literary criticsm, especially seeing the intelligent criticism made by the more writing-inclined game developers that I follow, and hope to apply some of these skills to my own interests sometime soon. (Perhaps I’ll analyze some game plots over the summer.)