Final Reflection Paper

As I complete Approaches to Literature, it’s a good time to reflect on my four month journey. During this class, I was astounded at the various ways one can look at a piece of literature or even the order of the words in a sentence and what words come, the author’s background, the historical context, and the societal structures can influence interpretations of what the text means and what the author intended to write. This class was a chance for me to look at text differently. The biggest change this class brought to my thinking of literature was that text could be analyzed independently from the author or the society.

I learned about the importance of the words, their repetition, and their double meanings most when looking at “Two or Three Things I Know for Sure.” From the small things like diction, that contributes to style and reinforces the bigger picture of theme. For example, the phrase Allison used to describe the women, “Solid, stolid, wide-hipped baby machines. We were all wide-hipped and predestined. Wide-faced meant stupid. Wide hands marked workhorse with dull hair and tired eyes…” The diction employed in the expression reinforces description, creates a clear image for the reader, makes the characters more real, and reinforces the meaning of words. This directly contributes to one of the main themes in “Two or Three Things I know for Sure;” beauty in ugliness. It is also possible to argue that the life of the woman described in the story can be compared to that of Dorothy Allison herself, but the fact remains that the text tells you the inner thoughts of the woman and describes her sufficiently to build a character which we do not really need a real-life match.

When reading the poetry of various poets, including Theodore Roethke, I discovered how fascinating it is that the structure of a poem, mainly the rhyme and meter, can provide us insight about the meaning a text and give away doubts, paradoxes, ironies, and tension that exist in a single piece. Approaches to Literature allowed me to see that using a rhyme scheme of ABAB not only is a technique, but can also portray the deeper meanings of the text; emphasis on not just a poem about a waltz, but a waltz itself.

Even though this class was eye opening for me in terms of the importance of looking at text independently to discover some meanings in the book and analyze paradoxes or ironies that exist in the writing itself, I have also realized that there is no wrong way of looking at a piece of literature. Approaches to Literature might allow the reader to stay focused on the text and analyze it as an independent object; there are many right ways of reading and analyzing literature. In the future, I will most likely use methods I learned in this course to study text. I believe one thing the students of this class learn is to be open to learning about diverse ways of looking at literature.