Portfolio Assignment 3
TIP FOR PROFESSIONAL WRITERS: In writing a novel, be sure to include Character Development.
WRONG: “Brad gazed into Marsha’s eyes.”
RIGHT: “Brad gazed into Marsha’s eyes and noticed that she now had three of them.”
- Dave Barry’s “Mister Language Person”
I am better person for having taken this course. I am able to divine the significance of my life in terms of the literature that we have studied. I can see that I wasted a healthy majority of my life reading and watching fare that really had no importance of any kind. I accomplished this mostly through (the realization, not the wasting) a cumulative review of what we learned. It is no any particular thing which we studied, but rather the method in which we studied it and the fine connections it had with other course content that truly defined my learning.
My favorite novel was Miss Lonelyhearts because it wasn’t needlessly verbose like some of the other works were, in my honest opinion. Miss L certainly wasn’t morally ambiguous like many of the other characters this year. And I just plain don’t like Shakespeare. I enjoyed writing these port asses because they’re not very structured and I’m a little more free to shoot from the hip, as opposed to the traditional blue book style.
I enjoy any vocab list featuring words that there’s a chance I’ll ever use again: maladroit, mot juste, verbose, etc. It’s a shame that they weren’t all in one list. The other great shame of this year is the tragic story of “Reuben, Reuben,” my favorite film of the year (“Seinfeld” finale exluded, of course.) I could really relate to Gowan McGland, insomuch as we are two of the world’s great lovers. My favorite grammar rules is subject-verb agreements and to be faulty parallelism.
It’s hard say which of your numerous and rambling lectures (is he being serious?) I enjoyed most. To be perfectly honest with you, I understand neither the Fisher King nor the Vegetation Myth. Those things can easily be researched online though. Another thing which I’d like to find online is “Übernostrum,” my favorite Friday “tune.” It’s both funny and practical.
I enjoy approaching literature archetypically. I find that this methodology yields the most interesting results and is often the most prevalent in contemporary work, which is truly what interests me most.
Now I will venture a little bit from my prepared remarks and speak to you on a more emotional level. This class really pissed me off for much of the beginning of the year. I felt that the connections you were making were meaningless and perhaps designed only to intimidate us. As it turns out, I was only right half the time. Aside from the nonstop intellectual competition among the “elite” of the class, things slowly became more tolerable and perhaps even enjoyable towards the tail end of the year. Then again, I’m an optimist.
The most lasting impression this class has left on me is the realization that there is an entire realm of existence that I have been missing. The difference between AP English and Honors English classes of years past is stark and more than a little confounding.