Final Blog

Some of my favorites from the “Making Literature Matter” textbook were “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien, and “Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin. Before this class I’ve never heard of Kate Chopin, but I liked all of her short stories that was in the text. I think that Chopin is a very interesting author, and that her work is controversial, largely because of the expected role of a woman during her time period (the late 1800’s). Some of the stories that I did not like in the text were “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and some of the plays by Edgar Allen Poe, because I couldn’t really grasp the meaning of what the author was trying to say and I’m not really interested in those types of genres. Also, when reading work by Edgar Allen Poe, it seems like I’m always trying to translate words just so that I can understand the text. When one of the assignments required that I do some research on Poe to learn if Poe’s writings reflects situations from his life, I found out that he has been through a lot as a child, from the death of his mother when he was infant, to watching his whole family succumb to tuberculosis. I didn’t even realize that tuberculosis was that bad back then. So I definitely thought that the events that took place in Poe’s life effected his work.
There are a lot of stories in the “Making Literature Matter” text that I did not get a chance to read yet, so instead of selling the book back to the book store I’m going to continue reading it. Some of the text that I would reread would be mainly poems so that I can understand them more deeply.