Reflection Essay

            Throughout the three main essays assigned this quarter I was satisfied with my performance. I continue to be satisfied with most, however I am not at all proud of my second essay. The assignments came earlier than my understanding of the textbook Critical Practice and therefore my original draft deviated greatly from the assignment. I am very satisfied and proud of my rewrite of the first draft. I think that I do a much better job at tying Anderson into my essay. The first final draft was without a cognitive thread between my claim and Imagined Communities, but I believe I fixed that greatly in the rewrite. I am confident that my final essay on As I Lay Dying was rewritten quite well, though I do admit it could benefit from better transitioning phrases, in more than a couple sections it could benefit from any transitioning phrase.

            In the first essay focusing on text as context in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” I demonstrated Poe’s manipulation of syntax and language to create pace, emulating the narrators anxiety and thereby interpolating the reader into the mind of the narrator. The analysis was analytical, citing specific passages and breaking them apart line by line to explain how, “Poe uses the increasing speed of the crowd in front of the hotel to illustrate the narrators growing interest in the scene. As the, ‘throng momently increased,’ the narrator is finished with the newspaper, beginning to look around, and by the time the lamps are lit he is, ‘filled… with a delicious novelty of emotion,’ and cannot turn away from the window.” I inserted brief summaries of the passages I exemplified, but did not summarize the entire story, which was perhaps to my paper’s detriment, or reveal the ending, which I do not think pertinent to my analysis. The paper is grammatically sound, as well it should be, and now follows MLA format.

            My revisions directly reflect the notes I was given by peers and instructor, including a completely rewritten connection to Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. My original paper was somewhat half-assed in connection to Anderson because I had not fully grasped Anderson’s claims, my brain bombarded with readjusting to school life, and was not realizing the connections to the implications of Poe as pre-modern. In the rewrite I submitted recently I believe I made a solid claim to Poe’s modernity and how that ties in to Anderson’s argument that modernity resulted from and is influenced by mass print, thus increasing the imaginariness of national boundaries. Rewriting the conclusion also helped in polishing paragraph transitions since the conclusion is now an extension of my main claim.

            The second essay was a bit rougher. I began with a misconstrued idea of the assignment and wrote about the ethical implications of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton” from the serialized Return of Sherlock Holmes. However, it gave me a solid foundation for my rewrite because most ethics are, by definition, ideologies in practice. With that said, I obviously failed at constructing an interpretation of the ideologies of women, marriage and sexuality that I found so blatantly obvious in the story. Perhaps I was “too close” to accurately detail them, thus leaving the reader to read between my lines and draw their own assumptions and interpretations of my claim. What is worse, in my hurry to finish my rewrite I allowed three horrendous grammatical errors to remain as a result of reconstructing sentences without fixing the gerunds within them. Furthermore, I have a combination of military and prior learning experience – professors who had specific salutation guidelines, and high school MLA – habits that keep getting in the way of meeting current MLA guidelines for the format of the byline and title segment.

            I did find this to be the most difficult of all of the essays because I found Catherine Belsey’s Critical Practice a mind numbing barrage of theories and references, which now that it has been explained through Tom Foster’s lecture and the printout of critical modes provided by Brian Gutierrez makes much more sense. Because of my initial confusion I did not know how to approach the assignment. My peers who read the paper did not provide me with any constructive feedback, so I think there was confusion or assumed ambiguity of the assignment shared with other students. I probably could have completed a more polished rewrite if I had dropped Post-colonial Literature sooner, thus freeing time that could have been spent studying Belsey and visiting my professors during their office hours. As a whole, I do not feel satisfied with my performance in this essay as I do not feel my claim was illustrated sufficiently. If given another chance at a rewrite I would spend more time discussing the interrogative text and how the scenes I chose to analyze interpolate the reader into the ideologies I suggest are subliminally obvious.

            The third, and final essay, in which we joined the critical conversation by performing an analysis of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying in conversation with another critic, went quite well in my opinion. As it turned out I could not find any critic who demonstrated a psychoanalytic interpretation of AILD as an illustration of the stages of grief. I had briefly discussed this in my discussion section after another student claimed that the characters do not grieve. After that I did a search for critical analysis of grief in AILD and I could not find any as thorough as what I was planning, so I felt as though I was on the right track to tackling an interpretation that had not been done before. I am very satisfied with my paper over all. I took all of my peer and instructor critiques to heart and did my absolute best to rewrite the essay in three very different incarnations before finally resolving to an interpretation that had a clear focus: Cash as the poster-boy for grief.

            In my analysis I presented an introduction that used Belsey to argue the validity and importance of psychoanalytic critique, which Belsey claims is important because language is our first introduction to society, culture, and how to be a part of them. With Belsey’s claim providing me with a strong purpose I set out to explain how AILD illustrates the five stages of grief using Cash as the star example and bringing a few of the other characters into fold, as necessary, to illustrate how grief can manifest itself in ways that are unhealthy. I mostly drew from psychologist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross to support my interpretation of the five stages of grief in AILD, but I also brought in claims from Olga W. Vickery. I conversed with Vickery’s claims, expanding them in support of my argument. Perhaps the only flaw of my essay is rough transitions between paragraphs, but I think the structure of my claims within paragraphs are solid and well establishes my claims and support for my interpretations. The essay is grammatically correct and does take formal academic tone and utilizes academic language.