Friday, September 12, 2008

"OBVIOUSLY...

...I'm wearing rubber pants."
"Like diction, as in word, so it's like a wordinary?"

You would think that in an AP Lit class, the conversation would be a bit more intellectual. When we blabber about literature and current events, we get on tangents that would never be expected. It's stuff like this that makes the class so much fun. Getting away from unexplainable poetry and modernity related literature is a nice break every once in a while. It doesn't keep us from learning though.
Trying to get ahead of the class, I decided to start Shakespeare's "King Lear" earlier than the rest of the class. Before I left with the play in hand, I should've asked which part I should start at. Thinking I would be required to read the overview and introduction, I started there. The next day in class, however, I learned that I didn't need to read the part that I spent two hours on the night prior. Although it wasn't required, I'm satisfied with reading the preface. It gives me a little background on Shakespeare and what I should expect from the play. As I was reading, I got to thinking... We just read Barthe's The Death of the Author. We analyzed this theory for three days and came to the conclusion that Barthe was trying to say that the background of an author shouldn't be taken into consideration while reading a piece of literature. Since we haven't spent much time on Shakespeare in high school, I wouldn't have known Shakespeare's style of writing. So no offense to Barthe, but in order to understand such dense pieces of literature, it sometimes helps to know what to expect beforehand.

~KD

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