Angie Chan
5/17/2020
Professor Gorsch
Seminar 1
Seminar Self Reflection Essay
The seminar class was not in line with my expectations as I didn’t see the point of having it. In my view, I think the seminar class was just a waste of my time. All throughout the seminar class, at first, I didn’t really get to understand the logic behind the explanation of the text given, but however, I’ve learned not to just look at a book but to develop a clear comparison and synthesis by developing a clear comparison of the texts. Seminars are different from English because you spend a whole class period talking about the reading, and come up with different questions. In English, you focus on the reading, but eventually, after a while, you move on to the next topic.
The first author was Virginia Woolf. Woolf was considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors that focused on inspiring feminism. One of her best essays was called “A Room of One’s own”. The piece was published in 1929, and the piece was about a woman’s access to education, women building history with their writing, and their writing skills. Writing “A Room of One’s Own” was a way of talking about her struggles in life because women in her time weren’t viewed as writers, but women who took care of the chores around the house, made sure the children were cared for and educated. Woolf was also talking about how not all women had the “safe space” to write, and if a woman did have the “safe space,” it was either because the woman’s father had money and status. It’s quite interesting to me that Woolf chose the words “safe space.” When I imagine the words, it’s a place where one would hide from others, whether it may be from an intruder, family, or just to get away from everything else. In my opinion, when Woolf decided to use those words, the safe space she was referring to was the ability to have peace to write. According to Woolf, it was scarce, as a matter of fact, that women had the “safe space alone to use it to write. A part of Woolf’s essay stood out to me the most was, “The life of the average Elizabethan woman must be scattered about somewhere, could one collect it and make a book of it” (Woolf in Critical Strategies p.15). The way Woolf wrote the sentence intrigued me. Not only was it a subtle hint with how little history there was on women, but it felt like Woolf was leaving it up”, allowing the readers to interpret what she meant by “average Elizabethan woman.”
Virginia Woolf raises excellent points in her writing. “A room of One’s Own” raises fundamental questions that need answers. When I read through the book, I asked myself what was the main idea behind the title A room of one’s own? Woolf’s narrative in the book was the one that seeks to pursue personal liberty and cherish creativity and knowledge. I was also tempted to ask what encouragement Wolf gives her audience? To me, I thought her encouragement comes in the initial chapter of the book. Woolf encourages endeavoring intellectual and property freedom. She encourages women to aim for a room with a look on it and have enough money to pay for that house. By saying one’s room, she means independence from society entirely in the hands of men. She gets further to claim that freedom of the mind comes from having material possessions. Poetry is altogether reliant on the independence of the mind and that women have always been pushed into abject poverty for about 200 years or so. Another fundamental question that crossed my mind was whether the argument presented by Woolf still makes sense in the society we live in today. In my view, her writings always make sense even in the 21st Century since ancient thinking. She advocates for the urge of women to have their own money and other possessions and become distinguished writers. Woolf refers to William Shakespeare and states the possibility of a woman writer rising to Shakespeare’ ’s ranks. It is imperative as well to ask why Woolf thought that Elizabethan women incapable of writing poetry? According to Woolf, the Elizabethan women were born like ordinary people and grew just like their brothers and weren’t granted the perfect platform for advanced poetry. In this era, the Elizabethan women weren’t given the privilege of going to school to learn writing just like their brothers. Instead, her place was in the house where she ran errands.
Langston Hughes’s career in writing started early during the renaissance period in the 1920s up to the era of Black Arts in the 1960s. Hughes established himself as the most distinguished African American writer of his time “It’s not easy to know what is true for you or me at twenty-two, my age” (Theme for English B Langston Hughes pg.1 ). In the course of his writing career, he published various collections of poetry and novels. One of his outstanding writings was “Theme for English B”. The title of the poem left me with several questions; for instance, what was Hughes referring to when he came up with the terminology theme? Could this poem be making any reference to an idea for this collection of poems or referring to a Black English? A narrative distancing itself from the perimeters of the African American Society? Or was it related to the kind of English which is not regarded as being as first as English A? The title of the poem draws the reader’s attention to the central categorization of this writing. However, there is another question that the poem raises that is the most important; who are we, and how do we come to the realization of our identity? As Hughes suggests, these questions are simple to answer as the instructor in English B utilizes them in offhand assignments. Hughes says that we come to realize our true identity by creating personal autobiographical details and stating how one would like to spend time and state the things that they enjoy doing. This is evident in one of the students’ autobiographical information. One of the lines says that he is the only student in the class that is colored.“I am the only colored student in my class” (Critical Strategies and Great Questions: Theme for English B Langston Hughes. p 26). According to Hughes’s students, one personal identity is a result of racial identity and difference, as it is not its outcome. The concept that we become our character by the fact of who we are not, is a direct contradiction of the Romantic, Emersonian theory, which describes the self as being a real identity.
Art Spiegelman’s’ Maus was a comic publication that highlighted the History of the Holocaust. Maus achieved things that most comics had never gotten closer to attaining. The work of Spiegelman describes the comics’ tradition and illustrates various forms of the convention. The story depicted the use of animals and complemented speeches, voice captions, and other sounds that represent rifles. Spielgeman uses animals to enable readers to have their emotional distance to have better follow up of the events that unfolded following the Holocaust. I had a great experience reading Maus. The work is mind-blowing and after reading through his work, I felt that Spiegelman would have done Maus 3,4 and 5. By reading this work, I learned that comics could be used effectively to pass history and let people learn about things they can’t hear naturally. Concerning the animals used in Maus, a question that I had for my classmates was what they thought about the use of animals. Could the message have been represented in the same effectiveness if animals were not used?
Question 2
Art Spielgman had experienced a cold relationship for a while with his father and he decides to visit him and have a talk. He arrives at his father’s place sick and unhappy. He expresses his marriage frustrations about a woman called Mala. This comes after the death of his late wife who committed suicide .Art and his father had a cold relationship and Art decides to write a comic book about his father who was a Holocaust survivor. Although, Art and his father had never had any better relationship, the series of interviews draws them close together and the two begin to develop a closer attachment” You should be visting here more than often, don’t be such a stranger” (Spiegelman, Art. Maus: a survivor’s tale. P 159). Although Art has not really developed a warm relationship with his parents, through Maus he sends a signal that he loves them and that he forgives them for whatever had transpired. Although the forgiveness was much more painful, the feeling was honest and deep. Vladek had endured hard life in the ghettos and several concentration camps in Poland areas occupied by the Nazis. The comic narrates the experiences of the Nazis as they are taken to the detention camps. They start to witness numerous atrocities meted against the Jews in the camps. They are forced to battle starvation, forced labor and the murder of people in gas chambers .The Nazis chose to liquidate the Srodula ghetto where Vladek inhabit. Vladek lost his parents in the process as well as most of her siblings. They manage to hide from the Nazis successfully but they couldn’t hide any longer as they were turned over by a stranger to the Nazis. Vladek and Anja successfully escape death by hiding in the bunkers and homes that belonged to the merciful Polish Smugglers. As Spielgeman describes his father’s experiences of war, he develops a parallel explanation of his own life experiences. He describe s how emotional the interview with his father would end up .He describes how he nursed his father at a time he was sick. As the book nears the end, it emerges clearly that Vladek is coming closer to meeting his death. His heart and lungs become weaker and leave him dependant.
This seminar had several significant impacts on my behavior. First, I learned to think like a detective. At the beginning of the seminar, I was shy and didn’t want to say anything because, in high school, most of us are used to not saying much because we’re afraid of the comments students would make and how they would see us if our interpretations were wrong. Throughout the seminar class, I became more comfortable and would ask questions that most wouldn’t ask. I learned not to just ask simple questions like “Why did the author write this.” I learned to focus on a specific part of the text and re-read the book to see if there are any questions that pop up that I’d want to know more about. While doing that, I often wondered how they were feeling or what they were thinking about as they wrote the story.
Before my first seminar class, I didn’t really understand what it meant to analyze the readings we were given in class. I didn’t understand why I had to spend about an hour and a half talking about the questions I had after reading the assigned readings. I’ve read a lot of books in my life, but I never had to talk about questions about why the author meant, what I thought of the book, or even analyze something in the text. After a few classes and certain readings that piqued my interests more than others, I started realizing the importance of asking good questions, not just questions that anyone could easily answer. I learned to ask meaningful questions that leave other classmates thinking about their own answers. Throughout the class, I’ve learned to think as if I were the writer themselves, re-reading what I’ve written, and while re-reading what “I’ve written”, see if there were any questions that I had for class.
At the beginning of class, I struggled with understanding why I had to spend two to three hours trying to interpret what the writer meant, or what the writer was trying to convey to their readers. I also struggled with coming up with questions that the class could talk about because many of us had the same questions. To most people who’ve never taken a seminar class, just like when I first started, I thought it was a waste of time. It seemed like it was stupid, but as I read more books that were required in the class, I started realizing the importance of being able to ask good, meaningful questions. There’s more to the book than just reading it and being done with it.
Despite having learned more near the end of the semester, I’m glad that at a certain point, I started realizing the importance of seminar and how it could be useful with my future career and daily life. I learned in my first seminar class that there are no such things as stupid questions, only stupidity if you let a question that you have go unanswered or undebated. I think if I had taken the seminar class with more of an open mind, I would have learned more at the beginning of the semester rather than at the end of the semester. Overall, I’m glad I finally understood the importance of having a seminar class.
Works Cited
College , Saint Mary’s. “Critical Strategies and Great Questions Collegiate Seminar 001 4th Edition.” Moraga, CA, Moraga .
Hughes, Langston. “Theme for English B by Langston Hughes.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47880/theme-for-english-b.
Spiegelman, Art. Maus: a survivor’s tale: I: My father bleeds history, II: And here my troubles began. London: Penguin, 2003.
Woolf, Virginia. Critical Strategies and Great Questions . 4th ed., Saint Mary’s College,
2020.
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