Reflective Tag: What did I learn about literary texts while writing this assignment? When in the process did I gain that new insight? What new facts or new questions about American culture did I encounter in the project? When? How?
This assignment taught me that the goal is to be ultra specific. Rather than focusing on an entire text, focus on a scene from a text to be used in an analysis. Literary texts can have multiple themes and all of those themes are open to multiple forms of interpretation, therefore focusing on one specific scene can already prove to be difficult enough. Though MAJ Heard warned us of this, I did not appreciate the importance of honing in my focus on one scene until I revised this analysis simply because I had ‘too many things going on’ for one paper. With regards to American culture, I think this text is a wonderful display of the ‘rough and tough’, frontiersman, liberty or death attitude that Americans like to portray. What stands out about this text? That attitude is coming from a young woman, highly irregular for the time period. Maybe young women have been fighting for rights and equality longer than I realized; that must be the case, because why else would Chopin chose to write in such a manner?