Brain Dump

At the beginning of the year, we started out with some tough reading. We read excerpts of the Debating the Canon. I have never read something quite that challenging before in my life. It took us days to read because of constant analysis that we did in order to understand what was going on. A canon a collection of books that is necessary to be read in order to gain a full understanding of the topic at hand. Our entire year so far has been spent reading canonical books from British literature, in order to help us gain a solid understanding of what British literature really is.

            The first book that we read was the dystopian novel, 1984 by George Orwell. Orwell was writing in 1948 during the aftermath of World War II. Europe during this time was in shambles. Country borders were being re-drawn, and the entire place was in poverty. In this novel he shows us the value of being mindful and how important language really is. In the novel, there were two main concepts that I applied to real life. There was Newspeak, where they basically took all the meaning out of words. They did this in order to remove all thought from everything, which leads to the next concept of “thoughtcrime”. Thoughtcrime is the idea of all thought contrary to exactly what the Party wanted you to think being illegal.  And this was enforced by the party being able read you thoughts through telescreens. The reason that they had newspeak was to remove all thought from speaking and basically living in order to make thoughtcrime impossible. I related this all to real life through connecting this to what the status of freedom of speech in America is like and sort of talking about it in relation to the conditions described in 1984 through a project. From here we moved to the Medieval Ages.

            The Medieval ages were a mess. It was a dangerous time full of monotony and repetition. People lived under the feudal system where there was a king, but he did not directly rule the people. They ruled the lords, the lords ruled people that ruled people that ruled them. The literature back then was broken up into a few categories. There were no novels however. In the Canterbury tales it provides the most accurate description of life in the late middle ages in a piece out of that time. Many stories were told orally therefore the written version sounds a little odd. Life was dangerous and it was risky to travel. But people found things to do. They told stories that were very entertaining to them.