it's the end

I have really enjoyed the personal reflection aspects of this class and having an opportunity to sort of talk about success at CMU and what it means to succeed here and what it should mean to succeed here in a more open and revealing way. I think that I've learned a good deal about what I want and need to get out of my own personal experience here and I think that being in this class has helped me to try and strive more towards that personal picture of what my life here should be like rather than accepting the typical picture of Carnegie Mellon success, working until you can't work anymore.

That being said I am taking some academic sort of traditional knowledge out of this course as well, although I have learned a lot about myself over this past semester through this class I have also discovered some interesting aspects of 19th century literature. One thing that I hadn't quite understood about American literature during this time period was the sheer variety of genres available. For some reason I mostly thought of pamphlets, fliers, treatises and poetry as representing this century and not novels and short stories. When thinking of the 19th century as an era in American literature I tended to think of documents that surrounded major historical events like the Civil War rather than books that would have been read for pleasure. I was pleasantly surprised then to find myself reading Little Women, and just as surprised, if not quite as pleasantly, to discover Wide Wide World.

One thing that I would have liked from this class, and that maybe wasn't possible because of time or other constraints, would have been more information about the specific moment in time that received these works in the 19th century. Some of the author biographies, like Charlotte Perkins Gilman's especially, did a good job with this, but while we covered the general makeup of the society during the 19th century I sort of would have liked more specific information about the historical events surrounding each book, which might have lent more weight to how the books reflect transformative moments in the century.

Overall I think that the class was pretty cohesive and engaging. I enjoyed class discussions and especially the somewhat unconventional assignments, and found the class to be somewhat refreshing rather than stressful.