Blog # 6

Today in class we watched part of the film The Yellow Wallpaper.  I found this film very interesting.  I have never read or even heard of the story, so I was a little lost during parts of the movie.  From what I understood, a family decides to move into a very nice house that has been uninhabited for quite some time. Everything seems like it is going to be great except the wife whose name is Charlotte, seems to have a bad feeling about everything.  Charlotte keeps having metal breakdowns, mostly due to her imagination and the yellow wall paper in her room.  She seems to find something creepy about the wall paper but still continues to write in the room.  We were unable to finish the film but we did see that Charlotte and her husband's marriage was hitting a rough patch.

Blog #5

So far this week, we have been reading Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto.   For today, we had to read about the first half of the book.  I found the reading confusing for the most part, and for some reason parts of this book reminded me of A Tale of Two Cities.  I think that was because of the struggle of the lower classes to survive and the higher classes lived very easily.  Today in class we discussed the ideas that Marx was trying to get across in his book.  Marx believed that profit was a good thing, but not in large quantities. He didn't like that the lower classes were getting payed very little while the upper class had a profit surplus.    We also discussed in class the way that feudalism worked and how the classes changed from feudalism to capitalism.  After today's class, I hope that the reading will not be as confusing.

Week #4

This week we have been focusing on Frankenstein.  Today in class we watched part of the movie.  I thought watching the movie gave everyone a good visual of what is going on in the story.  I must admit that I have always imagined the creature to be not quite as ugly.  I don't know why this is but I think its because I usually take the creature's side.  I do agree with the creature when he says that he is like Adam but he had done nothing wrong.  Victor created him and then turned from him before he had even been alive for a few days.  I think the creature would have been able to over come that however if the family he had been watching had accepted him.  If they had accepted him and given him a chance to explain himself, the book would have turned out very differently.  This book does not have a happy ending really so we know that something has to happen that cannot be fixed.  I am looking forward to finishing the book, but I also wish we could have spent a little more time on Frankenstein.

Blog #3

This week was a short week so we were only able to have class twice.  (well technically we really only had class once because Professor Tucker let us out of class after only 5 minutes on Wednesday) This week we read two more romantic poems and started reading Frankenstein.  Everything we read this week I read last year for my English class.  It was interesting to learn about what we read in greater detail and to hear Professor Tucker's opinions and thoughts concerning the literature.  When I read Frankenstein this week, I was surprised by how much I remembered from when I read it last year.  I was also surprised that I learned a lot about the beginning of the book than I did from my English teacher last year.  I'm looking forward to finishing Frankenstein this week and finding out what else I missed when I read it last year.

Humanities Blog #2

Last night, I read the poem by William Wordsworth called "Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey". I found that it was hard to follow at times, mostly because he often switched between the past, present, and future.  On my own, I managed to get the general idea of the poem.  During class, I realized how much I didn't pick up on while reading the poem.  I missed many of the details such as the part about the river and the part that described how innocent he was when he first visited the Abbey.