Final Project: Blog
For almost every piece of literature we have read and studied in class, the authors’ backgrounds and personal histories have been available to us. I’m interested in reading about the various authors whose works we read in class– and connect how their personal lives have influenced what they write about, how they write, and when they write. I’ve come upon this particular focus because I’ve been reading about the authors for the recent readings, and I’ve noticed that many of the authors write about themes or characters or ideas based on their personal experiences. I’m also interested to see how some other professions (e.g. painter, scholar) of some of the authors have influenced their literary work as well, and vice versa.
Not only will I be reading the works of each author we have assigned, but also be researching and discovering more about the authors’ personal lives (through the small bios that are written before the works in the Norton series, as well as via the Internet). It’ll be interesting to try to find similar themes and ideas sprouting up in the works of authors from different time periods because of familiar experiences, as well as it’s be to really point out the drastic changes among all the authors.
This blog will be updated every week, at least twice on appropriately “wordy” posts (from each week’s current readings to past authors from the beginning of the semester), and at least once on “extra” posts such as links and images that will be shorter.
3 responses so far
That sounds like a great idea, particularly with stories that are more out there or hard to understand, I think taking into account the authors lives will help better interpret them.
I think looking into their other careers sounds like a great way to find insight into their inspiration. I know that Charles Baudelaire was also an art and literary critic – so maybe you’d be able to see how his work was influenced by other writers and artists at the time.
Good luck on your blog!
I think this idea has potential, and you will find some fascinating authors to work with in the coming weeks. I like how your research will allow you to bring some of your knowledge to our class discussions of the texts coming up, so I definitely encourage you to write about the forthcoming readings. What concerns me here is breadth. Is the focus too broad? I think you need to narrow it down from how authors draw from their own lives in their writing (a bit of an obvious claim, perhaps) to what kinds of personal biography slips in to the works were reading. Is it the authors mothers, for instance, that keep making some kind of appearance? What does is maternal influence mean? This is just a random example, but you need some very specific focus like this, I think, to start with, and then narrow it even more as your blog develops. You also might consider how knowing an authors biography can add to our reading experience vs the opinion that it adds little or nothing. Somewhere in your blog you could take up this debate.
I think your approach is good but you might want to focus or organize it more.
What I would think about when trying to organize this is maybe you can do a “timeline” blog entry. What I mean is that, from the authors we read (and we did read them by linearly, in terms of time), you can organize those authors into 100-year categories (or 50, whatever you decide). Then you can look at how the time period (what was going on) influence the authors’ lives, which might reflect onto their writing.
Try to list out the authors you want to do, maybe find something common among a few works, and try to piece together a theme.
Or maybe you want to throw in an argument in each (or every few) blog post to discuss how much of an influence did the authors’ personal lives really influence their writing (like, to what extent)?
Just throwing some ideas out there. I hope this helps you start thinking about the focus or direction of your blog.