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I am not sure how appropriate The Sorrows of an American was for the final text of this course. I do like the book and I think it was a good contrast from more dense readings we had throughout the semester, but I do not know if it really was the best book to close with in understanding evolution and its literary aspects. I think the problem I have is that I feel that every contemporary novel could provide an evolutionary interpretation and one could definitely find some link to evolution in almost any novel. It seems arbitrary to have chosen a novel based on the gender of the author being female because she wrote through a male perspective. How is this different from reading a male author? Are we looking at this in an evolutionary perspective? I guess one can say that this novel is a good example of evolutionary fiction since we have a female writing as the opposite gender, something one does not find authors doing often or ever. Is this one reason for choosing it? Another person in the class talked about how this book has no chapters. Could this another example for it being evolutionary fiction? Although these reasons may be true and there are probably many more reasons, are these really the best reasons for choosing the book as the final example of evolutionary fiction?

I feel like because we are in a class about the evolution of stories, we can be given almost any book and we will be able to interpret it as evolutionary fiction. Because of the fact we already know this a class about evolution, I feel that our brains will be able to mold anything so that it may be linked to evolution. Professor Grobstein said on Thursday that Moby Dick was another choice for the final text. Although I have never read Moby Dick, I know about it and have a good sense that it is very different from Hustvedt's book. I think it is interesting because if have been assigned Moby Dick instead, we would still have been able to find evolutionary aspects in it. I think there is no one best, final text for the course because any book would suffice. I think what is important to note is that the course itself is the evolutionary example. Because of all the choices of books students can be given to read, the course is what will evolve throughout the years and be the dominant example.