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Concretely, I feel like I have learned much more about what Darwin actually meant by evolution, and I have a better idea of how his ideas have been appropriated (for better or worse) by others. I would have liked to learn more about how Social Darwinism actually came about and whether or not Darwin might have agreed with this. For me, the small group discussions are more useful than the large group discussions; the class is so big that I sometimes feel lost during Tuesday’s class, like we are covering a lot of different topics very quickly. I do however appreciate Professor Grobstein’s interventions in explaining aspects of evolution that we may or may not be entirely understanding.

While at first I didn’t really understand the idea of a webpaper (I have never written one before), I now see how it opens up more possibilities and allows the reader to interact more with the paper, which is something I find really compelling. I still need to work on making my papers contextualized for a wider audience and making sure that people outside of our class could understand them too.

I am really looking forward to moving more directly into the literary aspect of this course, and into thinking about literature evolutionarily. I’m hoping that we’ll explore why certain texts seem to stick around while other fade away and the importance of specific genres and mediums as the might have changed over time.