Literary Kinds

 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/world/asia/13hanhan.html?pagewanted=2&ref=global-home

This is a really interesting article about a famous Chinese blogger, his blog, and censorship.  I think it's worth reading, and it goes with what we did during the first half of the semester.

I came into Literary Kinds with a cynical view of the internet.  I loved it and spent a lot of my time on it, but I mostly saw it as my time-waster.  I also didn't see too much benefit to blogging as I thought it was simply self-centered.  This class has really helped me to understand the full potential of information-sharing on the web, and now I also see how it can be used in the academic world.

 I think Literary Kinds has been a great class so far.  Some of the highlights have been the visitors, and I especially enjoyed Paul Grobstein's visit.  I love that we decided as a class what to study for the rest of the semester, and I think that's a method that professors should use more often-that way, students might be more excited about their work because they are the ones who chose what to study.  All in all, this has been a great class, and I'm looking forward to the rest of it.

Literary Kinds has brought with it myriad new ideas in a new (for me at least) format--blogging.  My high school career was marked by very little technology use, so the transition to this class was a bit abrupt.  However, I have grown to love our online discussion and hope that it has proven useful to those outside of our class as well--after all, knowledge and ideas are not things that are supposed to be limited to just one room or one group of people when they could be spread and put to good use.  I also find the format of Serendip very easy to use, especially for those like myself who have never blogged or posted on a group forum before.  And even though the recent process of building our "sy

So far I have found this class to be highly engaging, unusual, and flexible. I especially appreciate the online component of the class, as it has given me a  platform to develop my thoughts and see how they evolve, a process often lost when I do not have such an open space in which to think and wonder. I initially struggled with the informality of the class discussions, but at this point I would not suggest a restructuring of class discussion as I find I am pushing myself to adapt to the openness of the class and in the process am growing in unexpected ways.

 Anne mentioned at the beginning of class that last week we got stuck talking about specific works we might read for the rest of the semester, so today we broke up into small groups again and discussed possibilities for the rest of the semester's syllabus.  I was in a group with jrf, rachelr, and aseidman.  The four of us discussed the possibility of focusing on parody through mystery.  At the beginning of class, Anne had also mentioned what a brilliant idea she thought focusing on parody would be, and two groups in addition to ours brought up the idea of parody as well in their proposed syllabi.  The fourth group was interested in focusing on the idea of the self as viewed through identity, memory, and reality.

  In class I was personally struck by the suggestion of Anne Dalke to follow parodies of genres. Not only does it sound interesting, but, in studying parodies I feel that one can better understand the "parodied."