Semester Reflection

Throughout this semester, a lot happened. Literature form all sources and genres came together into an overall study of allegorical meaning and the importance of literature, and everyone learned a as much as they could. The first piece of literature we all read was The Hero's Journey, an interview with Joseph Campbell conduced by Mr. Moyers. It was a short interview explaining Joseph's idea of The Hero's Circle, a cycle every person has to go through to accomplish their own personal goals. I liked this piece of literature the second most out of all of them, Lord of the Flies being the first. The next piece of literature was Johnathan Swift's A Modest Proposal. It was a style of satire, with which Swift is credited to have fostered. It was a sarcastic criticism proposal used to expose the horrible things happening to Ireland by the English. Seeing how convincing this was, and how much humor it held, it shows how effective satire can be, and how influential it can be to a group of undecided people. Swift was sarcastically putting forward the solution for the people of Ireland to simply eat their children, as to reduce labor and hardship on the mother and to solve the hunger problem that ravaged most of Ireland. He was literally trying to prove the point that Ireland was being starved to the point of almost resorting to cannibalism by the English. I enjoyed this piece, but I didn't connect to it on so much of a personal level, and found it hard to fully grasp the aspects of satire. The only full book we read, which is now in my top five favorite, is Sir William Golding's Lord of the Flies. This book changed my life. Granted, it did depress me a bit, but the whole meaning of it really got to me. I feel like I have a much better understanding of not only allegory, but human nature and myself also. The last piece we read, to help us tie them all together in our synthesis essay, was Solzhenitsyn's One Great Heart. It was a short speech on why he thought literature was important not only to ourselves, but to the world as a whole. I had never thought of literature as this, but after connecting it to what we are learning in history about the printing press and all the other innovations of the scientific revolution, I see it could possibly be the single most important invention of all time.  
All these pieces of literature have brought me to the conclusion that reading and writing is important, but why really? This is what we have to synthesize for our final, and now that I have a strong overview, I can prove this many ways. Literature, is the link of the world to itself. It bonds us all. It brings people of all nations together under the idea to serve us all and to improve our ever-expansion and movement. (NOT FINISHED)