A large portion of your grade comes from your blog posts, so make sure they have as much impact as possible on your fellow classmates and other readers of this blog. Here are the guidelines:
- Blog posts should be around 6-10 sentences.
- Posts should demonstrate clearly that you’ve grappled with the literature at hand.
- You must blog each day of our trip starting on Sunday evening or once for each day’s reading assignment.
- Posts can take one of two forms: you may either blog the night before on the piece(s) we’re covering the following day, or you may blog after the excursion that is associated with reading. Feel free to add any pictures or video you take during the excursion.
Consider the following suggestions for types of blog responses. These are merely suggestions; let the piece and your London experience of it guide your response:
- QuotationChoose a quotation from the work that you think is important. Give the page number and explain why the quotation is important.
- Apply Critical TheoryHow is this theory (feminism, postcolonialism, etc.) important to an understanding of reading?
- Theme/IssueIdentify a theme or issue and discuss how a work addresses it.
- QuestionsEven after carefully reading a work, you may have some questions. Your response should clearly show that you have struggled with understanding the work.
- Compare/ContrastYou should always think about how the works we read are similar to or different from one another in style, in content, and in the issues they deal with. Compare and contrast the reading with a work we read previously.
- Cultural/PoliticalHow does the reading reflect on or address the cultural/political conditions in which it is set? Is the work relevant to our cultural or political conditions here and now? In what way(s)?
- Peer ResponseYou are responsible for reading the responses of your peers. You may address their responses by disagreeing, furthering a point, or attempting to answer a question.
- AestheticsDiscuss authors’ use of specific literary techniques such point of view, characterization, metaphor, meter, rhyme, etc.
Today’s discussion helped me understand Western Culture’s style of writing. I enjoyed Ali’s realism and straightforwardness. The writing was very descriptive and written in a way to make you think. This style of writing relates to much of the African-American theorist styles that I have enjoyed reading. The writer shows how the characters struggle to find their identity in society. I can definitely relate to the main character Nazneen as she learned to adapt to unfamiliar and often discomforting places. As a young black woman in America, I am battling with double existence and the idea of having more than one social identity which makes it hard for me to develop a real sense of myself. I cannot fully “be” myself until I have found myself. Brick Lane revealed a lot about myself and allowed me to see that I am not the only one combating with double consciousness.
“While she wanted to look neither to her past nor her future, she lived exclusively in both. They had took different paths, but they had journeyed, so she realized, together.”
This quote defines everything that I am encountering on this journey to finding myself. I cannot look to my past nor my future. I just want to live in both and take the things that my past has taught me and use them to improve my future.
Walking down Brick Lane was nothing like I imagined. It was everything and so much more. The people on Brick Lane have a real sense of community and seem to be very family oriented. This was my first time seeing those markets and food shops set up like that. It was absolutely AWESOME!!!