Response to Course Material #4

            Recently in class we have finished Death of a Salesman, begun reading Hamlet, and continued doing tone exercises. I thought that Death of a Salesman was a really interesting play for us to read because despite obvious similarities to The American Dream, there were a lot more hidden themes with deeper meanings. For example, both plays exhibit obvious portrayals of consumerism but Miller’s writing takes it a step further. In his play, the consumerism seems to stem from a deeper need to be successful. Reading and analyzing Death of a Salesman has also caused me to look more into the motives of writers. Before taking this course, I would have assumed that the play was written to entertain an audience. Now, I can see that it was actually a way for the author to express his feelings toward society. I can now see themes in a lot of pieces that I have watched and read that actually have much deeper purposes than simply to entertain an audience.

            Although I know it will be a great piece of literature for us to discuss, I am finding Hamlet to be nearly impossible to comprehend. It’s like poetry for me; I can understand it if I spend enough time going through and trying to interpret it, but otherwise I am completely lost. Unfortunately at the rate at which we are doing our in-class reading, I have to rely entirely on Ms. Holmes’ summaries to follow along until I go through it again at home. Hopefully after doing the close reading I will get better at understanding Shakespeare’s writing.

            Recently I have found the tone exercises that we do in class to be very helpful. At first I didn’t really understand the purpose of them, but now I realize that being able to identify an author’s tone is a useful tool in analyzing literature. For example, once you discover how the author is intending the passage to come off, it becomes easier to interpret and to make connections. This has been really useful when doing our close reading blog posts.