Need a Rewrite on Introduction to Fiction homework, got to be 250 words each

Why Keep a Reading Journal

Your reading journal will be a place to try out and explore ideas concerning our readings, lectures, and discussions without worrying too much about being evaluated. The point of the journal is to develop a regular, habitual practice of figuring out what you think of our course materials. If you add to your journal consistently and regularly, you’ll find that you will deepen your thinking and enhance your ability to make connections between different texts and ideas, and between the readings and your own life. By writing regularly in your journal you will also have a wealth of material and ideas to draw from when responding to discussions and preparing for essays.

Requirements

You will make at least one entry for each week, making sure to refer to every reading assigned that week. Your entry should be dated and given some sort of title or label. While you do not have to write extensively about each individual reading or author in the set, you should at least make some quick notes about main topics/themes for each one so you can remember them later. You must address all the readings (to some degree) in order to get full credit. The bulk of your journal entry should engage with the week’s reading in some way. Usually, you can use the weekly theme or lecture as a starting point, but if something really jumps out at you, then you should explore it!

What an Entry Should Look Like

Feel free to write in the first person (“I think…I don’t understand…I saw a similarity…”). Your journal response might include your general reactions to the literary work, questions you have about it, connections to topics from class discussions, or revisions to your earlier thinking after having the benefit of additional time for reflection.

Possible specific approaches include looking at a passage, episode, or even single sentence from the reading that puzzles, moves, or upsets you—it’s tempting to skate past those moments, but instead slow down and focus on them; considering the significance or motivations of a character from one of the stories that we read; comparing different readings to each other; debating with me or a fellow student about an idea from discussion. I encourage you to write about things that challenge and push you. You can also connect the course material to your own life experience – just remember that the focus should be on the text.

It’s okay to think about how you felt reading a particular text or whether you enjoyed it or not. Just make sure always then to ask yourself, why? What is important is why you found a particular text appealing or unappealing, why you had a particular emotional reaction, why you agreed or disagreed with particular aspects of a text. Responding to these second level questions can refine your thinking about literature, your knowledge of yourself, and your values.

Grading

Your journal entry is due at midnight on Tuesday for each unit, and each entry is worth 15 points. In evaluating your journals, I will not be grading your grammar, nor will I be critiquing your ideas. Rather, I will be looking for these things:

Length of entries: Are the entries at least 250 words or longer and do they include the date and a title or label?

Appropriateness and vitality of entries: Are the entries relevant to the course and written clearly? Do the entries demonstrate serious efforts to come to terms with ideas from the weekly readings?

It may be tempting to see assignments such as this course reading journal—assignments that an instructor won’t be grading as formally as an essay or exam—as less important. Nothing could be further from the truth with this assignment. Your enjoyment and understanding of our readings, as well as your improvement in literary analysis, in writing, and in critical thinking, will be a direct result of the time you put into this assignment.

Don Quixote

16 June 2020 Miguel de Cervantes- Don Quixote: Chapter 1 I’ve never read Don Quixote however I am aware of the story and know many references to it. Shamefully I have never read it in its entirety. The first chapter is introducing our protagonist, Don Quixote. The narrator of the story sets the tone of a tale that might be true or might not and goes back and forth on what may or may not have happened. Quixote reads a lot and has a strong imagination. He begins to believe he can be a great knight as he is in one of the stories he reads. Every knight needs a princess to “call his lady!” thus he creates Dulcinea who is based off a farm girl who had once been in love with. My toddler watched “Puss in Boots” the cartoon and I now see connections between Puss’s character and that of Don Quixote. Puss’s “lady” is also named Dulcinea. The language is a bit hard for me to follow and I will spend some more time reading this tomorrow.

Kate Chopin- Desiree’s Baby

The protagonist in the story if Desiree. She is the adoptive child of Madame and Monsieur

Valmonde. The setting is that of the pre-civil war south, Louisiana to be specific. Clear tones of

classism, racism and sexism can be seen through-out the piece. Classism is seen when Desiree’s

adoptive father concerned that Armand might not want Desiree since they did not know her

“origin”. Sexism example includes that Armand was the “proudest father in the parish” due to the

child being a boy to “bare his name”. Racism is riddled in the writing in many ways. Armand

disapproves once he realizes the baby is biracial and no longer loves her after she brought shame

to his name. The irony in the end is that Armand is discovers that he is biracial himself and has

shunned his wife and child for this very same reason which led to their death. I find myself

uncomfortable as I read some of the language used in the short. I have to remind myself that it is

part of time period and that it is pointing out the terribleness of the time.