Response to Course Materials

          Since the last "Response to Course Material" we have finished Ceremony, started to read Fifth Business, and we have talked about Jung's criticism.  Ceremony was a rather difficult book for me to understand.  I still can't fully grasp what Silko's intentions were with this novel.  I can't tell if she believed in taking in a mixture of Laguna and American culture or if she believed that white people and everything associated with them is "witchery" and is seen as corruption to her.  The annotations were rather difficult as well.  I was rather confused by the frequent flashback's Tayo has and the book was filled with complex symbolism.  I think the reason annotations are harder with novels than with the plays for me is because they contain less dialogue.  I think this book will be really helpful because I needed to work on interpreting novels in depth as well.  

          I really enjoyed the lecture on Jung’s criticism. I’ve never taken a psych class, but I found these ideas to be very interesting. I haven’t really noticed them while actually reading Fifth Business though, but I haven’t gotten very far so that is probably why. This novel is really interesting, but so far I don’t really understand the author’s purpose in writing it, assuming it wasn’t just for entertainment.  The format is different than most of the books that I have read in the past and I’m not really sure why. It’s written as a first person narrative and the whole thing is supposed to be for his boss to redeem himself after what was written about him in the school paper. One thing that I like is that the situation and the narrative voice tell a lot about who the character is. You get a good feel for his character by his actions alone, but by having him as the narrator as well, expressing thoughts and viewpoints, adds a lot to it. I think we are probably reading this book because it is so different from the other pieces we have read this year. It’s good that we’re being exposed to more kinds of literature because it will help us when we try to interpret passages on the AP test and in future courses.