Response to Course Material (Oct. 7)

So far, this class has been fairly challenging, though it isn't (yet) as much of an overload of material as I had previously expected. The number of terms to remember is horrendous, but with two classes dedicated to making students memorize loads of terms, I'm getting accustomed to it rather quickly.

Things are looking up in this class. As I stated in my post on poetry study goals, I have to use what I learn, otherwise I'll quickly forget it. It has barely been a month since school started and we are already looking for applications of what we have learned within texts, which my brain detects as an acceptable use of information, resulting in proper storage of the material.

DIDLS was a new concept for me. It had never occurred to me that literary techniques could be summed up in a single acronym, so I had always thought literary techniques were complicated and annoying; but with just five letters, techniques have been made manageable. It almost makes me want to go back and rewrite a few essays where I could have used DIDLS to make things easier for me. Almost.

After some thought, I have realized that many comedies have an elements of "theater of the absurd" in them. Any time you come across a running gag, it is a reflection on how theater of the absurd has affected modern literature. Humans are so circular that they can laugh at the same thing multiple times. It's all so pointless, yet we laugh. Additionally, some jokes are intended to make you think, "What in the heck of a world did I just watch?" The best example I've seen of this phenomenon is the video, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The entire movie is a horrific mess of running gags like skipping 3 and 4 while counting, riding invisible horses, airspeed velocities of unladen swallows, etc. and the viewer has no idea what will happen next because it is all nonsense. In the end, the knights have made a massive circle back to the French castle where they started, only to be taken away by the police before they begin their invasion. The whole thing turns out to be pointless and, to put it simply, absurd.
After the timeline activity, I started thinking about the trends we noticed. Literature has, over time, moved from discussing people as a group under the rule of gods to smaller and smaller institutions until it becomes "all about me." The human race has decided life is short and pointless, so while we're here, we should do anything we can to benefit ourselves. Gods, monarchs, and upper-class groups have fallen out of favor because, in order to provide for the lower classes, they require large contributions in return--something individuals don't like to do if they feel they are the center of the universe. Instead of a large community, the human race has split into selfish individuals, desperate to grab all the personal gain possible before they die. We as humans have become exceedingly like animals, without a sense of morality because we are so self-centered we no longer care about each other.

There was so much more we learned, but these were the ones I wasn't already familiar with or hadn't thought about much in the past. This has been a rather interesting semester so far, and, honestly, I'm interested to see what things will interest me in the near future as well.