Jenny Cheung, PD2, 9/30/20, Day A

 Write about your thoughts regarding the most current reading.

    Our most current reading was the myth of Icarus and Daedalus. Any current teenager worth their salt probably knows the story from Percy Jackson in The Battle of the Labyrinth as Daedalus was a prominent character who was technically neither living nor dead. It was interesting to read the original story and compare it with my prior knowledge because of the contrast between the different tones and storytelling. Rick Riordan had included some of the original myth and spun a new tale with the more supernatural aspects and giving a new identity to Daedalus. The original myth was very short as it strove to tell a moral that you shouldn’t indulge in hubris (a word created by ancient Greeks that was a flaw that caused the downfall of many heroes; meaning excessive pride) or greedy. Depending on how you look at the myth, Icarus’s death could be the cause of many factors. Since he was trapped, he spread his wings, literally, and did not heed his father’s warnings to not fly too high. It could be that because he was simply too curious of the outside world, the new experience of flying was too exhilarating and he forgot to watch himself, or did not think he would fall because of his faith in his father. 

Reflect on any new information you have learned in English class by considering how that learning influences your critical perception.

    Learning about the critical theory itself has really opened my eyes to critical perception itself. While I knew that people criticized many classical works like fairy tales or Shakespeare’s works, I never knew that there was a movement of looking at these stories through different lenses like feminism, moral criticism, Marxist criticism, etc. These movements have existed for decades also means that scholars have always been looking at stories at different perspectives to challenge society’s perceptions of classic tales. We also learned about archetypes and axes of transformation to be able to recognize stories that share similarities with plot or characters that share similar traits. Through this new information, it influences how I read stories now because I can now recognize archetypes with the knowledge that through deconstruction, characters or new stories have been influenced by old stories directly or indirectly, showing how influential they are to society. 

How is what you’re learning applied to any other classes/the world around you?

    The critical theory is used to criticize literature but it can also teach us about how to deconstruct any piece of media and look at it objectively. Right now, there is a lot of discourse relating to politics and there are many articles and news shows that are documenting events about the election. Each of these are narrated or written by humans and although some try to be as objective as possible, humans have biases and those biases may influence how the information is conveyed. We also learn how to critisize versus being critical which is extremely important because through criticism, we address an author's bias but through being critical, we remove our own biases and the author's biases as well. By using critical theory, we learn how to look at them objectively and how to overlook bias to correctly inform ourselves.