Leo Lin, Period 1, 10/5/2023

Literacy and Learning

Leo Lin

Period 1

10/05/2023

Write about your thoughts/feelings regarding any of the fiction or nonfiction covered in class.

I have been intrigued with mythology ever since I touched upon the Percy Jackson series. It was a breath of fresh air to be exposed to the stories I found fascinating when I was younger again. In today’s class, we covered the origins of myths as well as various Greek writers. Mythology was created to explain the unknown such as Zeus raining down thunderbolts, Poseidon creating earthquakes, or even what happens after you die. The Greek writer I researched today is “Aeschylus”. He is known as the father of tragedies. Before him, plays would have one character interacting with a chorus, but he introduced a second role into these plays creating dialogue. He is most known for his story “Prometheus Unbound” which is about a titan who sacrificed himself to give humanity knowledge and fire. It’s really interesting to learn about how mythology started and how the basis for many plays and shows all stemmed from one person.

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

This class introduced me to new ways of looking at texts or any story through critical theories. I was able to go deeper into the text and learn more about the characters than if I had just read it straightforwardly. For our project, I analyzed different versions of “Cinderella” such as “Yeh Hsien” and “Donkeyskin”. In Donkeyskin the king wanted to marry his daughter. Reading through this I would think that it’s weird and out of the ordinary, what would drive a king to lust after his daughter? But reading it through a psychoanalytical lens I was able to understand more about the king’s situation. The story starts with the King’s wife dying. Before attempting to remarry the King grieved for months. Acute grief is referred to as the symptoms experienced within the first few months of losing a loved one. Prolonged grief can alter our brains, impairing basic functions such as memory and cognition, which is our ability to think straight. There is so much more to the characters we read about and applying the critical theories helped me comprehend the text better.

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

Learning about critical theories helped me in my other classes. In my biology class, we were learning about ethics in human experiments. We covered many famous cases such as the Milgram experiment, where it was concluded that humans are innately cruel and that cruelty is brought out by pressure from authority figures, and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study where black men were left to succumb to the effects of Syphilis for the “betterment of humanity”. Analyzing these cases through a psychoanalytical lens unravels why the researchers went so far and the lengths they took to complete the experiments. The researchers in the Tuskegee study genuinely wanted to do good for humanity by understanding the disease more, however, their methods may not be so noble. They secured their subjects through manipulation, the subjects were minorities and they could not refuse the “benefits” promised by the researchers such as meals, transportation, and burial stipends. They prevented their subjects from getting treated even though there was a cure because it was not known what syphilis could do to a human back then. While looking at these cases we may think that these researchers were cruel, but by looking at it more in depth, we get a new perspective.