This week in AP Lit class, we watched the play King Lear, and it was very interesting. Shakespeare always keeps it exciting and sad with all of the crazy struggles that go on in his pieces. King Lear was interesting to watch because it showed the struggle for power and how far some people will go for it. That was interesting to me because it pertained well to my SSR project for this trimester. This trimester, my SSR project has the theme of success and how far some people go to achieve when perhaps they don't realize what they lose in that race, and how much it can affect the rest of their life. You may be rich, but if nobody loves you for anything other than your money, than does it really matter? Are you really "rich"? It would seem that you are rather poor. I think there's a balance between success and people. There are always going to be those friends that aren't going to be by your side when you start to get successful, or they head the other direction. The important thing is to hold on to the friends that are true friends and want you to be successful.
The story of King Lear is really just quite sickening. The King starts this love game between his three daughters; whoever can say they love him the most can inherit his fortune. The two older daughters are super greedy and try really hard to best one another. The third daughter is above this, and finds it stupid. She is then banished by the King. The third and youngest daughter is probably the only pure and good character. To me, the saddest part of the play is when you figure out that the youngest daughter dies because she is the only good character besides perhaps Edgar or Gloucester. The story reflects on this greed between sisters, and a character named Edmond's attempts to be a player and manipulate both of them for their money. Edmond is very diabolical in his plans and his plans result in many people, including his father, being killed because of it.
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This week in AP Lit class, we went over our usual poem, plus one. We went over two poems like last week, and we are going to compare them in writing. I missed a day this week, so I'm not entirely clear on what happened in one of the poems. I know that both are about how the speaker has a love, but she is not perfect. The object of their affection has flaws that they are very aware of. They know the girl they love isn't perfect to anyone else's eyes, perhaps they aren't even perfect in their eyes. The only thing that is true is that they love them even with these in consideration. I think this goes to show that love is a very strong emotion and can take over other negative things that could be associated with a relationship. It doesn't have to be perfect because the emotion is so strong. Your love doesn't have to be a model that has everything you want and more. They can be an average person as long as love is present.
This week we went over how to grade an essay. This is a valuable skill to possess when writing because if you can look at an essay and see that it is a nine, it makes it much easier to write a nine. When trying to learn how to do something, it certainly helps to be able to do it backwards. Learning the reverse way to do things makes you much more familiar with them and able to do them because of it. Not only that, but this skill will carry over to my college years and help me write coherent essays for my professors to grade. This is already giving me a leg up on the competition for when I get to college. Overall, I think the main point of what I learned this week is that not everything goes as planned and that sometimes you have to just go with the flow. I'm not entirely sure how I came up with this but that's how I'm feeling at the moment. This past week, we learned about the classic plays of Macbeth and King Lear, and how we can tie certain elements in with them. We were assigned a group and were given a project where we had to analyze certain aspects in the story and make comparisons and find evidence for a critical theory inside of the stories. My group decided to do the aspect of psychology and how it relates to characters in the stories. To me, psychology is really easy to relate to Shakespearean literature because the characters all have lots of things going through their minds and have pretty straightforward motives. I hope it doesn't turn into making a lot of assumptions, I feel like that could be one downfall of using psychology. It can sometimes appear subjective and a little bit random, but I hope it doesn't. I feel like if we do it right we can make it completely accurate and prevent it from appearing subjective.
This week we read two poems that I thought were pretty interesting: Ozymandias and Sonnet 146 (Poor soul. the centre of my sinful earth). To me, these poems had quite a bit in common because it focused on the fact that we focus too much on what we have in terms of money and power, rather than focusing on our souls. We have this along with a body that doesn't last forever, but a soul that does. Our soul is eternal while our bodies are temporary. I think it's interesting to think about, but perhaps an atheist wouldn't find it very interesting because it talks about how we should focus on the things they don't believe in. Although I also think it still has meaning because you shouldn't overvalue your power or the amount of possessions you have because once you die, none of those things matter and you've still only got your soul (or nothing). |