LITR 4231 Early American Literature 2012 Student Midterm Samples 3. Web Highlights: Review at least 3 posts from course website's Model Assignments (4-6 paragraphs)

Jill Norris

How Understanding the Past Can Lead to a Brighter Future

As a future teacher it is important for me to understand that no two people will interpret the same piece of literature in the same way. Actually, this is one of the things that I am most looking forward to in my future career. I love reading a piece of literature and discovering how others feel about it and find out what they took away from the text, because I know that the experience they had with the material is going to be completely different from my own. Getting a different point of view on a piece of literature has always been fascinating to me, which is why I particularly enjoyed this part of the midterm. All of the model assignments that I read offer a different perspective on a similar topic, and that is the importance of origins.
          The first essay that I chose to review is Shae Turner's Origin and Creation Stories. I really enjoyed Shae's essay because it presents an interesting comparison regarding Genesis and the Iroquois' creation stories. She discusses how very similar these stories are to each other which is something that I honestly think I should have picked up on but unfortunately did not. For example, these stories all share a common element in which they both contain a tree that plays a major role in the creation of life. Also, in these stories there are always two brothers: one who symbolizes goodness and the other that symbolizes evil. After analyzing these similarities in greater detail, Shae argues that "the creation stories can be seen as one story that was dissected and each culture implemented their own revisions and beliefs within it, as they proved to be interconnected with meanings." I think that Shae makes a great point and I think that it is safe to say that these stories are indeed the same, but have been altered to suit the culture and beliefs of the people who hold them.
          In Alana Nesteruk's research post Christopher Columbus: Life and Voyages she states that "Columbus and the discovery of America are very important to Early American Literature as well as to every American’s own personal bank of knowledge." I also believe that it is important for Americans to know the true story of Christopher Columbus and his discovery, which is why I was immediately drawn to her article. Alana's post is a very informative piece on the life of Christopher Columbus that covers everything from his birth in Genoa, Italy, to the four expeditions that garnered him so much fame and glory, to his eventual death in Spain at the age of fifty-five. One thing about her article particularly stuck out for me, and that is the part in which she states that a man named Leif Ericsson may have been the first man to settle in what would later become America in approximately 1000 A.D.. But the truth of the matter is not about who discovered America, it is about what they did with their discovery. It wasn't until Columbus returned to Spain with news of this "new" country that anybody took interest in the area. So even though many others (Vikings, Chinese, Leif Ericsson) may have technically discovered America first, Columbus was the one who declared it a place worth exploring.
          Finally, Bethany Ellis's midterm essay Our Origin Stories Matter discusses the works of Columbus, Jonathan Edwards, and Thomas Jefferson. In her essay, she argues that these three texts and the events that occurred within them "set the foundation for the America we live in today." I believe that this is true, as I have already stated previously in this midterm, because they each show a landmark turning point in this country's history and how the people within it reacted to the change. She talks about how Columbus, Edwards, and Jefferson each played a major role in the creation of modern day America and believed that "origin stories matter because they guide us in our interpretation of what America should be and why She is the nation She is today". One thing that I really appreciated about Bethany's essay is that she is so passionate about learning about the past and applying it to her life now. She realizes that we learn from the past and mistakes that have been made, and if we do not understand the past, then it is impossible to learn from it.
          I found all three of these essays to be extremely informative. They really opened my eyes to other people's perspective on the same literature that I read for this class and even though I agreed with a lot of what was written in these essays, each one taught me something that I had not known before. This is why literature is important. I don't mean just published literature from renowned authors, but literature from our peers as well. Similar to what Bethany said in her article that we learn from the mistakes of our past, we also learn from the thoughts and experiences of others. Reading these essays has reaffirmed what you have already explained to us in class and that is that text can be interpreted in more than one way and can often times interconnect with other text in the most obscure and profound ways.