LITR 5734: Colonial & Postcolonial Literature

Sample Student Final Exams 2008

Essay 1: Describe and evaluate your learning experience or learning curve (Objective 3 + others)

Matt Richards

Moving away from Bias and Towards Understanding [1^st half]

            When I started this class I wasn’t sure what I was getting into, but now that it is over I find that my views that I came into the class with have been changed.  I believe that the change is for the better because unlike most of my fellow Americans I now see the other person’s side of the story.  I used to read novels and focus on what the story was about with out looking into the issues that were being addressed.  I find that doing this avoids real issues and helps perpetuate that American view of my culture and ideas are the most important and everything else is not important.  The main concept that I learned in this course is Americans tend to be uncomfortable when it comes to dealing with cultural ideas such as racism, religion, and social class.

            Mary Brooks, in her 2005 final exam Colonial and Postcolonial Identity, says, “To understand another culture one must first acknowledge the struggles of others.  It is this aspect of postcolonial literature that as an American and a colonial power one finds difficult.  As Americans, hundreds of years past our colonial prime, the idea of struggling for a postcolonial identity is incomprehensible.”  That is the attitude that I had when I started this class.  I thought that we would read some novels and see how other cultures lived.  I had no idea that I would be able to close the gap between the perception of myself and others.  I had a bias of that there is no way I am like some of these people in these other cultures, but the more novels we read the more I began to see that maybe to fully understand American culture it is necessary to look at the cultures of others.  The problem for me was shaking the bias that other cultures and other people’s views are not important.

            I was able to do this because after reading these novels, I saw that other cultures could teach us about ourselves.  I think that it is important to understand the cultures of others as Americans because the country is made up of many different people from many different cultural backgrounds.  If we focus only on ourselves we will miss the lessons and issues that are going on.  Another benefit to reading these novels is that we will be able to understand other people much better and will be able to get along as a country that is part of the world not the isolationist super power that we appear to be. . . .