A Semester in Review

This was a very great class for me this semester. With my other classes like organic chemistry and ecology, i could always come to this class with my mind at ease. I learnt a lot from all the books we read. Before coming to this class, i didn't know anything about Greek tragedy so it was fun to read the plays like Clytemnestra, Agamemnon, Medea. Those were the highlights of this class for me. I also learnt a few things about Indian literature from Ramayana and the last texts we read, the suffi poetry.
Posting on the blog is fun too and it helps to think about the texts read in class more deeply.
I took a different COLI class last semester "Literature and Psychology" and i had the best time just like i did in this class. I think i like comparative literature and i am thinking seriously about making it my minor.
All in all this class was awesome!

Presentation

In preparing for my presentation this week, i thought not only about books/stories that i read and liked but literary texts that would impact my class in a great way and something they would enjoy reading. While i have read some of the texts in my syllabus, some of the others i have not read but hope to read very soon.
My syllabus also follows a flow in time from like history texts to modern ones. I started with Aristophanes, Lysistrata then "Twelfth Night" by Shakespeare, Beowulf, Dante Inferno, Some verses of the New Testamest, Chinau Achebe "Things Fall Apart", Wole Soyinka "Death and the Kings Horseman", and last but not the least Haruki Murakami "Norwegian Wood."
My best part of this syllabus is the modern part- the last three books-because they are not only fun to read but teach a lot of things. Norwegian wood is my favorite which i read my first semester freshman year and fell in love with. I feel like its a book one will always remember after reading.

Lauretta Oseni

I am trying to make up my posts so i am going to talk about my presentation and how i am preparing for it.
I like that we were given the freedom to pick any texts we liked in the beginning but as i kept doing my research and finding the texts i wanted to use, it then became a problem because there are so many texts i like and i want to put all of them in my presentation which is not possible. So i have to figure out which ones i like better than the other or which would have a greater impact on the reader.
I am a little confused/overwhelmed now but i am hoping to get it together and make a great world literature syllabus!

Sufi Poetry

The suffism poetry we read in class this past week was not only interesting but very inspiring. It was very touching and made me think about something outside of everyday life. How these people (Attar, Hafiz,Rumi) try to find God is very inspiring and shows a lot of dedication.
According to what was said in class, there are two types of love in suffism, sacred and profane. The sacred is love for God while the profane is earthly love (for a person). According to suffism, God is not a perfect being that is unreachable. To them it is possible to draw closer to God more fully in present life than in death. In suffism, you are not required to buy redemption but rather to achieve and find your path to God.
There are also certain symbols that have to be in a suffism poetry such as "flight", "wine", "birds", and these symbols were used to portray the main content of the poem.

Catullus Poems

The Catullus poems we read in class are basically about his love, desire, and passion for Lesbia. He thinks of Lesbia as the most beautiful woman alive and would do pretty much anything to get her. He is similar to Sappho in writing because they both write about love. They both openly talk about sexuality even though Catullus may tend to sound perverted sometimes. This might be due to the fact that he respected Sappho and admired her work. He also tended to sound homosexual in some of the poems.
Although he loves Lesbia, his feelings for her changes through out the poems from tender love poems to sadness, dissapiontment and bitter sarcasm.
I loved reading both Catullus and Sappho because they are both different from other literary pieces i have read.

Sappho

Sappho was a woman who was said to have killed herself (gone over a cliff) because her husband did not return from war. From this it can be said that she is a very emotional person who would do a lot for love. In the first lines of this poem she calls on Aphrodite (who is the goddess of love) to help her with her broken heart. She believes in the power of Aphrodite and thinks she can solve all problems.
Sappho is unlike the other literary pieces we have read in this class. It is very emotional and passionate. She is in love with love and it is seen in every line of the poem. To Sappho, life without love is no life at all.

Othello Acts I and II

In the first Acts of this play, we are introduced to its main characters. Iago is evil, conniving and the antagonist of the play. He is basically "the sheep in wovles clothing." He pretends to like everyone while striking each of them in their backs. Othello so far is seen as a noble man who believes in justice. Desdemona is a very passive and submissive wife. She not only loves Othello but worships him as well. Roderigo and Cassio are two people who are secretly in love with Desdemona but cannot have her since she is already married to Othello.
Iago's main reason for not liking Othello is because he was passed over in postion of army and his position was given to Cassio. This is the main bone of contention in this play and it starts the ball rolling from the first scene. Due to this Iago decides to take revenge on Othello no what it takes and uses anybody (Roderigo, Cassio) to get to his goal.

MEDEA

Medea was a great story to read and really showed the wrath of a woman when what belongs to her is taken away especially something as important as a husband. Medea is full of rage after Jason decides to marry another woman but she lets the rage take over her. Even though she thinks and devises her plan before carrying them out she doesnt weigh the consequences of things before doing them. Like "is it worth killing my brother to marry a man?" Or "is it worth killing my children to hurt my husband?" She is very hardhearted and would do anything to get revenge. She can be seen as similar to Achilles in her rage and wrath but similar to clytemnestra in her pursuit of revenge.

Oedipus Rex

Oedipus Rex depicts the power of fate and how it is impossible to change our destiny's. As in the case of Oedipus who kills his father and marries his mother even with all the intervensions made to kill him by his father, mother and the shepheard. One of the elements that make this story a sad one is the portrayal of Oedipus's character. He is a person of contradiction and is quick to judgement because he wants to be seen as a good leader. If he had taken his time to find out about the murder of Laius privately or listened to the messenger and his wife and dropped the investigation he might not have found out about the abomination he commited. Oedipus not being able to see past what is in front of him makes his tragedy a very sad one. However one thing i didn't understand was why after Laius's death the throne was given to Oedipus, a stranger and not Creon, Jocsta's brother who is a native of Thebes.

Agamemnon

Agamemnon is a tragedy i found very interesting to read. It is about the events that happened to Agamemnon after the Trojan war. He is killed by his wife as vengeance for sacrificing their daughter in the Trojan war. One thing i found interesting in this story were the roles the women played. The women in this story unlike the epic are very strong, outspoken, very important to the stroyline and are also the main characters of the story. Cassandra can see visions and sees her and Agamemon's demise before it happens while Clytemnestra actually kills her husband. She is deceptive and plans the whole murder even before Agamemnon comes back from war. I love the roles of the two women in this story and how they stand out of the social norms of their time. However i do not really get how or why Cassandra was killed because it is not really explained in the story.

The Ramayana

The Ramayana is a very great literary work. It was both interesting/entertaining and provided readers with an insight into the great culture of India. The Ramayana is basically about the life of Rama, how his throne was taken from him by his brother and how his wife (Sita) was also abducted from him by the Raven. He is the central hero in the story and exhibits the qualities of a true leader. Sita also exihibits the qualities of an ideal wife because she still loved her husband and would not deny him even with all the good things that were promised to her by the Raven. The Raven is the antogonist in this story and is seen as the opposite of Rama. Lastly The Ramayana and The Iliad were great stories to read but i think it would be a bit hard to find significant differences/similarities between both stories.

The Iliad

The Iliad, Book I and Book XXII were both very interesting literary works to read. They weren't overly worded or too ancient to understand like past texts we've been reading in class. While Book I tells us about the disagreement/the bone of contention, Book XXII provides us with the resolution. However i do not understand why Achilles is fighting with Hector in Book XXII when he had a problem with Agamemnon in Book I. Achilles is the definiton of an epic hero due to his charisma and his love to win wars for the glory of his name. One thing i found weird was how the fight was portrayed in Book XXII. The writer stops in the middle of a fight scene and starts to talk about somehting totally outside of the battle scene. This tends to take away from the fight and might not make a reader take the fight seriously or understand the gravity of the fight.

Ovid, Metamorphoses

Metamorphoses by Ovid was a little confusing to read because of its length and the way the story is worded. It is the creation story of how earth, man, and the world we live in today was made from nature. It is very descriptive and scientific that anyone in this modern day can relate to it and believe it. It doesn't talk about any God but only about nature. It also talks about a flood story where Jove gets angry and causes a flood because of what lycaon did. Unlike Noah's story and the Epic of Gilgamesh, the flood is not the main theme of this story. Apart from the creation and the flood, it was hard to follow the rest of the story. From "The Transformation of Daphne into a Lawrel" it was as if the story lost its main focuse.

Epic of Gilgamesh

Epic of Gilgamesh is almost like the story of Noah where there is a flood and a main hero (Noah/Gilgamesh).
These two stories however differ in many ways. While the story of Noah is from the bible thus teaching about the power of God and calling people to believe in God, Gilgamesh on the other hand is an epic - a mere story for fun - and it is not calling anyone to believe in any God. Another difference is that in the bible, the main reason for the flood is given as due to the sins of man from the generations of Adam and Eve but in Gilgamesh, it doesn't say explicitly the reason for the flood. Utanapishtim just tells Gilgamesh to build a boat.
These and many more can be seen as the differences between these two stories

Story of Noah

The story of Noah is one of the very significant and popular stories in the bible. This might be due to the hugh flood that occured wiping all living organisms from the face of the earth - except Noah's family - or because after the fall of Adam and Eve, Noah was the first significant person to be talked about. These four verses of Genesis (6-9) were very specific about the events that happened long before it was written and it is rare to find narratives that are so detailed in our modern day. Although i enjoyed reading these verses, i didn't understand why Noah had to curse Canaan in verse 9. It was not Canaan who commited the sin but his father, Ham. And Ham might have seen Noah's nakedness accidentally, thus not deserving any punishment at all.