english hokey pokey

     The greatest thing that shifted in me this semester as a reader and writer is noticing and making connections between works: intertextuality.   I already love making pop culture references, in real life and in writing essays or projects (just look through my blogs), but it went to another level after this class.  Intertextuality was one of the first things we talked about in the class - about how every story has some general structure to it, a quest of sorts.  This sort of validated my experiences because I always loved noticing parallelism across stories and then bringing that to fiction that is more akin to an English class, like Oedipus or The Death of a Salesman, became natural to me. 

    The idea that all works build off of previous ones is so profound to me, we first came across that idea in How to Read Lit Like a Professor,  and it has stuck with me ever since.   TDAS came so far after Oedipus, but as tragedies they share much in common, without the latter, Willy Loman's story would never have existed.  Nevertheless, these stories are different but you can piece together influences and straight up references, something I have done before, but in a very different light.  Now I consider the time period and the historical context of when and where a story is written.  All that stuff matters and it feels like in this class I am forced to notice it.  Even in essay prompts, if iI write to answer the prompt, I may use several sources to argue it - or even if I only use one, I think about another work that could have been used as well!

    I think every piece we have consumed in this class has impacted me, albeit to different extents, but together I feel like the more I read or watch, the more these links of intertextuality are being made and the more I am noticing them, and the side effects of that are nice since I can understand the message a new story far easier!