Midterm Blog

Prior Reading Development Level
Prior to this Shakespeare class my reading development level was centralized around the text-self level. This level was dominant because I enjoy reading literature that allows me to create a personal relationship with the main character(s). I also tend to read novels more than any other type of literature where the characters are facing situations that I have faced myself or could, realistically, face. These personal connections allow me to generate a mental movie of the story where I try to picture myself as a character. This type of reading is very natural to me and comes easily.
I do make some text-other text connections when I am trying to relate a story to something I have seen before. I generally connect written texts with visual texts so that I can use the visual text as more of a supplement than a comparison tool; and movies tend to be connected to written texts in my head. One very notable connection I made between a movie and a written text was the movie The Island and the book Brave New World. I read Brave New World about six months before I saw The Island but I immediately made the connection. I was informed later that The Island was also a book written by Aldous Huxley.
Rarely did I ever make text-world connections. I am not really sure why this is, other than the fact that I like to put myself in the stories that I read and I am not an overwhelmingly worldly person. When I was a senior in high school my A.P. English teacher facilitated text-world connections with pieces such as Animal Farm, Brave New World, and excerpts from A Modest Proposal. After traveling to Europe I established some text-world connections with places I had seen: i.e. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Paris and the Notre Dame cathedral) and Rebecca (Monaco).
Current Reading Development Level
When reading over my blogs for this class I was rather surprised. I never thought of reading my blogs to find out what type of connections I made to the class and to the texts we read and watch, but my findings are interesting. Over the course of the semester, I think my reading level has gone down; however I don’t necessarily believe that my reading level has gone down, more likely my writing level has gone down.
The first blog that I wrote this semester incorporated both text-other text connections and text-self connections. In the opening paragraph of the blog I comment that the movie Becoming Jane follows the general format of turning “real experiences” into entertainment. This connection develops the idea that all literature is “creative non-fiction.” In the second paragraph of blog one I talked briefly about my idea that almost all, if not all, literature is, at some level, creative non-fiction. This comment is text-self because it was me imposing one of my ideas about literature onto the movie Shakespeare in Love.
The second blog brings in text-other text and text-world connections with the text-other text references being more obvious. I made a comparison between Romeo and Juliet the play that William Shakespeare wrote and Romeo and Juliet the movie that Baz Lhurman directed throughout the blog entry. This comparison was at the heart of that particular blog because I found it very interesting, and easy, to compare the two. Making text-other text comparisons is incredibly easy to do if one is looking at a movie version of a book/play, which was the case here.
On a less obvious level, I brought out the idea of a Western Duel at the beginning of the movie Romeo and Juliet. This could be thought of a text-other text comparison, but I would like to think of it as a text-world connection because I think the duel was used in the movie to bridge a gap for people. Lhurman wanted people to be able to connect to this fight and so he put it in the format of a Western movie which most Americans are familiar with.
My three most recent blogs are very text-self. They incorporate my personal opinions of certain portions of the movie Titus, my feelings on the name that my group chose for our playgroup, and my thoughts on the idea of the importance of hair and make-up to a play/movie. These blogs were far easier to compose than the other blogs because I didn’t have to think as hard to put them together. I still had to pull together and sort through my thoughts, but deliberately establishing connections of text-other text and text-world is more complicated.
How to advance in Reading Development Levels
In order to advance my reading levels I think I need to keep a more open mind. Like I said before, I enjoy making text-self connections, but I need to begin to think more regularly beyond myself. Many Shakespeare plays currently hold personal connections for me because of things that have happened while reading or viewing them, and these become the things that I want to write about in my blog. If I am able to step outside of my comfort zone I will be able to reach the text-world connections on a more regular basis.
I will try to give myself more time to read the actual plays and spend reflecting on the movies after I watch them. The addition of more time on the given activities should allow me to stretch what I am seeing to incorporate the information of the setting of the story. I think I skip too much over the setting and relationship subtleties to see only what is happening; for example, in Titus Andronicus I never would have thought about the roles of races, gender, ethnicity of the actors, and many other things we discussed in class. My gut does not tell me to pay attention to these details until I start to discuss them with other people. Also, the language of Shakespeare can be very difficult to understand, so spending more time picking apart the words will help me establish more connections.
I would like to get my thoughts more vocal, whether in class or outside of it, so that I can realize the larger picture of what I am thinking. As a class we had touched on the potential homosexual interpretation of Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet which is something that I didn’t realize I had thought about before until we began talking about it in class. The conversations along in this class are making me a much better reader, especially of Shakespeare.
One of the easiest ways for me to upgrade my blogs, however, is for me to spend more time on them. If I spent more time thinking about what I was going to write before I sat down to write it, I think my blogs would hold much more valuable information and insights.