This is my last blog post of my high school career. That means that initially I didn’t have a lot of motivation to write it, but then I started thinking about what I would write about and I realized I have learned a lot from this class (from all my Mitchell classes, actually) and that I could take some time to reflect and collect some of that information. Maybe I’ll refer back to this blog post in college when I want to remember what it was like to have an actually interesting English class with cool books and lively discussions!
Before I talk about Hero’s Journey, I would like to say to any Junior reading this: take History as Fiction. That was my favorite class in all my time at Uni and it actually changed my viewing of the world, literature, the media, and all of history.
This semester in English also taught me a lot. I thought it was really interesting to see all the different types of heroes that have existed. Recently I’ve been thinking about all the books I haven’t read, all the movies I haven’t seen, and I think about all of the different heroes in those stories that might be more like Anse (aka not a hero at all and a terrible person) or they might be like Macon (hard to accept but also respectable in some ways) or they might be the classic Odysseus hero that goes on a clear Journey (I think Pee-Wee was a perfect Odysseus, but with less vanity).
I think that something important that I’m taking out of this class is a way of thinking of heroes differently. If I had read Room outside of this class, I doubt I would have thought that Jack was a Hero going on a Journey and Refusing the Call only to venture out of the Ordinary World. I’m so glad that I did read Room in the setting of this class because it helped me to see the structure to his story and to realize that not all the heroes that we encounter in our lives will be superheroes or action movie stars, they could be a 5-year-old boy or a self-righteous man.
I would also like to really strongly recommend History As Fiction. It was an awesome class and I credit it with giving me the reading skills to succeed in this class. I really appreciated the new view on heroism that this class offered and I really liked how we looked at modern storylines that aren't necessarily viewed as heroic narratives and analyzed their characters as heroes.
ReplyDeleteAgreed with your point of seeing more stuff as a hero's journey. The books we've read seem to follow a progression from "standard tropey heroic journey" to "weird and kinda random but still a hero's journey if you look hard enough". The Odyssey was obviously a hero's journey, but books like Angry Black White Boy and As I Lay Dying especially didn't seem like hero's journeys to me at first.
ReplyDeleteHonestly, categorizing the classes that we take as English is kind of misrepresentative, because I think we learn way more than just English. The books that we read, and the discussions that we have, extends far beyond the structures of the book, and more book-specific things. The way that discussions forces us to think critically has as you say, changed the way that I view the world and the way I think. People should take more English classes. Hot take.
ReplyDeleteI guess first off, Good Luck in college. I'll try and take your advice in taking History as Fiction, that is if I'm not already taking it. I agree with how Heroes Journey has forced us to rethink what a heroes is. I think part of this change in thinking, for me, was caused by "As I Lay Dying" and "Pee-Wees big adventure" as their more, satirical quality, exposes us to certain undervalued ideas by blowing them out of proportion, while also poking fun at unnatural ones.
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