What does an English Major read? Year 2 & Lecture Notes

first up we read a room of one's own by virginia woolf which is all about how women deserve their own space their own education talks a lot about social and political factors and how education works for equality or can

next up we read parts of mary wollstonecraft's vindication of the rights of women this is mary shelley's mother and what role literature plays as a reflection of or an agent of change and especially how that relates to women's issues and what writing upon women's issues accomplishes or can do

this is one of my favorite plays i've ever read this is about math this one's just so much about math and statistics and so much that i just it was so good i highly recommend reading it

super interesting super crazy i still don't know what happened in that play you could come back to it a thousand and one bajillion times and read it all over again

we follow one of the soldiers named julian and his life and just everything that is going on in the future why this war is happening why it's being waged and it's just incredible

it's fantastic it's great i would highly recommend i just love this book every time i come back to it so really happy we got to study at uni again

i don't remember too much from this i remember really liking it and there's a lot i think there's a lot going on in this book other than just that of course but i would really love to read this again because it's been a few years

so we finally come to the last one the last book i have here to show you this is the one that scared me beyond any level of fear i had really ever known in my life imbibed from a piece of media and that is house of leaves by mark said danielski

i also read howell by alan ginsberg which is a really amazing long poem it is all about america and its ugly rotting side

this is one of my favorite books i've ever read and that is from university and ever probably that is neuromancer by william gibson

this one was all about interpretation and in this sense interpretation of the bible which is such a key part of analyzing a text is interpretation everyone is going to have a different interpretation and on christian doctrine shows you just how crazy things can get when people disagree on the interpretation of a text that's from the basis of so much of our world

the ending of this book is absolutely crazy so good all of these books just mess with your mind so much

aristotle argues that art exists because it's in our human nature it's natural for us to copy and his definition is that art is a representation of the world it's not independent of the world it is simply a representation of what we're seeing and he thinks it's very natural even for children to copy what they see and so there's no real harm in that

the way that jeanette winterson conceptualizes like time and history again insane i would highly recommend this book i had no idea what to expect but i was not disappointed it's absolutely crazy

then my next favorite two essays that we read are jean boutreaux simulacra and simulations this essay blew my mind this essay blew my mind

we talked about prescriptivism versus descriptivism so prescriptivism is people who try to tell you what is correct and how you should talk and how talking a certain way or using language a certain way is better than using slang or swearing or something like that which this book completely dismantles and actually goes into a lot of history

we picked up the wasteland which was then my second time studying it in uni i got to read that in first year too but like i said studying works twice at university never boring never the same thing because this time we looked at the wasteland through physics

the republic is a piece of art about the ideal society but plato doesn't want any art in his ideal society so it's this right out of the gate a direct contradiction like what are you doing do you want art or do you not want art do you need art to say that you can't have art what is going on plato