End of Semester

This class has changed my idea of reading. I use to just read a book and just read the words and follow the story. After this semester I learned a sense of higher understanding of what the authors are trying to say.

The only thing I found trouble with is the old english writting styles but I understand you cannot take that out because it is the backbone of gothic and where it started from. Reading Fight Club would have been fun but in the summer it is so pressed in time it was nice to have the last week off from reading to study and write the paper.

good man and emily

in a Good man and Emily stories there is the gothic feel with the grotesque characters. In Emily in you have this lady who thinks to much of herself and is above others and never marries. The story does not show what exact reason just that she and her family turned away all the young men. Throughout the story you have people saying poor emily and giving you the hope something good happens to her and she finds someone. Then in the end it shows the man she loved had died in her house and she had been sleeping the bed as the dead man, so you get the feeling of liking her and then having strange and odd thoughts that she was insane because of her actions during the story. In a good man the Misfit was a character you wanted to hate because he killed everyone but then when he was telling his story about his family and how he does not remember doing anything wrong you get the idea that he might be a good man. Then he went ahead and killed the family it all turns into hating him again. These did have the gothic feel in this way and it did put a little fear into the readers with the killings and the decaying body that the lady slept in the bed with.

Poquelin

The south is going through many changes in that the society is forming from all plantations to towns, roads and neighborhoods popping up. This is a huge change from the plantation owners owning all the land you could see and grew cash crops for their money. This change was not liked by all in the story, but well liked by the new members coming into the area for are coming from other countries who do not want to own a plantation or work on one but start a new town like the northern towns are. The old creole families especially Jacques does not want to change, but he does not have a normal reason because he does not use his land as others would have he and his brother let it decay. This subject brought on the story because if it was not for the uprising of the change of the south to urbanize then no one would have worried about Jacques and Jean and their mysterious ways. If the roads and neighborhoods would not have wanted to come through their land than this story would not have any appeal. But this mystery brought on the idea that Jacques is hiding something and therefore is a witch and does magic, he does throw a lot of curses at people that did not help his case. When it did turn out he was hiding something it was nothing anyone expected it turned out to be his brother was not missing but a leper. So all the changing in Louisiana brought on the discovery of the the reason Jean was missing for seven years.

Grapevine

I liked these two stories because to me there were easier to read than the others we have gone over. The language is different than some would like to read but I liked it because I grew up around a bunch of cajuns and could here every word pretty well in my head. The story of Henry was fun with the story of the bewitched land and that if you ate the grapes you would be killed within the year. If the story would have just started out with Uncle Julius then there would not have been the white people who are curious on the land and without them the readers might not have found the story less appealing to read if it was just a crazy story of magic and beliefs of blacks in the time. Without the care of the white family to get the land they wanted to make them succeed the book might not have sold and therefore the way the story was written to sell I would imagine.

Our Nig

This story is a lot different than the other novels we have gone over so far. It is a fiction but has the feel of a non fiction. The other ones were meant to send a message about society and to spread fear in the writting, Wilson's story scares the reader through testimony. I think she wrote it just to be able to be heard, like this is her way of saying this is what happened to me and what I have come through to get to where I am in life. The way she writes in third person during the beginning I do not have a strong reason for maybe its a way to give a better over view of all the characters at first before going into Frado's personal thoughts.

Poe

The narrator is used i think to add the extra bit of fear to Poe's readers. He already had the scary house and the Ushers family with mental sickness to put fear into the reader. With the narrator it brings in a friend that is an outsider of the family of late. This adds to the story because of his lack of experience with the family and the hose brings out his own fears and superstitions that are going on and when the narrator gets scared if the readers are into the story they will start to feel the scary plot themselves.

Poe's gothic differs to me in that it focuses on the house a lot (it is like this in his other writings are well). The other stories we have read they have been about a character (mostly women) over coming aspects in their lives to make it in a man's society. This one puts emphasis on the surroundings as well as the character to portray an evil spirit as to say the house is evil and takes over the characters instead of the characters being evil themselves.

YGB

The guide plays the evil side that leads young goodman brown into temptation where he does think he should be going into. The guide resembles him it is stated that he could pass as his father. This might be for extra sense of trust for young goodman brown or it could be a view of the future of what could happen. The guide convinces him to keep going by telling him stories of his father doing the same routes and other respectable people that have been in the same area as him, this could all be a lie just to get him to do what he wants him to do. The people he keeps running into are all important people to Brown and people who he wants to keep his reputation for.

Reading Novels

I think reading novels is a real good thing to do. When you read you expand your imagination to knew areas that you might not have known about before. Reading these new books will give you better access to how society works and how to act or not to act around people. I think literature can move a society to change, because when an author can move someone or a group to read and feel the same way they are then this is the power to change people. Some authors might not do this in the open but secretly hidden in the text. A book that I have always loved and learned a lot from is The Outsiders be S.E. Hinton. The story of the poor vs the rich in this big city and the struggles from both sides that brings them to fighting each other and how the characters grow and learn how they should be acting and what they are doing wrong really was a good inspiration to treat everyone nice growing up and now even if i do not see eye to eye with them there is no need to disrespect anyone.

J & H

1. I think some of the allegories in the story are the ape like creature as a description, and two personalities. The ape like description caught my eye because its more obvious I think he is saying that he believes in the darwin theory of evolution to an extent, but it not sold on it maybe having the ape like creature as the bad character is his way of saying that were are much to sophisticated to be from them or that we all have those animal instincts in us that want to act out and we have evolved into suppressing these feelings. This plays right into the two personalities I think he is saying everyone has two sides and maybe not as drastic as J & H but everyone has that wild side that needs to come out but not everyone lets theirs out. He could be saying that through this example that the temptations should be withheld and not gone after because bad things come from it.

4. In the book he uses different styles of description to inflict horror. Like said there was not a castle but there was fog, heavy door, dark empty streets, and big building with only three windows on one side. These are all things that can bring about fear to a reader. When you are reading a story and the description is an foggy day you know something is about to happen because even in movies with the lack of vision like darkness and fog it excites and scares you not knowing what is happening right in front of your face, this is so in the book even if you are reading you can still picture the dark and scary atmosphere. This and the dark and empty streets brings out the creepy factor needed in gothic novels to portray the right emotions the author is intending to bring up. The heavy door on the big building with only three windows can be portrayed as type of a castle because castles have big windowless walls that protect it with a huge heavy door that cant be broken down. This could the authors example of his present day castle and his new way of starting fear in his readers.

5. I think that if the story was portrayed in another character point of view it would have been a lot different because not other characters were as understanding towards Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Utterson was. In this i mean that when others would have suspected Dr. Jekyl for being so close to Hyde, Utterson believed every word he said about hyde was trustworthy and he was gone when he was suspected for murder. Other characters upon Jekyl to try to get to the bottom of all the weird incidents.

I liked this story kinda felt the details were a little much at times i like details to be able to see every aspect of what is going on but sometimes i caught my mind wandering because the page or paragraph was not going anywhere and staying still because of details that the author felt was needed.

Castle of Otranto

1. In this story women play a big role in the story not so much as making the decisions but being the objects the decisions are based about. When the women in the story were presented they were to do whatever they were told by their men in their lives. They were thought to be true and pure like angels, even with this thought they still we not able to be apart of the man society. This to me is saying that women of that time were good to have around and look at but when comes down to the real important stuff they were not suppose to be apart of.

2. Well this book does have a little chivalry to it but not until the end when Theodore comes into a bigger role. The whole beginning of the story I think is to portray how bad of a person Manfred is and it is odd of that time period to have this so called knight and for him not to act knightly at all. I think this is to set up for the hero to come in and show what a knight should be like compared to this tyrant who no one but his wife seems to like and she is, from the previous discussion, bond to him and feels she loves him. When Theodore shows up he on two different occasions tells Isabella that he would rather die a thousand deaths fighting to save her. This might be a little exageration on the whole chivalry idea but it does show the difference in the characters portrayed in the story, with Manfred and Theodore.

3. This conclusion was a little different than I saw coming when I was reading the story. It gave you the idea that somehow Theodore and Matilda would end up together and rule the land that was proven to be Theodore's in the first place. When she was killed and him not wanting to marry Isabella it does give you this feeling the author does not like the idea of marriage since throughtout the book he broke up every marriage in the story. This could be a way to make the story better in the authors eyes or Walpole's personal beliefs were that of marriages do not work even when you love someone it is never a happy ending and you will end up alone one day.

first post

Hi my name is Chase Iles I am a junior at TCU. I am a history major with minor in business and minor in energy. With this course I hope to expand my horizon a little on books i like to read (and finish my core work). Right now i like to read books by James Paterson, Sue Grafton those types of mysteries and drama. I work for TCU media relations department as a intern and really enjoy my job.

I understand all the rules and requirements from the syllabus.