Before I submit attachments to all the assignments I've done for the semester, I thought I'd reflect on each of them before showing my revisions to them. I think I'll attach the new and the older versions of the assignments for those which lend themselves to it. This class was innovative and challenged me to think about "why" I think about literary aspects of works the way I do. My interpretation of a poem may not be that of someone else's. Furthermore, we all have to come to a sort of self-discovery when interpreting literature and this class made me realize the importance of doing so.

I have to admit, I was a little skeptical. When I registered for "20th Century American Authors", I thought we would be reading Hemingway, Faulkner, Salinger and other "great" American authors. So when we came to class on the first day and Prof. Anderson told us we'd be concentrating not so much on novels and the like, but rather on what defines the literature genre, as well as how we can expand the definition of literature to our everyday lives, I thought he was off his nut.

"How can you have a literature class without novels and poems and old dead white guys?", I asked myself, "What is this new-age, 'I'm okay, You're okay' approach to writing and reading? Literature means paper and ink and words and paragraphs. Introduction, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution. That's what literature is, not some web diary, or whatever."

In this collage, I made the girl in the sky larger and clearer because I feel that the little girl (representing Phoebe) played a larger role in the novel than I had portrayed in the previous collage. Also, I moved the glass over a little to balance the left side.

In this collage, I made the woman more opaque to emphasize her importance in the collage. She, in fact, made the quote and is the central point in the story and its themes. I also blended the dead fish a little better, along with the barn and the flames. The sky around the hawk also got blended more. Hopefully it is an improvement!

I wasn't really satisfied with the first collage that I made for this, there was something about it that just wasn't right. I took the cameras out because I felt that there was a little too much going on, and used a feature called "color burn" on the eye to make it stand out more, and I also made it more of a lime green color. I feel that this is much better than the original.

I didn't do as good of a job as I wanted to with my first Bukowski collage. I wanted to show how he was at the same time haunted by his demons and his insecurities, but didn't care about them or how people percieved him. I erased the graffiti from the background image, instead choosing to use images from his life as the grafitti. He viewed attacks on himself and his lifestlye as most of us view graffiti, a little offputting, but nothing to really worry about.

Here it is. I'll explain in the portfolio.

Here is the revised version of Lenny from Of Mice and Men.