Introduction

Washington D.C., Chicago, Florida, New York City, South Dakota, and Minnesota, these are all of the places I've traveled so far in my life and from each place I've taken away many wonderful experiences.  Although I haven't traveled outside of the United States, I am going to be visiting other countries through novels that I will be reading in my World Literature course.  Perhaps experiencing these novels will provide me with places where I'd like to travel at some point in my life in order to venture out of Wisconsin.  I have always loved reading because it can take me to places that I may never have the chance to visit in person.

My name is Alex Herman and I am a freshman English major at Silver Lake College of the Holy Family.  This semester I am taking a World Literature course because I want to gain a greater understanding of literature from different countries.  As an English major, I understand the importance of good literature and the impact it can have on people.  Reading works written by authors from other countries helps us to gain a greater understanding and appreciation of different cultures.  For this class, I am looking forward to being exposed to works from many different cultures, so that I can learn more about myself from reading these works.  World literature is a very broad topic, but as a survey course, I expect that we will dabble in many different areas.  The authors of the seven novels we will be covering are Fumiko Enchi, Nadine Gordimer, Seamus Heaney, Naguib Mahfouz, Helen Oyeyemi, William Shakespeare, and Chrétien de Troyes.  Of these authors, I have only read William Shakespeare, so I am interested in exploring each of these in great detail.

A requirement of my World Literature class is that each student has to create a blog to share with the rest of the world.  I entitled my blog "A Tome in Time" because a tome is a large book and in this course, I will be reading a variety of literature from many different time periods.  In this blog, I will be posting several different entries in regards to my World Literature class including close reading, themes, and foreign films.  In the close reading entries, I will provide a detailed analysis of the work and my interpretation of the text.  The entries on themes will discuss connections between themes found in the books I read and other liberal arts classes I have taken.  The foreign film entry will be a review of a film watched outside of class from a list provided to my class by our instructor.  I hope you enjoy reading my blog entries and that they may inspire you to read deeper into world literature.