the +/- of intro to lit

[+'s]

I learned a new word. synecdoche. A figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole (as hand for sailor), the whole for a part (as the law for police officer), the specific for the general (as cutthroat for assassin), the general for the specific (as thief for pickpocket), or the material for the thing made from it (as steel for sword). [dictionary.com]

Today, I was the class expert on Emily Dickinson. Thanks to Eric being from Amherst, I've even actually been inside the room in which Dickinson spent most of her life, when Eric's mom (Amherst's head librarian) offered to spring for a tour of her home.

it's not the worst class ever.

[-'s]

Clearly, this is not the class a fourth year fiction writing major should have to take. I guess I should have taken it a long time ago, but I didn't really know it was a requirement until last year when I was "audited" for graduation and realized there was a lot of gen ed creds (that most people get out of the way at the beginning) that I had simply ignored.

When my teacher said to me, Are you a poet? I said no, since I'm not, though have been at some time, and then she said, "Good. I was afraid you might be. Having a poet in this class sucks."

I stayed up til two a.m. writing a five page paper, a one page journal reflection, and handwriting the definitions for the poetry section (a total of three and a half pages of double spaced words). She then said we should hang on to the poetry vocab and turn it in the following week.

She begins the poetry section by saying it's not a good idea to use the word always when it comes to poetry. She speaks about Dickinson's poems a mere fifteen minutes later and says they're always about loneliness, longing, and emptineess. She doesn't agree with my "she's chiding people, she's telling them what they're getting wrong..." theory.

The class always feels longer than nearly three hours...