Shepard Lee Reflection

3) I really enjoyed the works that our class has read this semester, but I think that there could be one tweak to make it better. If I were to remove a text from the syllabus it would be the Shepard Lee Written by Himself. I believe that the Hammon piece could cover the most important parts of Shepard Lee, and I think that what is lost could be searched for in other literature that the class has read this semester. Due to its length, portrayal of African Americans, and its topics and themes that can be analyzed in other texts, Shepard Lee is the most appropriate text to remove from the syllabus. One of the parts that bothered me about Shepard Lee was the time that we spent on it and the lack of work that our class did with it. I read the

Throughout the novel Lee jumps from body to body in order to find happiness that he couldn’t find in his own body. By the end of the novel Lee realizes his mistake is that he has no work ethic, and he needs to work harder in order to progress in life. He promises himself that he will work to get what he needs instead of mooching off others (Lee 417). This idea of the self-made man in not a new one in this class. Fredrick Douglass went from being a poor slave in northeastern America to becoming a highly respected political figure with ties to the abolitionist movement (Douglass 1). Also, Ben Franklin started working for his father’s failing candle business at the age of ten, but he eventually helped craft the United States Constitution (Franklin 33). Students do not need to learn more about men who learned to overcome their challenges because these two pieces do a great job at illustrating how one can overcome the seemingly

I think that it was a good exercise to test my knowledge of how all the literature we’ve read this semester is related to each other. I believe the most challenging portion to write was the second part because it took the most time and required digging back into texts that I haven’t touched in months. At times I felt like it was difficult to find the quotations that I wanted to share in order to prove a point, but I still felt like I was successful after a couple hours of searching for the right quotes. This transitions into what I found most interesting about this paper. I really enjoyed revisiting what links early American literature together. Sometimes literature can seem very abstract, which it is, but it is always nice to be able to classify or label something in order to gain a better understanding of it. While this was the most interesting task, the most thought provoking task was choosing which piece to cut out of the curriculum. I was searching mainly for a piece of fiction that I felt like was already covered by a piece of nonfiction. This is because nonfiction can oftentimes represent the truth better than a fiction piece can. It did take a while to make my decision, but I am happy with the criteria I chose to make the decision. It was not difficult to choose one of the three pieces. I thought that Poe’s piece would not really fit in with any of the themes that we discussed this semester. We didn’t really hit on dark