Having finished my Educating Rita essay I had a think about what I had learned from the essay with a apple, a cup of mint tea and U2's classic 1983 album, War, playing in the back ground. I think as a mature student that the play, Educating Rita, has much resonance with my own life at the moment. Having chosen question one I found my motives were different to Rita's, but I find that there are certain things that we both have in common. I've recently been asking myself about social class. Am I working class? Am I middle class? What is class? Why is it important? I think that my view of Educating Rita has answered this. Rita was desperate to escape her working class roots and become something else. She did do this, but what she became was not what she originally aspired to be. She became something better than her aspiration. By realising that her perceptions of people like Frank and Trish's lives were wrong she managed to become an improved version of herself. Ultimately Rita, who was once Susan, gained wider experiences and different life expectations; she transcended the shackles of social class and became Susan again, only with her own expectations and her own goals. This is all I want for myself, to esperience new and exciting things that broaden my horizons. If I was to be honest I wasn't really looking forward to this essay but I ended up really enjoying it and actually getting something for my own personal well being out of it.

The last few weeks have been the our first assessment period of the degree course. We've had class tests and we've had essays. I particularly enjoyed the New Criticism essay I did for Readers and Texts. I think I gained quite an insight into literary criticism and the potential advantages and short comings of applying the principles of New Criticism to practical analysis of poetry, in this case Wilfred Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est. As a discipline in it's self I found that New Criticism was a bit on the stuffy side. I couldn't come to terms with ideas like the “affective fallacy” and the “intentional fallacy”. How could you possibly separate the intention of the poet and the effect the poem has on the reader from a critical analysis of a poem, especially when a poem like Dulce et Decorum Est is concerned? Surely the whole point of poetry is for the poet to create a relationship between themselves and the reader, New Critic or just the casual reader. I do think that some of the principle in New Criticism are invaluable but, to my mind, they have to be accompanied by principles from other theories like Reader Response, for example.
If I had to do anything differently I would have started my preparation as soon as the assignment was issued, but I still fell I did finished with plenty of time to spare. All in all I really enjoyed doing the essay and I feel like I have learned a lot from it.