Chapter 7: Rising Action
Hi everyone!
I’m super glad to say that this week, I officially finished up my initial reading. All of my textual elements that I’ve been working on in the past week or so have been written up for use in my paper, which means that it’s time to move on to investigating the historical context of the work! This is the final half of my data collection phase, so I’m excited to eventually move into editing my paper and drawing conclusions once this final historical reading has finished.
Yesterday, I met with my expert advisor to catch up after all the excitement of break. She currently doesn’t have any research for me to be helping with, but I had the opportunity to talk to her more about her experience using narrative medicine (her term for the interaction of literature or poetry with medicine, especially past literature with current medicine, which aligns quite well with my topic) in her classes. I also asked her about a distinction I was struggling with while writing about my textual elements, which was that between symbols and motifs. I had previously thought I’d had a good grasp on the two, but I found that as I began to write up the portion of my paper about the motifs in the story, I was struggling to express how their individual meanings functioned differently than those of the symbols. She helped me understand that while both symbols and motifs are placed in the story to represent greater ideas, and both could be recurring elements of the story, symbols functioned more as individual metaphors (like the wallpaper representing the woman’s illness) while motifs helped advance a greater theme of the story (the journal displaying reality, which develops the theme of appearance vs reality in the story). Making that distinction was super helpful for me in my writing, so I’m incredibly glad to have had her help clearing that up!
I now plan to be working on researching historical context for the rest of this week, and then to conduct my second read-through of the story early next week! Be sure to stay tuned until then.
Have a great week, everyone! 🙂
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