Wow, this semester has flown by. It seems like yesterday that I was reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in my dorm room, yet now I am finishing Cellini at home. Looking at my journal posts, I can see the improvement in my writing from the fall. My goal this semester was to be intentional. Overall, I believe that achieved my goal of intentionality. There were definitely moments where I was not fully intentional with each work, but in those moments I also learned about my writing. Taking time to be bored with the text allowed me to have journals that were engaging even though I felt they lacked creativity. Those moments also taught me that each journal post did no have to be a groundbreaking observation that I made as long as I had thoughtful analysis and connections. The vagueness of “be intentional” actually allowed me to adapt when needed, but take myself and my writing seriously to achieve my goal.

I am impressed with how creative some of my journal posts are. Not having a prompt allowed me to take the text places that I could have never imagined. Some of my observations and connections are out there, but when backed with evidence and analysis, the ideas become a compelling argument. Literature’s subjectivity allows me to exercise my creativity. Staying within my goal of intentionality, I let myself be creative with my journal posts. The purpose of doing this was to play around with my writing and the texts to strengthen my longer papers. It is evident from my midterm that this creative exercise paid off. I am proud of my insights. After reflecting on them at the end of the semester, I know I will continue to practice.

I have a lot of unique insights, but there have been times where it is a struggle to back them up with evidence and analysis. Moving forward, I would like to work on strengthening my usage of evidence and analysis to support my points. I believe that strengthening this area will lengthen and strengthen my writing as a whole. Coming into the semester, honestly Junior year, I was bold. I knew I was a good writer, but forgot what my middle school language arts teacher always told my class about our writing, “Always revise and workshop your writing.” Part of not seeking out help for writing is a pride thing, but also asking for critical feedback puts me in the uncomfortable place of being vulnerable. In order for me to achieve my goal of strengthening my writing, I need to swallow my pride and ask for help or insight from others. Next year, I will begin again the practice of being uncomfortable in order to grow.

Moving forward, I would like to improve my consistency with my journal posts. This area was definitely my weakest. As much as I hate the journal posts at times, they are an effective tool to show growth. Increasing my consistency, would allow me to explore the all the texts like I did with my Top Three.

Top Three Journal Posts:

Boys Club

Good Boy

Origin Story

There are limits to creativity. You might be able to dream up the story, painting, or sculpture, but you might not actually be able to bring it to full completion. The same with making meaning with your art. To you, your art might mean one thing, but to others something else or mean nothing at all. Cellini describes a moment when he has been working on a detailed piece and the king comes to look at it. He is crushed when the king does not understand Cellini's art, even though he acknowledged its beauty. All Cellini had wanted to do was please the king (270-271.) Perhaps, Cellini's need to please is derived from the patronage system of the Renaissance, but could this need be his desire to create great art. To Cellini, the beauty and meaning behind his piece is evident, yet the meaning is lost to the king. This is the limit of translation. Art is the translation of the inner mess onto a medium of choice. Meaning is sometimes lost in translation, yet even then beauty can be found. The limits of creativity occur because art remains subjective. The return to ancient art ocurred because of the Renaissance obession with the Greeks and Romans. Would the king have seen Cellini's piece as beautiful if he did not mirror the style of ancient sculptures? I don't know, but I do know the disappointment Cellini felt. The same disappointment taught me that there are limits to art. Cellini, like other artists, taught me that I am not the only one that faces those limits.

When I studied abroad in Rome during the spring of 2019, there was one trip that I had to make no matter what. My family insisted that I go to Trento a town located along the Italian Alps and Italian-Austrian border. I would be the first family member to return to the Alpine region since 1910. The Bertagnolli family is largely known for their agricultural advancement along the eastern shore of Mobile Bay. The story of our Italian ancestors was lost in the pursuit of the American Dream, which was why my return was so crucial to our family.

As I made my journey to Trento, it was fitting that I travelled alone. The five hours that I rode the train to Trento, I wondered how I would change as a result of this trip. My first stop before Trento was in a small village in the Trentino Valley called Mezzacorona. I travelled down the single road to Grappa Bertagnolli for a guided tour of the distillery. During my personal tour, just my guide, Anna and I, Anna probed on why I was interested in visiting. After discovering I was a Bertagnolli from the US, she arranged for me to meet Livia Bertagnolli, one of the owners. In my conversation with Livia, I spoke only in Italian with the translation help of Anna. I discovered that "Bertagnolli" was the equivilent to Smith in the Trentino Valley. Livia wrote my family a note in Italian as a gift with two bottles of grappa and an apron. As I walked back to the Mezzacorona train station, I could feel my body swell with pride. Throughout the rest of the weekend, I learned of the hardships that fell upon the Trentino Valley in the early 1900s, and imagined the countless reasons why they left for America. Although, I discovered so much about my family's history, what I really discovered was myself.

Cellini's autobiography provoked me to question how your origin story changes you? For me, the pursuit of my origin story was crucial to my self discovery. Not the personal history, but the personal growth. This journey to Trento was so important that I made the trip solo, something I would have never done. I had always planned our trips, but I was known to not even go to the bathroom alone, much less travel solo. Throughout the semester, I had relied on my friend's more advanced Italian rather than attempted my own broken tongue, yet during trip, I had to communicate in Italian because most people spoke German as their second language instead of English. In my search for my origin, I found myself. Perhaps, people, like Cellini, trace. their roots back to their origin in order to find themselves. Cellini's origin plays into the metanarrative of his autobiography.

To my friend Laurel,

With the days of quarantine slowly crawling by, my anxieties are heightening. I miss my friends and peers that I studied along side every day. During this time, I have returned to the classics. What can I learn from them? How can I apply their values to this quarantine? Each afternoon, I take a stroll in my garden and ponder over these ancient texts. As I weave between laurel and the olive trees, a sweet breeze interrupts my deep thoughts on Virgil and Cicero’s writings. My family has several marble statues littered about the garden connected by a water feature. I sit by this feature and read the verses of Ovid and Sappho, searching for inspiration. By Jove, I must escape this quarantine because my head is swollen with the knowledge and complexity of my ruminations. My writing outlet does not fully relieve this pain, I desire for dialogue. I am reaching out to my peers through letters to attempt to recreate this dialogue. Soon, I hope this all becomes a quiet memory, but for now I am taking the time to discover the beauty of the classical rewriters. I ask that you join me in returning to the past for inspiration and share your ideas with me.

Yours,

Laura Cereta

I sit on my family’s pier as I read the pages of The Decameron. Usually, I am not here in March, but my family decided that quarantining me here would be best rather than getting my family sick due to my travel history. A whooshing noise interrupts my thoughts as I turn to see a wood duck skimming the surface of the lagoon. It glides gracefully into the water, barely creating ripples. My physical setting is full of peace. This peace could not be more opposite of the chaos that is the world right now. The past few weeks have been filled with attempts for finding peace and stability to hold on to. Being ripped from the normalcy that I have worked hard to create, has been dizzying. Yet, The Decameron has been one of the few things that has been able to create the peace that I have been craving. Pampinea’s steadiness reminds me of my mom, who has been my calm guiding force during this storm. The characters collective mission to highlight the good surrounding them, the appreciation of company in the beauty of nature, and the importance of sharing stories as a way to create a sense of order in disorder is refreshing. The continuity of the human experience from 1348 to 2020 is baffling. Only months ago, I had wondered what it would be like to live in a scary time such as the plague. I have been enamored by the beauty that resulted from the mass amounts of death and destruction in Renaissance art and literature. It makes me wonder what art will be created under our quarantine. The Decameron is providing the fuel necessary for me to make it through this dark period. We will survive, but for now, I will sit on the pier watching the single wood duck fly centimeters from the glassy surface of Little Lagoon. May I appreciate the beauty of the present moment because as the spread of this virus has taught me, we are not promised tomorrow as we planned it to be.

I am writing this journal post with my stack of textbooks starring me down across the table. The title of the only textbook with its spine facing me reads: Why Don't Women Rule the World?. Boccaccio lists all of these famous women rulers from antiquity and a few sprinkled in from his present historical moment. The common theme that consistently angers me in how these women came to power is that there were no male successors to take over power. This makes it seem like they thought "What the hell? Let's have a woman be my successor. If she drives the kingdom into the ground, I'll be dead so I don't care." Yet, I am having to pushback on my own knee jerk reaction. These women would be prepared for the throne. Many of them, like Dido and Cleopatra, are known for being just rulers who were admired by their subjects. This admiration does not only show up in Boccaccio's work, but also Christine de Pizan's City of Ladies, etc. With this background knowledge, perhaps, I need to be a little less critical of these female leaders from antiquity to the present historical moment. Maybe then, women would rule the world.

Dante use of the bleeding bush in Cantos XIII can be interpreted to symbolize human destruction of the earth. The personification of a plant "[crying] out, "Why did you break me?" (ln 33). Using a 2020 lense, this phrase struck me as an explaination for climate change. Plants do not have a voice, and therefore they can not speak out to us. We are only able to recognize the consequences when major changes begin. This interaction highlights the fragility of the our mindless action's consequences. Dante's personification of the bush allows for the bush to respond to the injustice.The creation of dialogue is beneficial to understanding each other and how we treat each other.

Usually, I love Shakespeare, but I have never been as bored as I was while reading Richard III. The long soliloquies in Act Three sounded like Charlie Brown's parents were inside my head. Perhaps, I am a simple reader, but there are so many different characters that I was confused, even in Acts One and Two. In my brain, the women all lumped together. The male characters talked way too long to keep me interested. I was distracted by my modern lense on differently abled people. I struggled with the fact that the cultural norms associated the atypical traits with the mother's bad morals. The dramatization of Richard III as an evil deformed man sells. Shakespeare made Richard III exude evil from the outside in. Looking at the play within context, the Tudor's slander of Richard III is present in almost every line. Shakespeare's Richard III can not be labelled as a historically accurate source, but this play speaks volumes to the attitudes about Richard III post-mortem. These attitudes have perpetuated into modern times, which demonstrate the impact of the Tudor's hegemony. This result forces me to pose the questions: what impact do fiction or dramatized literary works play in historical moments, and what gets remember? In this case, an extremely biased truth.

I have several issues with The Book of Margery Kempe. The overall lack of validation in Margery's story represents the cultural value placed on women during the Medieval period. Margery deviates from the norm by communicating directly to God and not caring for sex and children. Margery's direct communication created a problem for the Catholic Church, yet the Church found a loophole to double check her validity: she had to share her visions with a clergy member, who would then decipher her visions for her. Margery loved God so much after receiving her visions that she didn't want to have sex anymore. The male author felt the need to include that Margery was willing to do whatever her husband desired in order to be "obedient" (47). This paints Margery as a precious little wife, who does not have a brain. In addition to being treated as a second class human or an animal, Margery is to referred as "the creature" reaffirming her status as less than human. Yet, all that Margery craved was "to be respected" by her peers (44). I wonder if she was a man, how would she have been perceived by the heirarchy of the Church? I am fairly certain that she would have been able to preserve her own life story instead of beg some priest to record it for FOUR years. Margery Kempe would probably be considered a Church Father if she was a man, but she was a woman. We are lucky to have the account that we do.

A vision of the lily white woman is pervasive in the Medieval Romance genre. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales stains this concept of a pure innocent woman. Chaucer paints the opposite of picture. Chaucer's tales indicates the cultural value within sharing a raunchy story with peers vs. a tame story told at a family dinner. Which story can the true cultural value be derived from? Both.

Chaucer's depiction of women as the impure adulteress throughout the various tales reinforces the Medieval cultural value of the lily white woman. He does this through the contrast from the virgin queen of Medieval Romance through the poor married whore. The usage of the dichotomy of virgin and whore is not unique to Chaucer and Medieval Romance, but the comparison is revelant. The Pardoner's role within the Canterbury Tales capitalizes on the cuckcold making.

Relationships between knight and king were sustained through a simple reward system, similar to that of the king and his hunting dogs. The function of knights and hunting dogs parallel. Both act as agents, always on standby, ready to serve their master, and if they do a sufficient job, then they will receive a reward. After a successful hunt, the hunting hounds are rewarded with "the finest fells" (Stone, ln. 1360). The entire plot of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight relies on the testing of the kingly-knightley contract. Originally, Gawain agrees to play the Green Knight's game called "I Bet You Can't Chop My Head Off" to demonstrate loyalty to King Arthur (Stone, ln. 339-342). In the Green Chapel,"the man" aka the Green Knight in disguise tests Gawain by asking him to watch over his house while he goes to hunt. If Gawain does a good job and does not breach the contract between knight and lord, then the Green Knight will reward him with "whatever [he] wins in the woods" (Stone, st. 45). Both of these occasions test Gawain's loyalty. Yet, Gawain would be rewarded for his good behavior in the same manner as the hounds. The behavior of knights and dogs were regulated in the same manner. The message that this correlation relays is: Be a good boy, and you will get a treat.

In reflection of last semester's journal process, I have plenty of room for improvement. This semester, I plan to be more intentional with my writing. Idealy, I want to deeply engage with each text read throughout the course. In order to execute inciteful responses, I would like to relate the texts with popular culture and to my life. Relating the texts rather than creating a close reading response, would allow me to test my creativity. I must be careful to jump to interpretation and analysis without thoroughly explaining my rationale behind my conclusions.

My principle goal for my Spring 2020 journal posts is to: Be Intentional. Being intentional requires me to take writing my journals seriously, and acknowledge the importance the journals play in the writing process. Knowing this, I recognize that every journal post is not going to be my finest writing, but the weaker journal posts will allow me growth as a writer. Therefore, I must be serious when writing, and trust the process that journal writing creates.