World Literature

Although this was a tough year of school, our teacher, Ms. Agriesti, made it easier. English this year was one of my favorite classes because of its engaging nature. We read Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Beowulf, and Things Fall Apart in her class. We also explored the concept of storytelling throughout the year by reading things from multiple different authors and regions. I particularly liked World Literature because of the many different types of works we explored. Before this class, I had never read a book by an African author before and I never heard of British colocalization from their perspective. I will always remember the importance of storytelling and remaining open to other perspectives. I loved my English class this year.

This assignment was one of the most thoughtful in all of my classes in 9th grade. It took countless ideas and thoughts about the nature of evil to generate ideas to write about in this piece. To create this work I first had to plan the essay by creating a bullet-pointed diagram talking about what I would write about in my essay. However, in order to create this plan, I would first need to decide on an argument and create reasons to support it. This proved to be difficult for me because I had never actually thought about evil in depth. This is one of the reasons I picked this assignment. Bad events happen all the time, like a robbery or tax fraud, however evil events, which are by definition profoundly immoral and wicked, happen much less. In creating this essay I explored the definition of evil and morality. After coming up with an elementary definition of evil in my mind, I began to try and reason why Grendel was evil. For me this was the easiest part, I just used the events described in the book and connected them to my reasoning. In the end, I believe I did a good job on this assignment.

This work forced me to explore an important concept that I otherwise would not have learned about. My goal for this piece of work was to explore Evil and to explore Grendel through an essay. This essay met my standards for an essay and exceeded my goals of exploring evil. Compared to my other work this year, this was the most difficult one for me to handle. I believe that this work shows that I am not afraid of tackling large and difficult topics.

For this assignment, we could choose between 8 different tasks including creating a travel brochure, creating a game, writing a compare and contrast essay exploring Beowulf and another hero, an epic hero how-to guide, creating an Instagram account for Beowulf, creating trading cards, creating a children’s story, and writing an essay exploring whether Grendel was truly evil. Most other people chose to stay away from the essays (essays take a lot of work) and do tasks like creating trading cards or a children’s story. When other people read my work I want them to see how our definitions of evil may vary from person to person. In the essay, one of the reasons I had was that Grendel had a dark personality. However, having a dark personality doesn’t mean you’re evil necessarily, it is a combination of actions and morals that determine if somebody is evil. It was just my opinion that Grendel was evil in the poem. I wanted to show how the definition of evil can vary depending on our morals. Since this assignment was about proving whether Grendel was evil, I didn’t really go into detail about this, however, I hope that my essay inspires some more people to think about what evil is and what their values and morals are.

One thing I would like to improve upon (with this or other work) is my writing. If I had to do this piece again I would probably change my hook. I was honestly unsure about how to hook people into reading such a dark essay. Other than that, I also wish I talked more about the thinking I did while exploring evil and how evil exists in our lives. Next time, I am going to make sure that the format of my essay makes sense and is correct and also add more information about the definition of evil I had.