I don’t have much left to say concerning how the semester went, so I want to just talk about the topics given for this final reflection. During last class, we briefly discussed why it is important to read literature about mental illness. One of the points brought up by my classmates that I really agreed with was that writing about the experience of mental illness can communicate what it’s actually like to have that mental illness than more scientific writing. By just knowing the symptoms of an illness, it’s hard to know how that actually impacts someone’s day-to-day life. I think that this has the potential to foster a lot of empathy in a reader, especially one who doesn’t know anyone who has a particular mental illness or has never experienced mental health issues. Two of the texts we read this semester, Out of the Crazywoods and Marbles described the experienced of the authors coping with bipolar disorder, which is still a very stigmatized condition. Maybe through reading these and similar texts, people can become more understanding and empathetic towards people with mental health issues.
This class was the first English class I’ve taken where copyright was discussed any further than “don’t copy other’s work, it’s plagiarism”. I didn’t deal with copyright restrictions much with my project, as Ten Days in a Mad-House is in the public domain, but it has been interesting to see how other students have worked to publish their projects within the restrictions. None of us would have had to deal with the copyright of our primary sources if we had not used a website format for the project, but I think the format benefitted the project as a whole. I feel like the ePortfolio site made the digital edition a bit more engaging, and probably helped with navigating annotations for specific lines of text. If someone were to come across one of these digital editions before the original text, and process the text through the additional pieces (critical intro, annotations, etc.) then it would likely change how they viewed the text as a whole. In addition, I now have at least a basic understanding of WordPress and how to format a website. I’m still not sure if I’ll use this site for anything else in the future, but if I do decide to add more to it, I’ll have a basic understanding of how.
MK, you make some good points about what it is we can learn from first-hand accounts of mental illness that we cannot really learn any other way. And the fact that these are intentionally creative, highly crafted texts adds so much depth to that. And yes, it is true that if we were not using WordPress we might not have to think about copyright; that is the whole point: working at this advanced level, it is important to consider what the real-world concerns are of this field, right? When literary critics publish, they are creating public-facing writing where the stakes are real around issues of who owns a text. It’s great that you have gotten a sense of that, even if indirectly. I’m glad you chose Bly; it was really fun to read your edition and learn your take on it. Also, I’m glad you have some basic understanding of WordPress that you can take with you!