My Paper

Retellings

I will take away from this class something I will personally enjoy in my life and rely on in my teaching career—the context of literature. When I first signed up for this class, I thought it would be another required class where my passion level would be moderate to none. After the first two days, I realized I was wrong, very wrong. This class immediately wrenched me from my customary way of reading stories and showed me how to perceive and understand with a different eye.

The class gave me the context for understanding literature. For me, it is like a closet in which I can hang every thing I read from now on in its order and in appropriate relationship with every other story. By focusing on the theme that every story is a retelling of another story, this class revealed to me how the great literary characters and great stories repeat themselves and merge into one broad retelling of the human condition.

In literature, different characters ask the same questions about how to live life, and writers for centuries have been attempting to answer those same questions. Stories build on one another. Full enjoyment and understanding come when the reader can catch all the allusions. It’s like standing before Monet’s Water Lilies, experiencing the immediate emotional impact, and then stepping back to analyze the meaning of this painting and knowing where it comes from.

Hamlet stands out in our literature. But he did not come suddenly into the mind of William Shakespeare in 1599 as a new being. Shakespeare instead took the archetype of the killing of the king to journey into the Prince of Denmark. Hamlet stands as one of the most important characters in English literature as well as world literature because Hamlet is universal and represents a certain type of human character. The Russian Dostoyevsky modeled The Brothers Karamazov after Hamlet.

Hamlet’s story is so widespread that it even reappears in a Disney animated movie, The Lion King. In both of these stories, the father is killed by his brother and the son comes back for revenge. These stories have very similar plots, but the endings are very different. In Hamlet, Hamlet ends up dying from poison making it a tragedy. In The Lion King, Simba, the son, regains the throne and all is well in the end, hence creating the “fairy tale ending.” Interestingly enough, both of these stories are very popular. One reason I speculate this is because they have the same plot and archetypes. As humans, we tend to like the things we know. We like the familiar. From before Hamlet to the late 20^th century premier of Lion King, the killing of the king archetype continues to pick up momentum.

This class has let me become the reader I have always longed to be. Something always held me back. It was not just socializing, which is something that comes quite naturally to me. Now I see how all stories connect to create layers of meaning about the questions we ask on how we are to live. It is as if I have been given the missing bricks in my literary foundation.

As a teacher, I am going to use what I have learned in this class to help my young readers develop their reading closets of context. For example, I will encourage them to see that when they watch the Lion King, they are immersed in a story thousands of years old and that knowing the details and the questions of the old stories only adds to the richness of the new story. Through this, I want to embed in my students a certainty of their own place in the great retelling of the human story.