What are the advantages of Formalism? What are its disadvantages?

Formalism has a lot of advantages, When we would like to analyse a literary work, for whatever purpose,  we have many differents approaches. We can go about the historical context, cultural context, even we can get about abstractism. And so, we can approach the literal work from the point of view of the syntaxis, the structuralism and the former things of the work.

Formalism advantages have to do with the easy of work when analysing the work. You don’t have to really think or research about any other thing, not about the author's life, cultural or historical context, you just have to use a kind of “template”. You have to understand about how syntax, vocabulary and other things affect the novel, or play or whatever you want to analyze.

But also we cannot rest with just doing a formal analysis and thinking that that will do enough. An formal analysis will just do it without taking into account the historical and cultural context that the author lived.

It just do the form, not the message that the author tried to say.

Blog #5 Why is No Exit's hell different from the traditional view of it? What was the author's intent?

The author’s purpose was to let us see that our ideas, our images of something, our prejudices of the things we “are suppose to know”. He tries to question our foundations of knowledge. Why we say that in hell there are tools of torture? Why we say there’s fire all around hell and it’s underground?  At the end no one knows for sure what it’s in the after world. It can be nothingness, heaven and hell, reincarnation, no one knows.

He starts to shatter our foundations when he presents a hell without hell. A simple place without tortures or fire, without eternal pain or suffering.  Just people. That also makes you think. Why only people? Maybe hell is about pain and suffering, and that is delivered by people. That’s deep and makes you think what kind of living beings are we.

It also makes you think about how could that hell be bad, how can that could inflict us damage for eternity. And there’s no real answer. For every single person there's a different truth for what's to come.

What new insights did you gain as you wrote your essay?

I´ve learn that there are a lot of ways of setting your essay; from the thesis statement and how you can support it to where you have to make comments and how many and how you give examples. It also is new for me the way we wrote the essay. I was more of a simpler way of writing essays, “Thesis statement, opinion/supportive sentence/(maybe example sentence)/conclusion sentence”

This opened my thoughts about my writing skills and how I could improve to be more professional and neat while doing my essays. This also showed me how to make essays for all type of works, not only English A or Literature class, but for my upcoming future.

This will support me along the university and what is left of high school, and although i haven’t learned everything and won’t happen until i finish my high school. But in the meanwhile I am going to start focusing my attention on making my writing better for the upcoming essays.

I think knowing the archetypes and the theory of the hero's path help us identify and recognize things in different manner we usually do. In this way we can come up with different perspectives over a single character and we can come up with different reasons why is he doing or thinking, and even come up with some theory of what is going to happen.

Also having all this classification at our disposal we could be inspired to write some story about a hero, following the hero’s path theory and accomplishing it almost without any effort on getting ideas to make a plot.

Finally all this knowledge will help us at the time we read, or at the time we write. We can use this as our guidelines or as something we don't want to cross, or get close to. So this information isn't at all useless, if it was ever think at it that way, but some useful information for our lives and our future as reader or writer.

Blog 2

The cultural and historical context affects a lot. It defines how the author thinks and sees the world, how his ideologies behave and how he think the world is. Also cultural contexts affects things like religion, traditions, common things in their region, and so on.

It also limits your point of view. People living in different regions or countries will not see things the same way. For example some japanese see anime different from US people do.

For example in Naruto there's a lot of cultural and religion throughout the manga. Not only that, their way of thinking like the acknowledging and the autosuperacion mentality.

I don't think this is bad at all, plasmin our cultural and historical context in the way we leave our words for years must be influenced by our way we lived and so it definitely does that, either you want it or you don't. 

What would you consider Literature? Why? Give some examples.

I think literature is the way we express or leave something behind. Not everything like art, movies. But written things, like novels, articles, books. Things like this that represent our times and our present issues, that express our way of living and express our ideas and thinking.

Literature is our way of leaving a mark of ourselves and the environment we live on. The way authors, poets, novelist show the world their ideas, ideologies, ways of thinking, and opinions. It's something that sends messages sometimes so simple like the sun is a ball of fire, but other times so deep like the philosophy of our existence.

There's no real limit to what literature can transmit to others. It all depend about the author and what he wants to tell to the people. Because like some may want to only say entertaining things, without any debt or true meaning, while others may want to show you how the world really is or how it works behind the scene.

So literature is a way of expressing ideas. To transmit them and leave something behind. To not only tell about the author's ideas or mentalities, but also the time he lived, where and what he was living. Is our expression and our mark to this world.