Culture

Reading all these different books in this class allows you to get a feel of the different cultural heritages.  For example, when we had to read Masks, I found it very difficult to understand and follow.  The names in the book were very different from names I would know.  Also, the writing and story line was just different than a book written here in the U.S.  I believe this book was a Chinese book, and I had a hard time following it.  In my Liberal Arts class, LAS 201, we learned a lot about different cultures such as Hmong, African Americans, and others.  We looked at how they were treated and discriminated against and ways to help stop the discrimination.  This relates somewhat to the theme in this class, World Literature, because here we are reading books from different cultures and getting a feel for how their writing is compared to books here.  Different cultures have different ways of writing and what they write about.  If there is a lot of fighting or discrimination going on in the country, maybe the book an author writes is about that.  Having learned a little about some of these cultures before taking this class has helped me a little bit in trying to understand where the author is coming from and also understand the story itself.