Throughout this second half of the semester I have throughly enjoyed your common place book and amount of information that you chose to include. Really a wonderful job overall! The time and effort you put into your entries really shows and for many of them your personal interests shine through as well. I began reviewing the entries that I have commented on since “The Picture of Dorian Grey” and it appears that much of what you include could be broken down direct quotes from the novel and your own commentary on those, various outside critical commentary, and some really intriguing images. I really enjoyed this format because you build off of each aspect and work to interconnect the elements you chose to include in your entry. In terms of the content I thought the critical commentary was focused on a lot of your own particular interests and there seemed to be some variation between each entry. I can see some focus on the Victorian anxieties such as your focus on the New Women in “The Beetle” and then the potential critique of this in “Dracula”. After reviewing your entries some of the questions I would raise are: Was it helpful to begin your entries by examining various quotes that struck you as interesting and then to expand off of those? Would you view your entries as indicative of you as a person of the thought provoking nature of them?
I have really enjoyed your entries throughout the semester and thought you did a great job putting them all together! I reviewed your entries and it seems like the general format of your posts are to include some direct quotes from the novel, a form of critical commentary, and to also include some images. I thought you did a great job of connecting this elements and showing what the theme or topic of your entry was. A majority of the critical commentary seems to be sourced from the novel or the British Library (which is a source that I also heavily relied on). The topics of discussion seemed to be spread out but also seemed to be connected by focusing on topics such as the societal views during the time in which a novel was written or also the opinions of those who read the novel during the time it was published. This was something that I enjoyed because it is something I also chose to focus on. I thought it was great that you were able to take a broad view from the critical commentary and connect it back directly to the novel. That being said a question that I would bring up would be: Did you find it easy to be able to pull from the novel first to come up with a theme for your entry or to use the outside resources first? I know that everyone has a different way in formatting things so maybe the answer to this could explain more about your critical thinking process when making these entries.
