Since my first reflection post, I have only written two blog posts (along with detailed comments that I wrote instead of blog post 7). Regardless, reading over those two posts and thinking about my personal engagement with the text I have a few observations.

My first observation, which I could have included in the first reflection post, is that  I am very reluctant to write about works of art. I am much more comfortable analyzing literature since I have experience doing so. I struggle to analyze art, even in comparison to literature, since I don’t even know the correct vocabulary to do so. I seem to have made the unconscious decision to focus mostly on what Dante writes and then supplement it with a painting rather than focus on the painting alongside the poetry. While I am always an advocate of pushing oneself to try something more difficult, I also kept finding myself spending too much time trying to discover the meaning of the painting over the meaning of the text.

I did find the guided questions we had to answer about art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to be very challenging and instructional. Having guided questions to focus on helped me, although I still felt very lost at some points trying to answer them. I ended up writing over a thousand words and still did not feel satisfied I had answered all of the questions in their entirety when I submitted the post. The post actually would have been a lot longer but I edited out any observations I made that did not directly relate to the questions being asked. After reading other peoples posts about their Met visits I am not sure if I made the right choice in doing so but it is the choice I made all the same.

My other major reflection isn’t so much related to the blog posts as it is related to how I am engaging with the text. I personally have been struggling to find the same deep interest I had with Inferno while reading the later two canticles. I am somewhat of a completionist, meaning I have a hard time skipping around and not studying things in their complete original order. My mom loves to poke fun at me for it. I have to read book series in order starting from the beginning even if there is no connecting plot between the books. I mention all of this seemingly unimportant information because I am still trying to discover why I am struggling so much to engage with the text and find ways to do so. In a perfect world, I would just read the parts we aren’t assigned but doing so initially left me with even more confusion. If anyone else has had this problem and has any suggestions I would love to try any ideas out.

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