UW 20

My UW20 course just ended and I learned a lot of things about women's autobiography that I wasn't aware of before.
I didn't realize that one of my favorite genre of books is considered autobiography (autobiographical novel) so I enjoyed the class much more than I thought I would when I realized the topic was women's autobiography and I got to write my research paper on one of my favorite books, The Bell Jar. I also enjoyed the other readings for this class, including Sylvia Plath's diary, Meatless Days, and Baghdad Burning. The class made me realize how many types of interesting autobiography are out there, including blogs.

As far as my writing goes, I learned about things like a concession, "so what?" factor, and lit analysis which are key components to successful writing. I have learned to back up my argument in my writing better by linking everything back to the thesis statement and defending it, which was something I did not do effectively before.

I also learned to analyze these types of writings much better, especially with our activities with Meatless Days and the other short stories. When doing my research paper I also learned many more things present in The Bell Jar that I had not noticed before.

The library sessions for this class also taught me how to successfully utilize what the library has to offer, specifically research databases, which helped a lot for our second paper, which was comparing and contrasting two short stories.

Overall, I perfected my ability to complete research and write, and gained a better sense of the term "autobiography"

Baghdad Burning

Baghdad Burning is written by a 25 year old Iraqi woman who goes by the pseudonym "Riverbend". It is a blog that has just been turned into a book, still in the blog format. Riverbend began her blog with the start of the Iraq war and shares her views on the war and her personal experiences--how her life has been effected. She talks about how complicated the situation really is and her hate for the American people and the Bush administration. Regardless of how you feel on the issues addressed in the book, Riverbend successfully makes you think about the situation in Iraq, even if you have no interest in politics. She uses extremes when talking about her emotions and she obviously displays an extreme bias. She talks about her hatred toward Americans and regardless of if you are a democrat, republican, independent, or don't even care it makes you become defensive about your country and dislike what she is saying. As time continues, Riverbend's entries become more angry and bitter and she also becomes "cocky" with her entries, addressing the people who comment her blog entries. She is angry because people have a false impression of Iraq--she talks about how on tv there are pictures of dirt roads when there are paved highways and when she loses electricity it is a big deal. Ironically, Riverbend writes in impeccable English that is better than the English of the average American.
This book is an example of autobiography used as therapy. I think Riverbend uses her blog to cope with her situation. Whether or not someone likes this type of book depends on whether or not they can get along with the author's personality.

I think for my book review I'll focus on how Riverbend writes in her blog to deal with the situation and how the book being a blog is important because it captures the emotion in it. I think I'll also talk about how the honesty of it, regardless of the extreme bias, makes you think about the situation in Iraq, which I think is part of the point of the blog. I'll focus on those aspects and then go into other detail like the literary devices used that we discussed in class.