Final Essay Reflection

Good Afternoon All,

I just finished typing up my reflection for our final paper and wanted to share it with you all. Happy Studying!

Choosing The Last American Vampire as my novel to write a Reader-Response criticism about had its perks. Since the novel itself is very historical I was able to focus on the historical aspect as well as the Reader-Response aspect. If I were to write this paper as a New Historical paper it would include many different things. For starters, I would have a large focus on the time period. For this novel it would be very difficult to do so since it takes place over the course of five centuries dating back as early as the 1500s. It would be difficult to determine what was popular at the time, what outside sources I should use to benefit my analysis, and my paper would greatly exceed the seven page requirement. I would use more quotations about America (although my paper does have a lot of those already there is still a massive amount that I did not use). This version of the essay would not necessarily care about the life of Henry Sturges. It would, however, want to focus on why his life was so important to each historical period which I only briefly touched on in the Reader-Response version.

            If my paper was focused on a cultural perspective I would run into many of the same issues. I would have to pull out all of the political views of each president of the United States since its creation and how that connects to the novel as a whole. I would then apply each individual political theory back onto the novel and analysis how that effects it. This would be extremely difficult when it came to finding credible sources for a novel that was just published in January of 2015. There is no criticism of the novel as it is and this would make it ten times harder to write. A New Historical or Cultural version of this paper would be too hard to write and would more than likely be frustrating and it would not be anywhere close to my writing abilities.

            This is why I chose to write a Reader-Response paper on The Last American Vampire. As a reader of the novel I was greatly impacted on the way it rewrote history using vampiredom. I am very big in reading fantasy novels and when given the chance to write an essay about fantasy and history I jumped on it. Using Reader-Response did cause me to run into some problems. Since there is no criticism of this novel in the MLA Bibliography I resorted to using the genre in my paper which ultimately helped me decipher my thesis. Having such a complex thesis made it so I paid extra attention to that was going on in each paragraph. Although this is one of the most complex papers I have ever written, I found that my writing skills do not only exist in the creative sense. I can also write professionally and I cannot wait to expand that ability.