Peer Review

3 Strengths:

1)  Brooks did a very good job of showing his reader that although he was ready to enter into a new environment, he had animosity for what would lie ahead of him.

2)  By using the personal I, he showed his reader that what he was writing were direct experiences, which gave the reader more personal connection to the piece.

3)  Brooks did an excellent job of transitioning the piece from one major topic of entering college to moving off campus.

3 Weaknesses:

1)  There were some small errors where one word similar to what it appeared he meant was in place of what I feel he could have meant.  This made few but some sections awkward.

2)  Although it helped the piece as a whole, I did not feel that plans for the future were necessary in him speaking of his journey so far at Eckerd.

3)  While developing his piece, I feel that he foreshadowed a small amount to much of fear that he had for how his social life would turn out.

Revision Plan:

Because his strengths far outweighed his weaknesses, I feel that the largest area that needs to be improved upon is simply him going back and finding where word choice made the piece awkward at points.  Beyond that, the piece was able to be intriguing for me, the reader while also telling his story and because of that, I feel that little else is needing of being improved upon.

Hero's Journey

Stephen Leinhaas

Mrs. Robinson

Analytical and Persuasive Writing

10 February 2004

A Change in Lifestyle

Moving into a new place can be one of the scariest experiences that an individual may have to go through in their life.  Like all animals of the world, the human becomes accustomed to living in their specific and precise environment.  Certain habits are grown and the people become familiar.  In such a small and beautiful environment, it is hard to see everything that the world had to offer.  It was this realization that led him to a school far away where he could grow his experiences in life.  After living in a small rural town for nearly the first eighteen years of his life, it was definitely a momentous occasion to move away from the place that he called home and into a place he would one day love. 

Coming into this new world for him meant simply that he would immediately meet and become surrounded by the strangers that would grow into peers.  Like every other student on this small campus, he was assigned to a dorm to live in for his first year at college.  Upon moving into the Delta Copley dorm at Eckerd College, he was quick to realize just how different this would be for him and prepared to settle into his new home.  Soon after being confronted with a completely new environment, another change was made to his lifestyle when his roommate moved into a different dorm and he was faced with the choice of moving to a different dorm or having someone move in with him.  The choice was made and he would then move to Epsilon Blakely. 

 Switching again meant not much more than that he would meet his new dorm mates outside of the traditional bonding environment in which the school supported.  He then met the people who would grow to become his closest friends by simply spending time together and over time, learning that the dorm he had moved into was more than what he had hoped for in a new environment.  By being surrounded by people of the same life constitutions about how they wanted to act in this new environment, he quickly found his crowd and began to expand from there.

Living without supervision led him to begin to express himself as someone who embraces a fast and furious lifestyle.  This positive of the college environment came with a negative of having the constant opportunity to be distracted from his studies.  Along with becoming well known amongst his peers, he also managed to quickly regress from the fairly studious high school student he had been to a vagrant college student without the inspiration to do his work.  With a false aspiration of truly living instead of looking towards the future, he quickly became wrapped up in living like he had no obligations to his classes other than simply attending.

At the point where his future at Eckerd College was at a crossroads, it was he who made the decision to consciously calm his ways.  Without the extra effort put into the end of the semester, returning to Eckerd would not be a possibility for him any longer.  Because of this, it was with the friends around him that they realized the error in their ways.  A strong push to finish the semester on an upswing resulted in that specific semester turning out not being a complete failure.  By managing to salvage what could have been a completely wasted semester, he realized that now he would have to return home, to his original environment.

Being home gave him the opportunity to separate himself from that temptation for a while.  Returning to his crew, he realized just how badly he had performed during his first semester of college compared to his peers.  With all of his friends from high school spread throughout the Northeast, they had all kept close and consistently visited and been there to remind each other of how to respond to the temptation college brings.  He felt that he had not been mature enough to deal with that temptation as of yet.  By spending time at home, however, it gave him the opportunity to relearn the finer points of success and how he would need to act in the future in order to succeed.

The biggest lesson learned in the first semester of freshman year was nothing from any of his four classes, but instead moderation.  With this experience passed by, he realized that before returning to another semester in the sun, he would need to seriously reform and learn to finish work before doing things that are fun.  College is not a place where a person can simply show up and expect to prosper, work needed to be done and wasn’t, but after learning the difference between success and failure, he moves into the new semester with his head held high and prepared to face the adversities and temptations before him.

This first reading from Christopher Vogler's "The Writer's Journey" features a structure for how film and storytelling today of the classic hero follows a basic outline.  Vogler's outline consists of three basic acts which each are made of smaller and more specific stages which the main character must also move through.  The three acts break the story off into introduction, climax, and conclusion.  The smaller and more detailed sections of each act being detailed out themselves.  With the hero's journey well defined, it is quite simple to relate how many different characters in literature are easily related to what Vogler is speaking about.

By setting out an outline for all hero's in general, Vogler does however restrict the definition of a literary or fictional hero to a great extent though.  By classifying and stating that all great heroes are faces with all three acts and further all of their sections, many of the people who are considered in today's society to be heroes are taken out of the discussion. People such as firemen and other life-risking professions would be very difficult to cast in such a way to portray them as a hero using this criteria.  In that position where an individual is trained to overcome the obstacle in front of them, would Vogler classify them as a hero? Because of how specific Vogler gets with his definition, it would be very difficult in many other mediums to portray the classic American as a hero in their natural environment.

Vogler's piece does however connect with outside sources including popular books and films in modern popular culture.  His idea of the hero being forced out of their normal element in order to overcome a dilemma can be found in many different stories popular today.  Each individual section of his three main themes are often found in movies and books, with all of them together occurring far less commonly.   Because of this, it is questionable as to why Vogler classifies that all of these themes can found in every modern piece instead of just classifying that his idea of an outline is very basic and open to interpretation.

Questions:

1)  Why does Vogler choose to declare his idea of the Hero's Journey to be so precise as a system, as in, while allowing variation, he proclaims that his idea , in some way is ever present in literature and cinema?

2)  When referring to Vogler's step 12, Returning with the elixir, does he consider it to more common that the elixir would be a literal object or a figurative lesson?

3)  Can Vogler's Hero's Journey be incorporated into different themes of literature including making a tragic love story into a man or woman's journey?