About the Job

In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Hi, my name is Job Sing. Thanks for reading even this much!

This blog came out of an assignment from a class called multicultural literature. In this class we read a lot of really good pieces of literature and found ourselves really immersing ourselves in the cultures that they presented. For each individual culture we wrote a blog post about our thoughts and our recommendations for teachers regarding a certain theme that we noticed in each individual piece that we read. Now we get to share those with you in our website that we created for these blog posts.

The term global has changed throughout the course of history. When one says global today, they mean that exactly. The entire world has been connected and a person in China can read instantly what a man in Mexico writes. This is the global literature that we experience on a daily basis, true sharing of cultures and in many cases full cultural diffusion. However, in the past, no culture was in any way connected in the way that it is now. The cultures of the world are very different and we can view the differences by looking at the literature that they wrote. As a student in a multicultural literature class, I get to experience literature as very few people have ever done in the history of the world: I get to experience many global cultures by reading literature.

What’s more than that, I got to read the difference and the changing of the tides as the world became more connected and boundaries became less defined in literature. The world, beginning in the 20th century was able to share their cultures like never before in history. The best place to witness the change, the best seats in the house, so to speak, is reserved for the literature historian. Literature reflects the moods of the era that people live in. During the romantic era, writers showcased in their flowery and naturalistic writing how the people those days rebelled against the rigid laws of the past and came to love their natural state of things. During the modern period, the depressed and moody writings of the authors in that time period depicted the terror that people felt for the future. In this time period, the writings of the most prominent authors of the world seemed to have characteristics of many different cultures and it became harder and harder to pinpoint a specific culture that each writing represented.

Now as a future English teacher it is important to understand the difficulties in teaching about 20th century literature. This period of history has issues with finding its individuality with the various different cultures that are portrayed in it. Each different culture in this era had an author that portrayed not just that culture, but a different culture that had influenced his writing earlier in his career. It is difficult but necessary to find the trail of cultural tropes back to the source of the identity of the author’s cultural influence.