Monday, October 19, 2015

Literary Merit


Literary Merit: The quality shared by all works of fiction that are considered to have aesthetic value. The concept is considered criticized as being subjective since personal taste determine aesthetic value.

-Definition from College Board

To me I feel as though a literary merit is a novel that teaches us a lesson. Remember when we were in elementary school and at the end of the novel there was always a lesson or the moral of the novel? For instance, The Boy Who Cried Wolf--if you lie about needing help and when the time comes when you are in danger, help will not come. Then when we get older we read books like The Lord of the Flies--one still exist even though they were masked but an uncivilized society. We can always take a work of literature and relate back to real life situations that may relate to us.

The novel Black Boy depicts a character that is put into a society of racial inequality. The literary merit behind this book is how an individual survives in a society filled with prejudice and intolerance in the environment. To be completely honest, the narrator is a mischievous child who nobody likes to put up with. He went through a large amount of different jobs, his family members have a hard time dealing with him, and he constantly moves from household to household. Depicting that for him it's pretty hard to survive in any given environment. Living down south was not for him so he decided to find a better lifestyle up north. Finding that racism did not exist as much in the north than it did in the south. I would not say I personally learned a lesson from this novel but the overall lesson was basically survival of the fittest in a prejudice society.

Sunday, October 4, 2015

Blog to the World

I'm an athlete. I don't like to read. I barely ever want to eat and sleeping is so essential. But since I'm suppose to write about this blog instead of sleeping, I guess I'll do so.

The book I chose is Black Boy by Richard Wright. I didn't pick it for any particular reason but I don't regret picking it. Originally I was like "oh my goodness this book is going to be too long I really don't have time to be reading this" but, then I thought about the summer reading books and realized this book is a peace of cake. Personally, I like to read books that are based off of racial inequalities just so I can get a deeper feel for how people of my race lived in that time period. Seeing as I'm a lazy reader, I'll only read books that'll interest me and this book is giving me justice. 

My only goal for this blog is to make it everyone's favorite. I'm only kidding. I would like to develop my writing, take it to the next level. With the help of my peers, I feel as though different insight would further get me to the next level with writing. I don't want to be the basic writer and do what basic writers do. I want my writing to engage readers and really "ooo,ahh" the audience. 



- Kincaid E. McLaren