Commentary: When I was originally assigned the ADE (annotate digital edition) I was excited to use it to talk about Sylvia Plath’s breakout novel The Bell Jar. However, I, ironically, was assaulted twice by a patient at the psychiatric hospital I worked at and ended up with two concussions over the course of a month during the semester. I knew that my ability to write, comprehend, edit, and remember was hindered, but I did not realize the full extent to which this occurred until I looked over this project. Upon reviewing my ADE I remembered about 5% of the process of completing the project. When I was looking over the introduction, I thought it was somewhat well written (apart from being rife with punctuation error and grammatical mistakes) but never managed to delve deeper than the visceral interpretation of the novel. This is exceedingly unlike me, as I tend to delve as deep as physically possible into a text. I liken my general style of analysis to the disembowelment of a text— its borderline assault. But for this text, I barely scraped the surface. And as for my annotations, they were barely cogent enough to be veritably defined as examinations of the text— much less annotations. I think another mistake I made was including far too many outside sources that were not literary criticisms. This drew away from my focus on the text, and overall made my analysis less successful. For my conclusion and reflection, I think that these mirrored the overall quality of the rest of my assignment: visceral, subpar, and poorly written. I hope, and believe I will be capable of, changing those things in my capstone. First, I am moving away from my original subject (ECT) and focusing more on gender. Second, I am using many of the same quotes, but I will be using literary criticism, primary sources, and novels to contextualize the topic in a comprehensive forward. Finally, I will be using the conclusion to make broader claims and the reflection to talk about how and why I made the choices I did. I will be utilizing my original artwork from the project, as that satisfied my general vision at the time and still does. Overall, I think this will make a much more comprehensive project and will satisfy my capstone requirements.
