Final Reflective Essay
English 111
Dr. McCoy
12/7/24
The Semester began skeptically for myself, I was unsure how this collection of books could in any way be connected to the 2008 housing crisis, or any economic event in general. It felt absurd Shakespeare could know anything about the housing crisis. My thoughts exactly were about how a writer from hundreds of years ago could know anything at all about a housing crisis. Or how a book about a young slave girl could in any way be related to a market crash. It did not seem likely to me that it could be possible, however, over the semester I realized it was not that they knew about it, but about the themes. Historically speaking, in both Shakespeare’s time, and the time that A Mercy is set housing was very hard to come by if you were disenfranchised in any way. If you did manage to have housing, you could be easily expelled. This meant that over the course of the semester my skepticism of being unsure whether Shakespeare or any of the other books could have any insight changed. In the stories, it’s not about an economic crisis like the housing crisis, it’s about the themes and the lessons. The lessons being expulsion, good faith, bad faith, trust, and human greed.
To this day… I am still somewhat skeptical because to me there seems to be no true connection, it seems as if sometimes we’re pulling sticks to see what connection is “made”. My skepticism is less than it used to be of course, I do not say this to “trash” or disparage this class, I do believe that this course provides very important and valuable lessons about the world (as mentioned above). I have come to see the importance of this class over the semester. That growth has come from reading the courses assigned books and doing assignments in class. Also, from realizing that not everything is as obvious as it may seem and that there is much more to everything than meets the eye.
As I said, I started the semester thinking that this class was not going to provide me with anything valuable, that it was just going to be a random class taken only because it was required. However, as we got into King Lear I began to see the importance of these readings. The act of expulsion King Lear faced, just as homeowners did, all because his daughters, or the people giving out predatory loans and mortgages, wanted more power or money for themselves. This began to show me the connection between the two topics is one of human greed. Greed is one thing that connects these two unlike events. It is human greed that tears and tears and tears at those less fortunate until there is nothing left.
King Lear also focuses on the act of expelling someone or removing someone or something from a location or group. This is made clear by King Lear himself being expelled from his own kingdom after splitting it between his daughters. Again, when Edmund tried to expel Edgar from his legitimacy through various plots and schemes. King Lear is a good example of both expulsion and human greed and how they can devastate people’s lives, as did the housing crisis.
The Big Short, both the movie and the book, were useful in defining the terms needed to understand the course. Along with this, it shed light on the actions of big corporations during the troubling times of the 2008 housing crisis and recession. Whether or not you look at the “real” or “fake” stories, they are all rooted in the truth. They are all rooted in the same concept that King Lear and homeowners faced, greed. It goes over CDO’s and subprime mortgages along with many other terms that would attempt to allow someone to understand what might have caused the housing crisis. For clarities sake, a CDO is a “financial product that pools various types of debt, such as mortgages, bonds, or loans, and repackages the into trances sold to investor.” (Investopedia). Also, a subprime mortgage is “one that’s normally issued to borrowers with low credit ratings” (Investopedia). The Big Short tells that investors used CDO’s to buy and sell people’s loans to make a greater profit for themselves. Along with this, banks and higher ups would give out subprime mortgages with higher interest rates to take advantage of buyers. Greed, this book shows even more clearly that greed is the motivation behind so many terrible things.
A Mercy, A story that is so vastly different than the other two. It is focused on a Portuguese slave girl who must race against time itself to find someone who can cure her mistress. Not only is the topic of this book completely different from the previous two, but so is the theme. While the other two were heavily focused on greed, this book focuses on “expulsion”, expulsion is one of the most important course concepts that has been discussed. It has also been one of the main focuses of the class, focusing on how homeowners were expelled by banks and investors when they defaulted. While reading this book the connection between Florens, the main character, and homeowners was made multiple times throughout the time reading the novel. This is truly when I began to believe that his course had something valuable to teach me. Which is strange because I thought connecting a book about slavery to the housing crisis was absurd. However, the connections between the two were becoming clearer with people wanting power, people being expelled, and people acting in good or bad faith.
Parable of the Sower takes a lot of these course concepts and meshes them together or tries to; when reading I could only really see one course concept that stood out in relation to the housing crisis. For example, expulsion is a large proponent of this book. This includes the economic expulsion of everybody from their houses, Lauren’s (the main character) expulsion from a role model with the death of her father, and violence forcing out her family from their “community”. This book is about a post-apocalyptic world that has suffered severely from economic collapse. This economic collapse expelled almost everyone from their homes. Those who were not expelled immediately, were eventually pushed out by the rampant violence. Referring to the prompt given for this essay, when I read this novel, the only concept that pops up in reference to the housing crisis in my mind is expulsion. This does matter given GLOBE’S insistence on self-reflection because it makes me look back at all I have learned over the semester and put it all together.