Final Self-Reflective Essay
By: Samantha Kim
Jumping into the class “Lit: Expulsions and Housing Crisis” as a first year student, I had little knowledge on the concept of expulsion and the housing crisis. I didn’t know what to expect with the class. This class really deepened my understanding on these topics. We read different books such as William Shakepear’s King Lear, Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. When I saw the books we were going to read, at first I was confused on how some of these books like King Lear would connect to either of these two topics. But as we read the books it all connected back to the topics and showed many examples of the topics. In King Lear, there were many examples of expulsion. For example, King Lear who is the father of three daughters, expels his youngest daughter Cordelia. Lear expels Cordelia after she does not overly express her love for him and flatter Lear in the way he was hoping. Lear also expels The Earl of Kent after Kent questioning Lear and wanting him to reconsider his choice of expelling Cordelia. These decisions of expulsion made by King Lear created major consequences resulting in Lear losing his home, power/kingdom, and his relationships with his daughters. In the book A Mercy, the main character Florens experiences expulsion throughout the book. The expulsion from her mother and expulsion of the blacksmith whom she loved had major negative effects on her. The book The Big Short, focuses on the housing crisis. There was corruption in the US mortgage market and a collapse of the housing market due to the subprime mortgage defaults. Thus negatively affecting the people/homeowners. But positively affecting a small group of investors who profited and made a significant amount of money off of predicting the crisis. After reading these books it now makes sense on why these books were chosen for this specific course. We were able to see many examples of expulsion and the housing crisis within these books.
The book Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler and the 2008 financial crisis have many connections. Parable of the Sower takes place in a dystopian future which affects society greatly due to many factors, including economic instability, environmental degradation, inequality/classism, homelessness, and the structure of government. All of these factors created a destabilized community. All of these factors can go along with what happened after the 2008 financial crisis. The 2008 financial crisis had issues such as subprime mortgages, systematic inequality, housing bubble, and problems with financial institutions. In Parable of the Sower, there is the rich/wealthy and the poor. The rich live in safe gated communities for residents while the poor live outside the gated community walls and are struggling with extreme hardships. “But people who have no homes will build fires. Even people like us who know what fire can do will build them. They give comfort, hot food, and a false sense of security” (Butler, p. 180) The major issues with the economic systems causes an unsustainable community leading to survival and strongly affects the unity and trust within the community. This relates to how the people were affected by the housing crisis. The wealthy were able to manage their way through, while the less fortunate classes had to deal with high unemployment rates, difficulty to pay mortgages, plummeting home values, foreclosure, limited credit access, struggles to find affordable housing, and unstable housing situations. In The Big Short it states “If we’re right, people lose homes. People lose jobs. People lose retirement savings, people lose pensions.” “It reduces people to numbers. Here’s a number-every 1% unemployment goes up, 40,000 people die, did you know that?” In Parable of the Sower, Lauren lost trust in people in order to protect herself from the violence, theft, and people that would use their power in a bad faith way over those less fortunate. For example, in the book it states “Nobody’s safe, Zahra told him.No matter how pitiful they look, they can steal you naked.” (Butler, p.181) It was easier for Lauren to not trust a lot of people and prepare for the worst to try to protect herself because there were people in the community who were acting in bad faith to put themselves first during this time. This relates and connects to the 2008 housing crisis, because the homeowners and home buyers could not trust the investment banking and insurance practices anymore, because they were far too risky and CDO’s did not care about what would happen to the homeowners and buyers. There was a large number of homeowners defaulting on their mortgages and people losing trust in the financial system and banks feeling like they could not rely on them anymore. Public faith was lost in the housing market because of the lack of regulation.
All of this does matter for students to see given GLOBE’s insistence and emphasis of the importance for students to be able to have the ability to “reflect upon changes in learning and outlook over time.” It is very valuable for students to see this crisis in both a real world example being the 2008 crisis, and then the crisis in a novel form being Parable of the Sower. Both the Parable of the Sower and the 2008 housing crisis are great for students to reflect on, and encourages students to create their own outlooks to these real life serious issues. The crisis opens up different interpretations, meanings, and ideas. Students can notice changes in this global crisis and see if anything evolves within these economic, environmental, societal issues, and systemic failures in the present day. Personally, I find this very valuable and am glad I learned about this big crisis because it really does affect so many people. Learning about the 2008 crisis gave insight and shed light on the economic systems and financial markets. We as people can hopefully prevent future events and see warning signs, with now having a better understanding and a better foundation in making these decisions. As for the class/course all together, I now have a different well developed perspective on both expulsion and on the 2008 housing crisis.