Cassidy Hand
Professor McCoy
English 111
6 December 2024
When I started this class, as a first semester freshman, I was unsure how the title of the class “Expulsion & Housing Crisis” had anything to do with an English course. When thinking of the terms expulsion and housing crisis my initial thought was people were losing their homes because of weather, or they were being taken away due to financial reasons. I soon learned my interpretation was close, but there was still much more to be learned and understood. I wasn’t expecting to read King Lear, The Big Short, A Mercy, or The Parable of the Sower, not to mention having topics in these books ultimately relating to the title of the class. After reading these books I was able to understand how these books connected to the course topic of expulsion and housing crisis. As a class we also determined many different course concepts like, bad faith, trust, moral hazard, toxicity, fraud, and risk to help interpret the true meaning of our reading. Expulsion was seen in both King Lear and A Mercy. In King Lear his daughter Cordelia was expelled by Lear after she refused to flatter him excessively during a public declaration of love. In A Mercy expulsion is shown multiple times after Florens is expelled multiple times. Florens is expelled from her mother, the widow and daughter Jane, and the blacksmith. In The Big Short and The Parable of the Sower we saw how the housing crisis came into play. In The Big Short, the focus of the book was around specific events that led to the financial crisis in 2008. The financial fall, which was caused by several failures in the industrial setting such as risk taking and fraud, led to a collapse in the housing market. The Parable of the Sower, has a similar focus on economic change. The book focuses on the combination of global climate change and economic crises which leads to social chaos.
The Parable of the Sower turned out to be my favorite book out of all the novels we were assigned. I was able to grasp a better understanding of what the author was trying to relay to the reader. I was able to bring together the course concepts and the main topics of the course, expulsion and housing crisis, to The Parable of the Sower. I found that I was able to connect The Parable of the Sower to the 2008 housing crisis, but also was able to pick out reasons why it wasn’t the same. In The Parable of the Sower, the main character Lauren starts off living in what could be considered a gated community and one of wealthy status. Those living in this community were protected from the others who lived a much harder lifestyle of poverty, crime and drugs outside the walls. Those on the outside always found their way in to steal and cause harm to those who had more than they had. The community began to fall apart and feel unsafe. Lauren expresses her concern in the book and states, “Now, I have to go home. I don’t want to. The idea scares me to death. It’s taken me a long time to write the word: Home.”This caused them to want to move to another wealthy area, called Olivar, which was seen to be safer and provide them with new opportunities. Laruen shares her perspective in stating, “The people of Olivar aren’t frightened, impoverished victims. They’re able to look after themselves their rights and their property. They’re educated people who don’t want to live in the spreading chaos of the rest of Los Angeles county. Some of them said so on the radio documentary we all listened to last night–as they made a public spectacle of selling themselves to KSF.” It also states “ Marcus tells me the Garfeilds are trying to get into Olivar.” The downfall to what was seen to be a great move was an application process people needed to do to get into Olivar with no guarantee of acceptance in. Similar to the 2008 financial crisis where there was mass foreclosures, job loss and housing crisis, people were placed in situations where they needed to make tough choices that affected their livelihood. In both the book and the 2008 financial crisis wealthier people experienced significant gain while poorer people struggled to survive.
The Parable of the Sower is also different compared to the 2008 housing crisis. The main difference I found was in The Parable of the Sower the community experienced an extreme shutdown causing an economical fall that appeared to be so bad that it wasn’t able to be fixed.There was destruction to the environment and people left the community for better neighborhoods because of the poor people constantly stealing and hurting people in the community. The people were scared to live in the community so they made a choice to find better neighborhoods to live in. The following quote from the book helps to paint that picture: “We’ve never been rich, but to the desperate, we looked rich. We were surviving and we had our wall. Did our community die so that addicts could make a help-the-poor political statement?” The people of the community felt helpless with no other answer than to leave their homes for a better place to live .Where in the 2008 housing crisis there was also an economical fall, but the communities were able to maintain stability by coming up with solutions to help them through. Instead of society falling apart, it remained together because of the actions taken to address what was happening and find ways to help. The government stepped in with actions. These actions were mentioned in an article found on the Federal Reserve History website stating, “One set of actions was aimed at encouraging lenders to rework payments and other terms on troubled mortgages or to refinance “underwater” mortgages (loans exceeding the market value of homes) rather than aggressively seek foreclosure. This reduced repossessions whose subsequent sale could further depress house prices. Congress also passed temporary tax credits for homebuyers that increased housing demand and eased the fall of house prices in 2009 and 2010. To buttress the funding of mortgages, the Congress greatly increased the maximum size of mortgages that FHA would insure. Because FHA loans allow for low down payments, the agency’s share of newly issued mortgages jumped from under 10 percent to over 40 percent.”
My understanding of GLOBE is to get people thinking in other ways through experiences in different cultures, diversity, viewpoints, etc. It is important to stay open minded and think outside of the box while reading and learning about something unfamiliar. Being exposed to something different than I am used to has encouraged me to want to learn more about expulsion and housing crisis after not having much knowledge about that topic, especially in an English class. Through this course I was able to read new novels that I never would have picked up on my own that I ended up really enjoying. I also learned how to connect course concepts with the text I was reading to better understand the idea that was trying to be portrayed in the novel. Overall, this course was very beneficial in learning how to connect outside problems to texts.