Hello everyone!

This week in class we learned about war memorials. We learned that for a war memorial to be constructed, many things must be taking into consideration. We learned how one must design a structure keeping in mind critics, feelings, and most importantly the message the monument conveys. We first took a look at a British monument commemorating the British soldiers in World War 1, and then we were asked to look for another memorial and note its symbolism. I wrote about the Tjeniste war monument in Bosnia, a huge abstract fractal monument on a mountain meant to symbolize the victory of the Yugoslavian forces over the Axis powers.

I didn't understand at first why we were analyzing something as mundane and uninteresting as war memorials, after all, this is English class am I right? However later i came to realize that the significance of analyzing the symbolism in structures is helpful to understanding literature. Works of literature are similar to monuments as both use abstract devices to get a message across. The Vietnam War Memorial may just look like an interesting structure, but understand the complex symbolic meaning put into it gives the onlooker a deeper sense of what really went on in that war. So much could be missed by simply looking upon the structure from the outside.

While the first two weeks have started off quite poorly in terms of my performance in class, hopefully this lesson on the war memorials has taught me something about analysis that i wouldn't have understood otherwise.