On Dec.7, we started our last tutorial class in front of Burling library, and walked to A&M Café together. That day was cold; the lawn on campus was covered by a layer of hoarfrost. When we crossed street, there’s a certain slant of light which projected our shadows on the road.

I felt kind of shame that I still could not order food adeptly after I arrived America for nearly four months. Prof. Rodrigues gave us our breakfast data of the whole semester, which she began to collect at the beginning of our class. To some degree, this sheet of data is a souvenir of our first semester in Grinnell.

We divided into two groups to find two different words to sum up our study about American autobiographies. One group came up with the word “father,” and another group raised “epiphany.” Almost all of autobiographies have a figure of father in their narratives, and the “father” also alludes to the “founding father” of America. This “father” which came up with by our classmates doesn’t only refer to the real father of the author, but the roles who act as a father role or give the author supports. The “epiphany group” emphasized that every authors have their epiphanies in their stories, and the establishment of America might also be a kind of epiphany of freedom. Epiphany gives people a chance to obtain prominent improvement and it’s the change points of a lot of stories.

Finally, “epiphany group” persuaded “father group,” and decided to choose epiphany as the final word of our class. I consider our class is also a kind of epiphany, which gives us a method to get into the study of college.

As the groups went through their presentations, I was amazed to see the connections to our lives on campus. I learned about the roots of construction and education. I saw connections between our work in tutorial and our other classes. My group used readings from my  political science class and another group used information from their linguistics class. All the connections within our small class got me thinking about the connections between texts that we have read. It was incredible to see how all of our keywords were applicable to the texts we’ve analyzed throughout the semester. The presence of education is in many more texts than I would have thought.  Even within texts there is the differentiation between formal and informal. When Will and Yaz were explaining the definitons, I saw how applicable all these keywords are to our lives. We will certainly be seeing the actions of agency, consequences of time, and results of education along with many other things in our careers here at Grinnell.

These analysis of keywords and autobiographies will help all of us in our future years at Grinnell. I think it is important to understand the discoveries we have made in our course. I continue to think about the reoccurring themes of patriarchy, revelation, family, travel, and much much more. The information that may have been left out by the writers are also a vital part of the story; I will be reading and analyzing in a much different way after this course.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the revelations of sexual assault/harassment that have been extending everywhere from prominent Hollywood actors and producers to politicians to journalists.

I feel like this kind of relates to what we’ve been talking about this semester. There seems to be this tension between whether allegations are made to be credible or not. And, in a way, the stories of men and women who’ve undergone abuse become a sort of mini-autobiography, because they are self-communicated stories of what has happened to someone. But then, there exists this public discourse about which of these “autobiographies” are “legitimate” and which are called into question for their authenticity. (Also, I hate to use the word “allegation” because that serves to undermine the validity of these stories, while at the same time the word “allegation” serves a legal purpose.)

It’s interesting to think that on the human-level, some people will outright claim that these allegations are untrue when they are just people telling other people about their lives. When thinking of these allegations through the prism of autobiography, I think it creates a humanizing effect and it becomes harder and harder to discredit people who experienced trauma. It kind of calls into question why we disregard some stories immediately, while other stories we take at face value. Obviously, there is a historical thread of patriarchal defamation of women’s voices, and that makes the idea of “legitimate autobiography” all the more interesting.

Sorry, these thoughts are kind of scattered, but I am curious what other people think about this.