As I was reading through my classmates' blogs, I was intimidated (as I usually am) by the depth of thought and insight each person brought through their writing.  I was most intrigued with Angel's blog. She wrote a post talking about seeing ourselves in Shakespeare's characters.  And... ah... isn't this the purpose of literature?  (Or one of them, at least?)  I work in the writing center on campus, and often it is so hard to get this point across to writers.  "Your professor does not want you to summarize the book, she wants to know WHY it matters."  And yet, we are so afraid to do this... and often we English majors are the worst!  We talk about ideas and we ponder and we analyze and speculate, but do we ever let what we read shape us?  Do we see the fatal flaws of Theseus or Hamlet, identify with them, and they resolve to change that shared behavior?  I admit that often I do not.  I read for a class, for a professor, for a grade, but I rarely take the time to read in a personal way.  I love the aesthetic aspect of our discipline, memorizing Shakespeare and feeling the beauty of his words, but I'm also a concrete person.  I have to find a way to make these beautiful words I read significant to me and also to the world around me.  Like Angel mentioned in her blog, it is pretty amazing to think that this class of interesting people in this a room filled with Ipads and laptops and Smartphones... we are working through many of the same struggles that the audience of Midsummer Night's Dream was facing.  We are the top and the bottom, the high and the low, and we can identify as wholeheartedly as Shakespeare's original audience.  So maybe that will be my project for the semester.  I will blog about some personal engagement and identification with characters and see what happens...