Looking at the big picture

Dang, as much as I enjoyed getting out of school for a day, I was really enjoying this unit on New Historicism. Of all the literary analysis techniques we've explored I personally felt like New Historicism was the one that seemed most practical. An aspect of New Historicism that took me by surprise was the amount and diversity of co-texts a New Historicist goes through, using everything from books to research trips to an actual location of where a scene in a book took place. Looking at the authors life, what the world was like at the time a text was written, all those things, they are too important to be ignored when looking at the meaning of a lot of works of literature. Just looking at the examples in class, without the field documents, the footage of of the soldiers, the news paper articles and scientific essays, how would we ever have been able to understand the poems as deeply as we did.