Odalis Espinoza

FIQWS: Literature & Psychoanalysis

4 December 2018

Reflection

“Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing” – Wernher von Braun.

Conducting research on finding and exploring the Freudian concepts within a literary element was the task I was given for this critical research paper. Like the assignment name states, literary elements had to be critically researched and broken down into the Freudian concepts of the id, ego, and super-ego of the Haruki Murakami short story, “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo”. This reflection will depict my process of writing my critical research paper, as well as the learning outcomes I acquired.

While initially given this assignment with approximately a month in advanced, I was at a complete loss, since for the first time I realized that this was our final paper and seemed a bit more challenging than the previous papers assigned. I was given seven prompts to choose from, from which I picked #7 which involved analyzing Murakami’s short story with a Freudian lens, as well as other stories. As soon as I picked my writing prompt, I proceeded to pick Carmen Machado’s “Eight Bites” since it was a short story I had already previously read. This lazy decision led to my drawback of about a week. I was also then given a due date to upload my proposal for this paper to alert the professor if we were going in the wrong path. The proposal benefited me immensely because it was during the writing of the proposal that I realized about my lack of interest in “Eight Bites” and the lack of knowledge on the id, ego, and super-ego did not help. After completing what seemed to me as a very weak proposal, I spoke to my professor about changing my literary element to “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo”. I had already read Murakami’s story and searching for the psychical personalities of the main character was much simpler than that of the characters of “Eight Bites”. My professor agreed to the resubmittal of my proposal and I was able to begin my final paper efficiently.

The most difficult task I have encountered in writing this final paper was the search for academic journals. Searching for academic journals on the CCNY Library databases was new to me, so as was expected, this was the hardest task I encountered. After days and days of searching and getting very limited results, I realized I must broaden my searches since I had been searching very specifically. After finding the academic journals that seemed fit for me the rest was just making connections and adding sentences.

I feel I have benefited tremendously from writing this critical research paper because not only did I increase my knowledge on the Freudian concepts and closely study Murakami’s work, but I was also able to learn how to search for scholarly journals and academic journals with the databases provided by City College. Finding academic journals will surely benefit me for other classes in my college journey.

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