Metacognition: Jane Eyre Project

At first I wasn't sure how to approach the writing project we did for Jane Eyre--I've had to do a lot of English final projects in the past, but I don't think any of them involved writing a dialogue between the author and two people from the present day. Of course, that was probably what Mr. Allen intended--he told us that he couldn't do any kind of normal project, since they've all been done (and posted online) a hundred times already. So I didn't really know how to start. In the end, I ended up thinking about the project largely the same way as I would have an ordinary essay on the book. I thought of some aspects of the book--passages or ideas that had interested me when we discussed them in class or when I was reading at home--and decided to use them for the project. Obviously, I couldn't just write essay style paragraphs about these ideas. Instead, I had to think a little bit more and come up with plausible questions or disagreements for the people in the discussion to have, which would lead them to the points I wanted to make. In a way, it was similar to the final project of the first semester, in which we also wrote a fictional discussion. I thought this project gave us more freedom than that essay, though, for a few reasons. First, we had the ability to change the subject after having exhausted one issue. This meant that it wasn't necessary to find a single theme or idea in the novel that could sustain several pages of discussion--instead, it could be more varied and flow from one subject to the next. Additionally, we could create the characters in the discussion ourselves and choose the positions they could take on various issues, where in that essay we used pre-existing characters who had to take views to fit their personalities. Obviously, there were a few limits--Bronte would be unlikely to harshly criticize her own book--but overall, we had more freedom to create the discussion.