Reading Black Shack Alley felt heavier than I expected. At first, it seems like a familiar story about a smart kid escaping poverty through education, but the more I read, the more uncomfortable that idea became. José’s success never feels fully like a victory. Instead, it feels complicated, almost like a trade-off where something important […]
When I think about Nada, what stays with me most is how difficult it is to explain what the novel is “about” without saying that not much really happens. Andrea arrives in Barcelona full of expectation, spends a year surrounded by hunger, tension, and emotional decay, and then leaves feeling like she has gained nothing. […]
This week’s reading, The Shrouded Woman by María Luisa Bombal, felt very different from the texts we’ve read so far in this course. Compared to Proust especially, I found this much easier to read and follow. Even though the novel deals with heavy themes like death, regret, and unhappy relationships, the writing itself feels fluid […]
To be honest, Nadja is definitely not the typical “romance”. Instead of a love story, it feels more like a surrealist experiment or a diary where Breton uses a woman as a mirror to figure out his own identity. It’s a messy mix of philosophy, Paris street life, and random photographs, which makes the whole […]
Reading Marcel Proust’s “Combray” was a very different experience than I expected. The first thing that stood out to me was the style of the writing. The sentences are famously long and detailed, which can be a bit overwhelming at times. However, once I got into the flow, I realized that this “dreamy” way of […]
Introducing Myself I’m writing this blog under a pseudonym, but I’m excited to be part of this class and to use this space to think through the ideas we’ll be encountering this semester. I’m especially looking forward to the discussion-based nature of the course and the chance to engage with both the texts and my […]
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