Student Blogs

While it had its moments, I had a difficult time getting drawn into Mad Toy. However, while I didn't enjoy the book last week because of the writing, I really enjoyed Arlt's writing style this week. My main issue with the book was that I just couldn't ... read full post >>

While it had its moments, I had a difficult time getting drawn into Mad Toy. However, while I didn't enjoy the book last week because of the writing, I really enjoyed Arlt's writing style this week. My main issue with the book was that I just couldn't ... read full post >>

When I first started reading this novel, I was a little confused and intimidated by what the author was trying to convey. But as the story progressed, I found that the author was someone who was interested in poetry and loved writing about the events that occurred in his life or that he witnessed. After […] read full post >>

Roberto Arlt’s novel, “Mad Toy,” was a refreshing coming-of-age novel that invited readers to follow the harrowing journey of a struggling youth named Silvio Astier. In the first chapter, “The Band of Thieves,” Silvio befriended Enrique Irzubeta and Lucio. Together, the three adolescents became members of the “Club of the Midnight Horsemen,” entangled in a […] read full post >>

Hello Everyone! Welcome back to week 2, and let me introduce you to Nadja, a woman written by the author André Breton. This book is about a man who becomes obsessed with this woman he met in Paris, Nadja, and his account of his experiences with her, and his thoughts about her. One thing about […] read full post >>

For this week, I chose to read Mad Toy, a reading that I enjoyed but did leave me with the question of why the book is called Mad Toy. First off, I read the third section, “Mad Toy” first which definitely coloured my perception of the story when I realized my mistake and went back […] read full post >>

    Nadja was written by André Breton, who is a theorist of surrealism. The concept of surrealism is greatly expressed in the novel “Nadja.” Personally, surrealism is very abstract to me, and its ideas seem to transcend conventional reasoning and rationality, not depending on any conventional aesthetic constraints.     The novel begins with […] read full post >>

My first impression of Breton’s Nadja was that it was a novel with a lot of illustrations, to the point where the illustrations took up quite a bit of space. This reminds me of the children’s books I read as a child, which also had many animated images. The significance of the existence of illustrations […] read full post >>

To me, it felt that Robert Arlt’s “El Juguete Rabioso” (“Mad Toy”) provides an interesting tale into the life of an adolescent as he struggles to fit in within the society that surrounds him. While the protagonist Silvio Astier is certainly a genius bookworm, his environment barely has a place for academic pursuit of any […] read full post >>

Hello Everyone, welcome back to my blog. This will hopefully be my last late post as I am scrambling to catch up from joining the class a week late. The book of interest for this week is Combray by Marcel Proust. I had not heard of Proust prior to reading this so I had no […] read full post >>

Combray by Marcel Proust, the first text I have ever encountered of such a descriptive, narrative nature. I found the book especially hard to consume due to, what I found to be, increasingly complicated and elaborate descriptions of the world. This took form in the shape of extremely long sentences, heavy use of adjectives and …

Continue reading "Week 2: Combray"

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Honestly speaking, this reading was a little bit of a challenge for me. I hadn’t been exposed to many texts that had such  a complex plot and a variety of different characters continuously being introduced throughout a text until I took a class called WRDS 150 last year. I think the reason I had to […] read full post >>

Week 1 – IntroductionHi! My name is Alexandra, but I almost always go by Alex. I am a second year undergraduate student studying economics in the Faculty of Arts with an interest in learning languages, more recently the Italian language. Growing up, I spoke mostly English and learned Greek practically at the same time as […] read full post >>

 Hey everyone! The assigned reading for this week was “Combray” by Marcel Proust. Before I started reading, I didn’t think it would be as difficult as it was to get through this reading. I found it to be a bit hard to read because of the long... read full post >>

 Hey everyone! The assigned reading for this week was “Combray” by Marcel Proust. Before I started reading, I didn’t think it would be as difficult as it was to get through this reading. I found it to be a bit hard to read because of the long... read full post >>