Student Blogs

To be honest, I am not a fan of this novel. I found it quite confusing and a bit difficult to follow. As discussed in the conversation video with professor Farid Laroussi, time in this novel is not linear. For such a long book to never mention the precise time is crazy to me. I […] read full post >>

Hi Romance Studiers, After reading Marcel Proust’s “Swann’s Way”, part 1 “Combray”, I found myself lost and dissatisfied. Conceptually, the idea of building a world through the lens of a child, and as they grow up and realize the beauty of the world they live in, so does the reader, was very interesting. The execution […] read full post >>

My first thought when reading “Combray” by Marcel Proust was, why are these sentences so long?  It wasn’t until I continued to read the novel and watch the video on Proust that I realized these unconventional grammatical rules and sentence structure were simply a part of modernism. The reason for the length of sentences became […] read full post >>

Frankly, that was not the easiest read!! I found many of the descriptions were hard to follow and quickly lost my interest. A particularly difficult one for me was the seemingly neverending description of the church around p. 81 – 90. However, the parts that I DID really enjoy I decided to read closely, and […] read full post >>

Hey Folks! This marks my first post on this blog related to a specific text. Today I’ll be Talking about Marcel Proust’s “Combray”. Let me start by saying that reading this book was confusing at first, and something akin to reading an excerpt from an academic article. Without the historical or contextual background of Marcel Proust […] read full post >>

This week’s reading, Marcel Proust’s Combray, was very challenging for me to get through. This book was very different compared to anything I'm used to reading. With the book's heavy details and symbolism, I had a very hard time trying to stay engaged ... read full post >>

This week’s reading, Marcel Proust’s Combray, was very challenging for me to get through. This book was very different compared to anything I'm used to reading. With the book's heavy details and symbolism, I had a very hard time trying to stay engaged ... read full post >>

Proust’s “Combray” was definitely challenging for me to follow along, with its lengthy sentences and extremely detailed descriptions of his own memories. I found the plot dreary at first. That said, I appreciated how Proust depicts the scenes where he drowns in his own thoughts, creating a gloomy atmosphere right from the start that signals […] read full post >>

“But, when nothing subsists of an old past, after the death of people, after the destruction of things, along, frailer but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, smell and taste still remain from a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, upon the ruins of all the rest, bearing without giving away, on […] read full post >>

For this week’s reading by Marcel Proust, I left it feeling confused but interested as this reading challenged me. This reading included lots of run-on sentences and large amounts of detail which was sometimes hard to wrap my head around. The long sentences did aid in explaining the characters and scenes well but often would […] read full post >>

The first thing that struck me when reading Proust’s Combray was how smooth, continuous, and flowing the prose was. While many books are cut up quite finely by short sentences, paragraph breaks, and general changes in topic, Combray reads like one smooth flow. It features very long sentences and paragraphs, and it moves through descriptionContinue reading "Combray – A Childhood Proust’s Stream of Consciousness" read full post >>

Hello viewers (in James May’s voice). I did a quick scroll on the blog page and so far almost every post about Proust has been negative. I share similar feelings, so I will try to explain it. The story starts by reminiscing the childhood of the protagonist on a sleepless night. The child is a […] read full post >>

[Combray] by Marcel Proust is not a page-turner. Every sentence in the book is lengthy and contains long-winded details, and every scene is, in my perspective, descriptive as the protagonist tries to depict everything he feels in the moment. One explicit example is the sentence above. In the sentence, he is trying to describe the […] read full post >>

A. Initial Thoughts My first read of Marcel Proust’s “Combray” was SO difficult. Initially, it seemed like a never-ending text of sleep and a madeleine soaked in tea. Proust starts by painting this scene where the protagonist experiences “the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in [his great aunt’s] decoction of lime-flowers…” (6), which … Continue reading Combray: Madelines and Memories (Jan 14) read full post >>

“And in the same way, also, the thoughts of the dying are quite often turned toward the aspect of death that is real, painful, dark, visceral, toward the underside of death, which is in fact the side it presents to them and so harshly makes them feel, and which more closely resembles a crushing burden, […] read full post >>