Student Blogs

I wasn’t sure how to start this blog. I think I sat here staring at an empty screen, just gathering my thoughts for quite a while. I read Mad Toy by Roberto Arlt this morning, started my day early and immersed myself into the streets of Argentina. Reading the book was a breeze when it […] read full post >>

My first thought when I read the initial couple pages of Nadja was… this man sounds annoying. My lasting thought when I finished Nadja was… this man is still annoying. It’s probably a mix of my distaste for the writing style, and his narration itself. The writing and flow was disorienting and confusing to me, maybe because it […] read full post >>

Hello again! For this blog I’m going blindly off of my instinctual interpretation and will watch the lecture after so that my rant is as pure to my thoughts as possible. (Because for some odd reason I felt strongly about this novel…) In honesty, I thought that the book could have begun in the second part of the novel. However,... read full post >>

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 […] read full post >>

I want to begin by mentioning that I found this novel much easier to read than Proust. I was constantly engaged and interested in learning more about the main character. The amount of dialogue and the rate of story progression almost made Mad Toy seem like a playwright. As a result, I feel like the […] read full post >>

Hi all! Hope you all had a good read! I picked Nadja as my book for the week because I was quite intrigued about this mysterious woman. I was waiting and waiting for her to appear and it took about a third of the book for her to make her very firs... read full post >>

Hi all! Hope you all had a good read! I picked Nadja as my book for the week because I was quite intrigued about this mysterious woman. I was waiting and waiting for her to appear and it took about a third of the book for her to make her very firs... read full post >>

I was expecting this book to be mainly about Nadja as the main character, so I was surprised when it came across as more of a reflection on Breton’s identity. I found it almost impossible to get past my hatred of Breton for most of this novel. I found both his actions and the way […] read full post >>

After reading Marcel’s prousts’s Swann’s Way, Proust was able to explore how memory works not as a clear and logical process, but as something deeply emotional and often triggered by everyday sensations. Much of the reading, I believe focuses on the experiences of the narrator, that shows how the bounderies between the past and present […] read full post >>

Okay, so going into Nadja, I really thought things would finally get easier after Proust. Like surely that was the hardest one, right? Wrong. While Nadja was technically easier to get through, I still spent most of the book feeling confused and slightly unwell in a “what am I even reading right now?” kind of […] read full post >>

This was definitely a breath of fresh air after reading Proust last week as i was finally reading something i can follow along. While reading Mad Toy by Roberto Arlt, I was struck by how uncomfortable the novel feels. There is nothing clear or reassuring about Silvio’s story. Arlt does not attempt to make Silvio […] read full post >>

So this was my first real taste of Surrealism, (I think) and I do not think it is quite the writing style fit for me… I definitely think the idea behind Surrealism is cool in how it is meant to blend together reality and thoughts, both conscious and unconscious to create the Surreal world which […] read full post >>

Confusing. Figuring things out not by their form but by the convoluted trails of meaning formed by dense sentences, juxtaposing verses, and half-conscious dreams. This book is a forest of question marks. “I am no puzzle-maker, no wizard of chess, no ph... read full post >>

At first reading, I was gonna title this “nadja or nada” because the book well – wasn’t too appealing/ frankly boring to me BUT midway through I changed it because… well you know if you chose this book. I’ll be transparent and say I have a lot of mixed thoughts and confusion after reading this, […] read full post >>

So, Nadja was my first ever introduction to surrealist fiction, and all I can say is…at least it was less confusing than Proust. For starters, the first few parts of the book left me wondering whether I was reading the right book or not, because like… where exactly was Nadja? It felt I was like […] read full post >>