“Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all.” André Breton, pg 160 André Breton’s Nadja was published in 1928 and was a part of a collection of books during France’s Surrealist Movement post World War II. Straight off the bat, I absolutely loved this book. Perhaps I’m just a romance junkie, but I […]
Posted in Blogs, Breton | Tagged with André Breton, Art, beauty, books, Poetry, romance, Surrealism, unconscious mind
In the text, Society of Reluctant Dreamers, Agualusa challenges the meaning and importance of dreams. In the book, they have the ability to appear in people’s dreams, and one character, in particular, can dream about people he hasn’t met and future things that haven’t occurred yet. He can dream about the future. He uses this power to appear in everyone’s dreams in Angolan to overthrow the government, a one-party state. This power over dreams is bizarre and not what we usually think dreams are. Dreams are funny, confusing, metaphorical tales that we become aware of in our sleep that don’t always make sense and can arise hidden feelings or motives we would not know when we are conscious. In the Society of Reluctant Dreamers, this dreaming is not a mere confusion or weird story in our heads but a movement to defeat politics and the political authority at the time. This creates a collective dream among the whole population of Angolans and gives people the courage and bravery within themselves to stand up. As a community together, they are able to find the strength to come together and make a change. This power is crazy to think about and is something we would not see in everyday life.
One question I have is, How can the unconscious affect us so profoundly? Especially when we are conscious and always careless about things and scared?
After watching the lecture, I wanted to reflect on the point about how Agualusa uses dreams as a metaphor to bring change. Jon mentioned in the lecture how this was a metaphor for literature having the same effect. Literature is powerful, and words on a page hold so much meaning, especially in Romance Studies, where the words hold hidden themes and underlying thoughts/memories. I believe that literature has the power to create change. Just like our dreams coming to us in the unconscious, literature is an escape from reality when you read. It is somewhat a form of the unconscious, and that’s why I think it has more power than words from people. Hearing things in the unconscious allows us to fully grasp the idea without adding our own bias from the natural, conscious world.
This book had many themes of repetition and conflict between original and copy stories, just like the conflict between dreams and reality. For example, in the book, when the character meets the woman he previously dreamed about, he calls her a fake image of the woman he dreamed about, and she does not seem real. This challenges the tradition of dreams being a copy and reality the original. Agualusa flips it around many times. This book was sometimes hard to follow because of these confusing, non-traditional themes. Another example of bizarre is when a character tells the world that his brother is dead, but in the end, his brother is there in the political overthrow. Why was this hidden from the reader for so long?
I am super excited to discuss this book this week and hope that I can further understand Agualusa’s intentions and writing!
Posted in Agualusa, Blogs | Tagged with bizarre, divided, dreaming, Dreams, future, resolution, talent, unconscious mind, unity, war
In the text, Society of Reluctant Dreamers, Agualusa challenges the meaning and importance of dreams. In the book, they have the ability to appear in people’s dreams, and one character, in particular, can dream about people he hasn’t met and future things that haven’t occurred yet. He can dream about the future. He uses this power to appear in everyone’s dreams in Angolan to overthrow the government, a one-party state. This power over dreams is bizarre and not what we usually think dreams are. Dreams are funny, confusing, metaphorical tales that we become aware of in our sleep that don’t always make sense and can arise hidden feelings or motives we would not know when we are conscious. In the Society of Reluctant Dreamers, this dreaming is not a mere confusion or weird story in our heads but a movement to defeat politics and the political authority at the time. This creates a collective dream among the whole population of Angolans and gives people the courage and bravery within themselves to stand up. As a community together, they are able to find the strength to come together and make a change. This power is crazy to think about and is something we would not see in everyday life.
One question I have is, How can the unconscious affect us so profoundly? Especially when we are conscious and always careless about things and scared?
After watching the lecture, I wanted to reflect on the point about how Agualusa uses dreams as a metaphor to bring change. Jon mentioned in the lecture how this was a metaphor for literature having the same effect. Literature is powerful, and words on a page hold so much meaning, especially in Romance Studies, where the words hold hidden themes and underlying thoughts/memories. I believe that literature has the power to create change. Just like our dreams coming to us in the unconscious, literature is an escape from reality when you read. It is somewhat a form of the unconscious, and that’s why I think it has more power than words from people. Hearing things in the unconscious allows us to fully grasp the idea without adding our own bias from the natural, conscious world.
This book had many themes of repetition and conflict between original and copy stories, just like the conflict between dreams and reality. For example, in the book, when the character meets the woman he previously dreamed about, he calls her a fake image of the woman he dreamed about, and she does not seem real. This challenges the tradition of dreams being a copy and reality the original. Agualusa flips it around many times. This book was sometimes hard to follow because of these confusing, non-traditional themes. Another example of bizarre is when a character tells the world that his brother is dead, but in the end, his brother is there in the political overthrow. Why was this hidden from the reader for so long?
I am super excited to discuss this book this week and hope that I can further understand Agualusa’s intentions and writing!
Posted in Agualusa, Blogs | Tagged with bizarre, divided, dreaming, Dreams, future, resolution, talent, unconscious mind, unity, war
After reading the first couple of pages of Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant, I did not understand what I was reading at all. All the previous texts I have read are novels. My first initial thought is to try and highlight words to understand the reasoning behind the author and their story. With Paris Peasant, this got me nowhere, and after watching the lecture and searching some things up about this text, I realized that the way I was reading and analyzing the book was all wrong. Even though I still don’t fully understand it, Surrealism is a way of releasing our unconscious minds. Louis takes us on a journey of his small peasant town in pairs, describing the architecture, the types of people it draws and how we always have a perceived notion or underlying feeling about these places or things. One of the questions that Jon wanted us to think about was the notion of time in Aragon’s text. I feel like the sense of time is lost and moving so fast before anyone can realize it’s passing by. The way Louis jumps from building to building or random facts about how he loves blondes to talking about the importance of error without evidence makes me think this. One of my favourite parts was when he talked about baths and how “man” perceives that baths pertain to sensual pleasure instead of just a way to clean ourselves. I never thought of thinking in this way. Everything we see in reality has a feeling associated with it in our unconscious mind. After I realized this, I started to understand how this text was written. I’m not going to lie, some parts still confused me a lot, but I began to sit back and simply enjoy the words. I let my own mind take over and just absorb the beautiful details of scenery and how passionate Louis was about this little town. In the beginning, I remember him mentioning how they were trying to change the roads in his city to make it more open and that he was scared and wasn’t open to the idea of modernization. I agree with Louis; this small town holds the passages that its inhibitors walk on and venture down. It may seem like a dull reality above but hidden underneath are the dark, twisty unconscious minds that dare to dream of coming above the surface. Instead of being in the present moment with this book, I felt disconnected. I didn’t feel like Louis walking through the town, I felt as if I was watching Louis stroll through the town instead. I didn’t feel present in the story, like when I have those days where I feel so tired and disconnected in the world that I don’t feel like myself. I think that’s what Louis was trying to grasp, though, the difference between reality and dreaming. Surrealism.
This leaves me with one question,
Do authors have a certain way they want you to read their book? / how does this impact what the reader gets out of the text?
Posted in Blogs | Tagged with dreaming, modernization, reality, scenery, unconscious mind
