Let me just start off by saying that that was not even remotely what I expected. This felt like a fever dream, I have reread sections and still don’t totally know what the point of some of that was. It felt like it was flitting back and forth between things, or going on tangents, and either brushed past things or focused on others (not always relevant, at least in my opinion) with extreme detail. It kind felt like early 1900s male equivalent of a middle-school girl’s diary. I think it may partially go back to the lack of ‘standard story structure’, of which I simply am not accustomed. It constantly felt as though I was missing connections or details.<\/p>\n
That being said, I don’t think it necessarily makes it ‘bad writing’, as so much goes back to the intentions of the writer, but it certainly isn’t the commonplace format, which made it difficult for me to comprehend at times. It certainly made me question my literacy and general literary skills. Though, I think that’s a good thing despite how humbling it was, a large part of why I chose this course was to look at different perspectives I may not come into contact with as often, and while I would prefer to have those perspectives be a bit more comprehensible, beggers can’t be choosers.<\/p>\n
While those were my intial thoughts and they still hold true, I have to consider the goals of literary modernism, trying to make it ‘new’ so to speak and bypassing the traditional literary patterns. In that sense, I would say Proust succeeded in that endevour. It is not traditional, it is not standard.<\/p>\n
Honestly, some of the detailed points of the story were so odd to me, right from the very start. There is a substantial bit of writing at the beginning that is focusing on how the boy is laying in bed and what his room is like, but in many ways none of that was relevant, it was a lead into his memories of Combray and these details were not referrenced meaningfully going forward. While the writing often paints beautiful images in your mind (such as the madeleines with tea), it also almost provided too much detail at times, to the point it felt like it lost it’s purpose.<\/p>\n
Once the story got past the scene of the boy talking very dramatically for a long paragraph over wanting his mother to kiss him late into the night and more than once (Freudian who?), and M. Swann was introduced, it felt like it was coming together a bit more, at least for a while. Overall, I found the quote: “The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh trivility or other every day” rather ironic, because that’s what this book feels like to me, fresh trivility each page, which may be intentional.<\/p>\n
That all being said, I hope the class conversation helps with all this!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Let me just start off by saying that that was not even remotely what I expected. This felt like a fever dream, I have reread sections and still don’t totally know what the point of some of that was. It felt like it was flitting back and forth between things, or going on tangents, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107621,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[8,5,6,4,7],"class_list":["post-8","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-combray","tag-memory","tag-nostalgia","tag-proust","tag-time"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/amyall02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/amyall02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/amyall02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/amyall02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107621"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/amyall02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/amyall02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/amyall02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8\/revisions\/9"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/amyall02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/amyall02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/amyall02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}