Author Archives: michael liudeng

“Paris Peasant,” Lin-Manuel Miranda, and the Ephemeral in the Path Toward Modernism

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Hello! I just finished reading Aragon’s Paris Peasant and here are some of my thoughts. I initially read the first 50 pages or so and enjoyed the prose, but it was often confusing and it felt like there was little structure, so I had trouble understanding it. Individual sentences seemed to make sense but I often forgot what was going on, and I think I tried too hard to look at how everything was immediately relevant to some narrative that wasn’t there, beyond Paris’s slow march to a newer, modern world in which things must be “correct” and “efficient” to be valuable, and one in which the Passage de l’Opéra did not belong.

After watching the lecture, I think that the lack of traditional novel structure began to feel more justified. It wasn’t that the details necessarily worked together to produce some narrative, and that should’ve been clear from the back, but suddenly the digressions into things that seemed meaningless turned into thoughts and remnants of everyday life subjected to an inevitable end. The clippings, musings, and placards became information that wasn’t meant to last but contributed something to everyday experience, and finding so much insight in them was interesting, especially seeing as we probably consume more information than any time in history now. There doesn’t have to be structure in the things we take in, and the “mishmash of inventions and real facts” really turned into the centrepiece of the book for me.

I think that finding some value and beauty in the everyday as Aragon did, rather than just in extravagance or drama, is something that I’ve heard about often but never really took to heart. I think that I’ve probably had many rapid thoughts walking throughout cities or neighbourhoods, but I’ve always unconsciously made a distinction between information that was “meant to last,” like the things I write for school or make for my friends, and ephemeral thoughts like taking brief notice of surroundings. Sometimes I’d think hard about and remember everything I wanted to stay, and the thoughts that I never paid much attention to just drifted out of memory, despite making up a significant part of my experiences.

I also noticed some parallels in Paris Peasant’s descriptions of the Passage de l’Opéra and one of my favourite Broadway musicals, In The Heights, which was released almost 90 years later, and I think that helped me appreciate Paris Peasant’s message a bit more. Both stories deal with legacies of the ephemeral and the “rubble” piling up as the world modernizes and becomes more efficient and practical. Reading a book, or a compilation of snippets of everyday life, and comparing it to trends like gentrification today, helped me appreciate the “now,” the transition between the past and the future, that we can uniquely control. I think in light of that, my question is “To what extent can Aragon’s portrayal of the “wake” of modernism inform us of modern-day changes and developments?”

Proust on Our Memories Amidst Change in “Combray”

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I just finished reading the first chapter of Proust’s Combray and felt that he had some interesting ideas on our memory and our understanding of reality, so I wanted to focus on that in this post. In terms of my experience reading it, I found it a bit difficult to focus on the text: the long sentences and imagery were fun to read but I found myself losing track of what was going on often. That might also have been because Proust seems to jump between vivid descriptions of different things, exploring interfaces between consciousness and unconsciousness, or the permeation of social constructs like class into individual life through M. Swann. Looking back, it’s one of those books I’m glad I read because it made me appreciate my consciousness and my ability to observe things more, strangely enough, but I found myself having to reread around half the passages which wasn’t as fun.

That being said, the way he contrasted the “new” and the unfamiliar with memories and what is familiar particularly resonated with me. A few pages in, the narrator sits in their room, looking at their magic lantern. They describe the “supernatural, multicolored apparitions, where legends were depicted as in a wavering, momentary stained-glass window.” They recall how amid all these fanciful stories and images, their sadness was “only increased by this since the mere change in lighting destroyed the familiarity which my bedroom had acquired for me,” having observed the intrusion of new into the familiar, and looking back at the “anesthetizing influence of habit.”

The narrator watching the lights dance across their room reminded me of my experiences with change in the past few years, sometimes desperately wanting to cling on to the familiar but also being enchanted by the possibilities of new experiences and opportunities like university. Proust evokes a sense of profound imagination as well, never giving the figures the attribute of reality and referring to them as “apparitions,” and ‘”wavering” as though they’ll soon disappear. That emphasized to me that our memories don’t exist in some sense: I can’t visit my childhood for example, and in the meantime, everything, even the doorknobs in the narrator’s room, seems to be changing as we passively observe it. By highlighting changes that seem practically insignificant, I think that Proust meaningfully shows how nothing is constant in our lives, and things that are familiar can disappear quickly. I’ve definitely grown more comfortable with change in the past few years, with COVID, moving to UBC, and meeting new people along the way while losing contact with others. Combray made me reflect on how every moment was valuable and how much of the reality we remember is coloured by our perception of it.

In light of that, my question is “What does the narrator’s tone in describing their memories tell us about their attitude towards change?”

Hello! + Reactions to the Introductory Lecture

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Hi everyone! My name is Michael, and I was born in and lived my whole life around the greater Toronto area. I’m in first-year science and want to major in physics; the dream is to do research in theoretical physics one day. I wanted to take this class mainly because the reading list seemed really interesting. English was one of my favourite subjects in high school, so I wanted to explore more novels this year. I’ve always been pretty interested in issues of power and oppression, and a lot of texts like Black Shack Alley and Amulet seemed like they would provide a unique perspective on them. I don’t really have expectations for discussions; I’m mainly excited to try new books and talk with other people who are reading them, and to see how that goes. In my spare time, I like to read and play Minecraft with my friends, and I also really like hiking, although I haven’t done as much of that recently.

On the first lecture:

Where is the “Romance World”? When signing up for this course, my idea of the Romance world consisted of all the geographic area in which people spoke a Romance language. This included countries like France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Romania, but also Latin America and places like Quebec. I felt that even the voice of a Romance language-speaking resident of a predominantly non-Romance country could be an object of “Romance Studies”, and that the actual “world” itself consists of the geographic and cultural elements associated with these people. It seemed arbitrary to draw the line of people not being part of some ambiguous “Romance World” because they live in a place too sparsely-populated by Romance language speakers. It’s not immediately clear to me that there is some significant, deep link between all of the Romance world apart from linguistic roots, but maybe the goal shouldn’t be to find some simple but profound connection: I mainly want to enjoy the complexity and contradiction that comes with the idea of “Romance Studies.”

I was also interested in our preliminary definition of literature as something that can compel us to pay attention to mechanisms of representation. I especially want to pay attention to authors’ representations of their own cultures and the diversity within them, because the selection of literature is geographically diverse, but beyond that, I don’t know much about the extent to which the authors try communicating specific elements of their cultures or tell stories about specific subcultures and underrepresented groups.