Author Archives: pliego

Thoughts on Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant

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Aragon’s Paris Peasant

For this week I decided to first see the lecture video before reading the book and when I heard that it was about surrealism I got excited as I know a few things about André Bréton although I have never read a book written by him. But most importantly I got excited as back in middle school I used to have an arts class in which we used to talk about different art movements and it used to be specifically about paintings and the life of the most important painters of each movement along with the things they used to paint and why. 

In this course, we dedicated an entire bimester talking about surrealist painters like Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso in his surrealism period or Rene Magruite which is my favorite of these last three. But my favorite painter of this movement and one of my favorite painters is Joan Miro, who was also part of the surrealism movement but he had a mix of surrealism alongside abstract art which I enjoy a lot, so even though his art might be a bit different from the art from the artists mentioned above, he is also considered part of the surrealism movement.

With all of this in mind about surrealism, when I heard that the book was part of the movement, I got very excited to read it and sadly after reading the first few pages of the book I was a little disappointed as I believe this reading is a difficult one, at least for me which i’m not used to reading a lot. Also the idea of the book not following a normal novel structure made the reading not to be an enjoyable one for me. 

I was really disappointed with this because as said before, Joan Miro, a surrealist painter, is one of my favorites ever and the reading just was not for me. I can appreciate all the surrealistic things in the reading and see how for someone that might be better at reading or that is looking for something different, may enjoy Aragon´s novel a lot but sadly not me.

Because of all of this, my question for this blog is if you guys enjoy the surrealism movement? And also in the case that anyone has some knowledge about surrealist painters, if you enjoy the surrealist paintings or the reading of this book more.

 

Thoughts on Combray by Marcel Proust

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Before I start with my thoughts on Marcel Proust’s Combray, I want to say that I only read part 1 and thus all my thoughts are regarding that part only. I mention this as my thoughts could be different if I read part 2.

 

Having said that, I enjoyed the part at the start which talks about how this novel was rejected by a lot of publishers, with one of the publishers saying “I don’t see why a man should take thirty pages to describe how he turns over in bed before going to sleep”. I agree with the opinion of this publisher as I believe that Proust goes too much into explaining every little detail of what is happening, which at least for me makes the reading a little confusing. But even though that happens, my main problem with this reading is that I was not that interested in what was happening. The story of how little kid is bothered by his mom not giving him a kiss simply did not interested me that much and I was more interested in Mr. Swan’s life or other things happening alongside the main story of the kid. 

 

Because of this, I can’t say that I liked the reading of part 1 but I also did not dislike it. I believe that he keeps Mr. Swan as a quite mysterious person without going into much into detail about his marriage or other things about his life, which is the thing that made me not dislike reading. I saw the video lecture in which it is mentioned that in part 2 Proust goes more about Mr. Swan’s marriage and life, and that is why these thoughts of not enjoying the reading that much only regard part 1. I believe that if I read part 2 and it indeed went more about Mr. Swan’s life, I would enjoy it more.

 

One thing that did interest me from the main story is the reaction of the dad when he sees the narrator with his mom after he waited all night to see her. I feel like the whole story was hinting towards the dad getting mad at the kid for being awake and I liked the turn it took when the dad mentioned that he was not mad and rather told the mom to go sleep in the narrator’s room.

 

So my question for this blog is if you enjoyed part 1 reading and if so, why?

 

Introduction

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Hi my name is Daniel Pliego and I am a first year student. I was born and raised in the north of Mexico City, where I lived my whole life before moving to Canada. I am planning to major in Mathematics and probably do a minor in commerce but I am in bachelor of arts and because of this I am required to complete the literature requirements. 

 

In order to do that, I decided to take this class to complete that requirement and at first I was not that sure about that decision. This is because, I did not have the biggest idea of what Romance Studies meant and I actually thought that it had to do with the languages that come from the roman empire (Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese) and since I already know Spanish and I am also learning French. I thought it would be a great idea to take this class.

 

When I first saw what this class was about, I was not super happy as I am not the biggest reader, even though I have always wanted to get more into it. But because of this, I believe that this class will be a great challenge for me, as it will challenge me to read more books which, as said before, is one of the things that I would like to do more. So I’m going to try to challenge myself to read the most amount of books that I feel is good for me which makes me really excited about this class as it is now seen by me as a challenge and not only as a literature requirement.  Another thing that excites me about this class is that there are a few books that were originally written in Spanish and I am not sure why, but I am excited to read those books.