{"id":20,"date":"2023-02-13T22:09:58","date_gmt":"2023-02-14T05:09:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312discussion\/?p=20"},"modified":"2023-02-13T22:09:58","modified_gmt":"2023-02-14T05:09:58","slug":"week-six-the-kingdom-of-this-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312discussion\/2023\/02\/13\/week-six-the-kingdom-of-this-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Week six- The Kingdom of This World"},"content":{"rendered":"

In this week\u2019s reading, I read \u201cThe Kingdom of This World\u201d by Alejo Carpentier. I quite enjoyed reading this story as I found the imagery to be quite powerful throughout the book, evoking strong emotions in me as the reader. This imagery was shown to be strong from the very beginning, with Ti Noel detailing about the wax heads, \u201cthe curls of the wigs, opening into a pool of ringlets on the red baize, framed expressionless faces. Those heads seemed as real\u2014although their fixed stare was so dead\u2014as the talking head\u201d (page 8).<\/span><\/p>\n

As mentioned last week, this story delves into the world of magic realism. Coming into this course I had not read or known much about this topic and I found that this book was a great introduction to magic realism within Latin American literature for me. One thing that I found I found interesting in relation to this theme was how one\u2019s perspective and belief played a role in how the \u2018magic\u2019 was presented. To elaborate, we see that Ti Noel is a character who believes in the practices of Voodoo, which allows him to experience the magic that plays out within the story, as well as view certain events from a different perspective, such as when Macandal is captured and burned the slaves \u201creturned to their plantations laughing all the way\u201d as they believed that he was saved by the African Gods. On the other hand, when Henri-Christophe begins his reign and adopts Christianity rather than voodoo, we see that the \u2018magic\u2019 and the others turn against him, as he loses his power and finds himself alone with no support. All in all, I found this to be a really intriguing part of the story.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Kingdom of This World<\/span><\/i> ends with a powerful scene where Ti Noel gains the power to transform into any animal he desires, as shown through his transformation into a bird, stallion, wasp, and an ant. However, his experience with transforming into a goose (in which he is stunned by the group of other geese) allows him to a revelation about the weight of his responsibility in \u201cthis kingdom of this world\u201d. While this ending was very impactful to me, it made me wonder why Alejo Carpentier decided to use those specific animals in describing Ti Noel\u2019s metamorphosis as I would have never thought of a pact of geese to be an animal that would be so significant to the ending scene. Because of that, my discussion question for this week is: Why do you think the author chose to illuminate Ti noel\u2019s ending transformation using the pact of geese? Do you think there is a deeper significance to the geese that helps guide Ti Noel to his revelation or do you believe there would be another animal that could have had the same effect on Ti Noel? I would love to hear all of your thoughts!<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In this week\u2019s reading, I read \u201cThe Kingdom of This World\u201d by Alejo Carpentier. I quite enjoyed reading this story as I found the imagery to be quite powerful throughout the book, evoking strong emotions in me as the reader. This imagery was shown to be strong from the very beginning, with Ti Noel detailing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":94962,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[19,18,7],"class_list":["post-20","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-carpentier","tag-animals","tag-magic-realism","tag-perspective"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312discussion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312discussion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312discussion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312discussion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/94962"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312discussion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312discussion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312discussion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20\/revisions\/21"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312discussion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312discussion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312discussion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}