Innovation and departures in the history of English literature - Nedko Ivanov Nedev

  The French Lietenant's woman is a very nice novel with a lot of innovation by the author. At first, I thought it was boring and tiresome (boring as hell, really!), but the final 150 pages are absolutely fantastic. The culmination of Charles and Sarah's romance and the two possible endings is really great idea. I felt goosebumps when reading it and I was really hoping it to end the way I want it. The auhtor gives you the possibility to chose how you want it to end, which is, in my opinion, what really makes this novel unique. 

  We were introduced this week to the Beat Generation, a group of writers that emerged in the U.S. after WW2. They were against the American establishment of the time and their way of expressing it was quite agressive and unconventional. Many of these writers pleaded for more sexual freedom and for the use of drugs. We read one of the most representative poems of this generation, America , by Allen Ginsberg. I find this pome very creative and amusing. The author uses irony and sarcasm to tease the American government, its policies and social injustices. I like it because I believe that this is the best way of making fun of something and not everyone can actually understand it.

  During this week, we finished with our analysis of "To the Lighthouse" and we started with the other most famous modernist writer in English, James Joyce. Sara taught us the theory that we need to know about him and she said that we do not need to read "Ulysses" (thank God). We read some excerpts from "A portrait of the artist as a young man". I find this text interesting, although very complicated to understand because we can never be sure of what Joyce wanted to say exactly in every line. The one thing I liked the most is his experimentation with language and the deep insight he offers of Stephen's life. 

  At the beginning of this week, we first finished our discussion on T.S. Eliot's 'The Wasteland' and  'Four Quartets'. The poems, although somewhat hard to understand after the first reading, are very profound and rich. After that, we started with the discussion on To the Lighthouse . To be completely honest, this is definetely not my type of reading. When I started it, after two or three pages, it immeadiately reminded me of Merce Rodoreda and La plaça del diamant. The story is told from the characters' perspective and what we read are not their dialogues, but their thoughts. Because of this, the reading becomes very tedious and tiresome. The whole plot is about a dysfunctional family with a father that is frustrated and obsessed with his work, a mother that is unhappy and feels an emptyness that she tries to fill by inviting friends to their house and having pointless conversations with them and eight children that, deep inside, hate their father and are rese...

  The most remarkable aspect of this week is definetely the lesson and discussion on 'The love song of J.Alfred Profrock', by T. S. Elliot. This was one of the strangest and most enigmatic poems that I have ever read. It is a poem that says so much, and yet it is so hard to find the gist of it and to know what Elliot exactly meant in every single line. One thing is for sure; he was very pesimistic about everything. It was interesting for me to see that I am not the only young person (because Elliot was twenty-years old when he wrote the poem) who is pesimistic about life. I really understood the speaker and connected with his feeling of fatigue and weariness. Many people believe that if you are young then you should be full of energy and will, but it is not like that some times. Ocasionally, a young person can also be depressed and feel tired of life. In this sense, I enjoyed the poem very much.   

This week was a standard one in which we had theory sessions on Modernism. Our teacher explained to us the origins of the movement and most of its relevant features. We were also introduced to one of the most brilliant and representative figures of Modernism, T.S Elliot.  This famous writer and literary critic is know for being very prolific. He wrote poetry, drama en essays on literary criticism. T.S. Elliot is considered one of the key figures in English literature in the 20th century.