The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy

 


This is our first mandatory text. I have to say that I hated it with all my heart when I first attempted to read it. I understood absolutely nothing and thought that this is just a whole lot of rubbish and nonsense. However, after Sara's explanation, I think I now hate it a bit less than before. The author, Lawrence Sterne, had a point when he wrote it. It is one of the first attemps to break with the rules in literature. We find here a distorted timeline and a weird progression. The author wanted to make something new and original. The text is in fact very creative in its own nonsense. Personally, I would not recommed this book to anybody, not even my sworn enemies, but it is a great example of innovation and new creation, I admit. 

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Semana 12 - 16 de octubre

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  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.   
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Semana 19 - 23 de octubre

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  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...
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Semana 05 - 09 de octubre

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. 
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