My Final Post :(

It feels like just yesterday we were discussing Proust and madeleines…

Funnily enough, the first volume of In Search of Lost Time was actually my favorite text we read during this class. I loved how immersive the prose was. The entire text had a dreamlike feel, reminding me strongly of what it was like to be a child. Thoughts and actions, longings and physical happenings blend together into an odd world where subjective and objective don’t appear so different. 

Then there was The Shrouded Woman. I found this book fascinating because it was told through the eyes of the dead, a perspective I had never considered. Life is portrayed differently from the “other side,” giving us a new way of looking at it. Thinking about how a narrator that’s literally dead could be reliable or relatable made me stretch my mind. 

Next I read Time of the Doves. Our class discussions for this text were funny: it seemed all we could talk about was how much we hated Quimet! There was so much more to this book though, and I enjoyed it a lot. 

After that came If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. This was definitely the weirdest text I read this term. It challenged many of my ideas about what a novel could and couldn’t be, and required more brainpower to make sense of (at least for me). 

Then I read The Lover, a short and uncomfortable but still quite enjoyable novel which has been compared to Lolita. I read this book with a focus on objectification and power, and how power dynamics can shift in complex ways depending on situational factors. 

Finally, I read Money to Burn. Gay people did crime and it was fun. While I didn’t like it as much as Proust, I had more fun reading it. Judging from the blog posts of others, it seems they enjoyed reading it too. 

I quite appreciated this course as a whole. I really liked the contract grading system, as I was graded on how much effort I put in, rather than how much the professor agreed with my paper or other arbitrary factors. The texts were well-chosen and the lectures on them were insightful and prompted interesting discussions. It was fun to read so many people’s blog posts. It gave the class a communal feel that my other classes lack. 

My question: Which text are you most glad you read for this course? Why?