disGraceofthe20thcentury

As we know from the very first day we started discussing Song of Solomon, the idea of names and their importance has been a theme in the epigraph and in the book. I wanted to use my blog post as an opportunity to research the cultural backgrounds associated with a few of the names we encounter in Song of Solomon, as well as connect these backgrounds to the actual characters of the novel. Many of these cultural backgrounds are rooted in the Bible, which makes sense because flipping through and choosing a name based on where your finger lands was the strategy that the Deads used for naming their children. As you’re reading these, please feel free to say if you agree or disagree with these connections or the validity of these descriptions. :) (also for clarification this isn't actually the name game but that anna banna bobana song was stuck in my head because of this blog post so I titled it that hahah ok back to regularly scheduled programming) Name Song of Solomon Character...

As I was reading Wide Sargasso Sea, I was very interested in the topic of Obeah. In the novel, Christophine is known as a follower of Obeah, and is depicted in scenes as early as Antoinette’s early childhood as distrustful because of her following of these traditions. People around Antoinette believed that Christophine could summon zombies and thought that she was not to be crossed, or else they would be affected by evil spirits through Christophine. Even Antoinette was frightened of her practices in Obeah; in part one, Antoinette narrates: “I was certain that hidden in the room (behind the old black press?) there was a dead man’s dried hand, white chicken feathers, a cock with its throat cut, dying slowly, slowly. Drop by drop the blood was falling into a red basin and I imagined I could hear it.” She also mentions here that she has never been taught about what Obeah really was, but was certain of herself that she already knows about it. With this description, Obeah sounds really ho...

The other day in class, my group and I discussed the article ,”Psychological Interpretation of the novel The Stranger by Camus” by R.Gnanasekaran, in which the author provides several psychoanalytical ideas to explain Mersault as a character in The Stranger. In this article, he described many interesting psychological and philosophical ideas, such as absurdism, existentialism, and commitment phobia, but there were some we were not able to discuss. Therefore, I want to pinpoint and build on the idea of phobic neurosis that the author mentions in his article. To quote the author’s explanation of phobic neurosis directly, “phobias result from anxiety that is produced by id impulses. This anxiety is displaced from the id impulses to an object or situation that has some symbolic connection with this fear. These objects or situations then become the phobic stimuli.” When I read “phobic stimuli”, I immediately thought of Mersault’s difficulties of coping with the sun and it...

        In our class discussion the other day, we mentioned the possible reasoning for Kafka choosing  a giant insect as the animal that Gregor was transformed into, versus another type of animal. We uniformly agreed that Kafka's choice of a large cockroach-like insect was deliberate. By choosing an insect as the new body of Gregor, it gives both the reader and the characters that Gregor encounters in the book the ultimate sense of dehumanization without leaving the realm of living vertebrate. Below I have some reasonings as to why an insect was Kafka's best choice of brute:     - bugs are the most commonly killed leaving creatures. There are insect repellents and other devices to get rid of bugs that are easily available at your local grocery store, and it is normal for a household to own one or more of these repellents. Also, an exterminator is a person whose paid occupation is to exterminate (a rather aggressively fancy word for killing bugs!) thes...

A panel presentation this week has brought up the idea of Brett as a motherly figure in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises . This raised up quite the discussion in class, and I would like to build off of these ideas by bringing to the table my own ideas of the familial relationships they have within the group, if the characters of this novel were seen as a family. The first character of the family that I will focus on, of course, is the mother, Lady Brett Ashley . As most of the plot is revolved around her and her decisions, the male characters are naturally drawn towards her, and most of them long for her attention. She has a maternal leadership aspect, where the boys follow her and will accept/tend to whatever she pleases to do. Brett also comforts like a maternal figure, as shown in the scene when Jake is lying face down on the bed when he is upset about not being able to be with Brett. On page 62, Brett strokes his head and calls him “poor old darling”. This scene hi...

- a response to the movie, The Hours - As I was beginning to watch The Hours (the movie), the connections between the three main storylines were not at all clear to me. In fact, they seemed very distant, and even as I began to put several pieces together, I was still figuring out which characters I knew from the book and which ones weren't from the book. As the movie went on and built, however, the connections became much clearer and some were so shocking/cleverly planned that I had to force myself to pause the movie in order to allow myself to fully grasp the scene/character connection reveal. In this post, I would like to highlight some of the connections as well as contrasts that I was able to make between the book Mrs. Dalloway and the movie The Hours . The Woman in the Mirror As the camera switches between snippets of the three storylines in the beginning of the movie, the focus is on each woman waking up from her bed. As they get ready, each of the three main char...