English is Entering my Dreams

        While dreaming the other night, I found myself in a city where I could change any aspect of the environment at my will.  Much like Adradne, I took full advantage of this privilege and rearranged the entire architecture of the city.  In response to the change of environment, the inhabitants of the dream began to get mad at me and eventually killed me before I was satisfied with the environment of the dream.  Hopefully I will have another chance to enter a similar dream, where I can spend more time exploring, but it better not not involve modernist attributes, such as those found in Inception, because I would spend too much time during the day confusing myself about my subconscious.

        The modernistic traits that I would be most concerned about seeing in my dream would be impressionism and ambiguous endings.  All day, I would be breaking my dream into every little detail that I could imagine, and trying to find the deeper meaning of what these details mean.  The search for the meaning of the non-transparency and impressionism would be driven by an insatiable ambiguous ending, such as the ending of Inception, when you do not know whether the top will fall or keep spinning, would become a daunting task.  I am certain that the constant search for the inner meanings of my dreams would drive me to insanity, and I am thankful that I am not plagued with such a curse.  

        Although Inception is tied to modernism, it made me excite to start the psychoanaliytic criticism unit.  Modernism explains the symbolism and themes behind Inception, which is good to know, but I want to know the psychology behind Inception so I can better understand what is going on and how certain characters are driven to act.  Also, it would be interesting to connect these two units because they seem to have much in common.

Trust Issues with Modernism

Trust Issues with Modernism

          Coming out of last school year, I was a naive and unexperienced reader excited for another fruitful dive into the adventures of the romantic and victorian ages.  Little did I know, I would experience a whole new genre of literature and emerge into the summer with more excitement than I could handle when I began reading Tender is the Night.  Throughout my summer reading journey, I focused on the finest details of each book and thought long and hard about the significance and deeper meaning of every word.  In the deep trance of euphoria that I experienced when reading the summer texts, I thought I understood all the details available, but I realized I was wrong when I learned how to truly fondle details.

        Going into the first day of senior year english class, we were assigned the task to read Nabokov's essay, "Good Readers and Good Writers."  This taught us the techniques of understanding and producing good literature.  One of the most striking notes on becoming a better reader from this essay was the importance of rereading and looking over every detail just as you would if you were to read a book.  This comparison of appreciating and observing a book just as you would with a painting was game changing in the development of my reading skills, and I was eager to test this new skill out.  During the next class, we were given a set of modernist stories to read and reread.  As an honest and dedicated student, I read and reread the stories and found a startling amount of answered questions after the rereads.  When we reviewed the stories in class, we learned about major characteristics of modernist literature and carefully fondled many details in the stories.  While fondling the details, we discovered that many phrases or details that could appear insignificant actually have multiple meanings and levels that require careful observations and rereading to pick out.  Learning about the non-transparent language, along with the impressionism, experimentation of form, tightening of form and ambiguous endings has taught me to never the words that appear infront of me, as before I interpret them for exactly how they are, I must take the time and effort to fondle them and truly understand what I am reading.