A Farewell to Arms – “When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.”

Well hello again! I apologize for the long, unintentional hiatus. Back in June I had started with my current job and slowly things kind of fell on the back burner for me – which meant reading books and updating this blog. However, I didn’t completely forget about you all! My boyfriend had recommended that I read Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, and I had started to read it, but my reading sessions started becoming fragmented. Then, even when I did finally finish the book, I never found time to actually sit and discuss my thoughts on here. That is the reason why this post may be shorter than the others – just because I was never able to consistently read the book thus my full grasp of the story isn’t the greatest. I do have a few points I would like to discuss, plus I was determined to post on here before the new year that way I could start off with a fresh slate and a new book. 🙂 So let’s get down to it!

Published in 1929, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms follows the romance of an American, Frederic Henry – who is serving as a Lieutenant in the Ambulance Corps of the Italian Army – and Catherine Barkley, a British nurse; all against the backdrop of World War I. While the text is divided into several books, the overall narrative that Henry provides can be divided by where he spent his time: 1. with the army and 2. with Catherine. The interesting part about war novels written together with a romantic story is the overall juxtaposition, and Hemingway definitely uses this to his advantage to explore the notions of loyalty – both to love and to his duty in the Italian Army.

When reading through the text, it becomes clear that many of the soldiers share an ambivalence towards the war. Rinaldi, a friend of Henry’s, claims that the war is “killing [him]” and that he is “very depressed by it.” Henry does not shy away from expressing his own sentiments towards the war as well. When hearing other soldiers describing the hope that their efforts were not being done in vain, it elicits Henry to describe his feelings (ones most likely shared by others) in which he reveals that he is

embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. [They] had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and [he] had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and theses with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

For Henry, his role in the Italian Army and the war as a whole is one stripped of the glamor placed on it by media and journalists. Henry presents the reality that is war – the death and destruction – but ties it into the notion that these are the inevitable outcomes associated with wars due to the cruel nature of the world we live in. It is this notion that Hemingway carries throughout the war sections of the novel. It is seen in the shoddiness of their equipment, lack of supplies, and it is especially evident in the Italian retreat. Commenting on his army, Henry points out the vast amount of confusion that began growing amongst the men. Henry claims that they “are in more danger from Italians than Germans…The Germans know what they’re after.” The Italians, on the other hand, “were frightened and firing on anything they saw.” Henry goes on further to say that “There was no need to confuse our retreat [because] the size of the army and the fewness of the roads did that.” These depictions only add to the unglamorous, cruel realities of war that Hemingway is painting in the novel. It is at this point that we must now turn to where Henry’s loyalty really rests, and that is in his relationship with Catherine.

In examining both aspects of Henry’s life, during his time as a soldier he exhibited a very basic form of service – accepting no recognition or praise for his efforts. However, in his relationship with Catherine, Henry goes to great lengths for her – leaving the army and taking her away to Switzerland where they would both be safe. He really exemplifies his loyalty to Catherine and it is with each other that they find temporary refuge from the horrible effects of the war. With their relationship, Catherine and Henry end up isolating themselves from the rest of the world, or so it seems in their minds. That is the case whenever Henry would think about Catherine during the war – it was his escape where he could isolate himself from the action. Then, once Henry has left the army, he chooses to separate himself from the war as best as he can. At one point he states that he “did not want to read about the war. [He] was going to forget the war. [He] had made a separate peace.” Hemingway, however, does not make A Farewell to Arms a novel in which love prevails – it is the reason that makes the ending so tragic. Despite the fact that Henry and Catherine are able to be together, their love ultimately succumbs to the realities of the world, just like the war and everything else. It is through Catherine, Henry, and their overall relationship that makes this line ring true in the novel:

The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

A Farewell to Arms solidifies the idea that without making an effort to protect and preserve true love, it can also be victim to the cruel realities of the world such as war, destruction, and death.

While there is still so much that could be said about this novel, this is going to be my stopping point. What I did note while I was reading was Hemingway’s skill in creating all of these images and really detailing the landscapes. The details can be very refreshing for readers. To be honest, for whatever reason it was really hard for me to get into this book. It could have just been my schedule or other factors, but I would have to say this wasn’t necessarily a favorite book for me. This should be seen as a lesson though – even though you may not enjoy a book or any other piece of literature, that doesn’t mean there isn’t anything you can take from it or points you can still discuss. Remember: there are two sides to an argument, so even if everyone agrees about a book in one light, you could be the person who provides the other perspective. 🙂

That’s all for me in this post. I hope everyone has a very blessed new year! I’ve already got my next book lined up for me to read which I find to be ironically fitting given all the past hype about the Mayan calendar and whatnot. Either way, my goal is to read more and post more this coming year. Until next time in the new year!

Happy Reading!
– Charlyn

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead – “Who’d have thought that we were so important?”

Hello folks! I apologize for the lack of activity on here lately, but I haven’t completely forgotten about this blog. Life happens and it has been pretty busy around here within the last month or so. However, on to the books! Today’s post is probably going to be somewhat shorter than the others just because I wasn’t able to consistently read this book. Even though it is a shorter read, it ended up taking me maybe two weeks or so to finish just due to other things going on. Either way, I’ll try to make this worth your while. 🙂 The central focus of this post is going to be on Tom Stoppard’s play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead which first premiered on stage in 1966. My sister personally recommended that I should read this book because it is one she had to read for class and really enjoyed – so I took her up on the offer.

Hopefully the title characters sound familiar to you seeing as most people encounter Shakespeare by the time they graduate high school. If this is not the case…well, I think you should start reading some! In all seriousness, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are two minor characters that appear in Shakespeare’s play, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, or for quicker reference – Hamlet. In Shakespeare’s play, these two characters are childhood friends of Hamlet who have been called on by the King to investigate into the string of Hamlet’s recent bouts of madness.  In Tom Stoppard’s play, he does not necessarily deviate from Shakespeare’s original plot, but instead place both Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as the leading characters of the play. Ros and Guild (for short) are presented as two characters following along with the original plot of Hamlet, but without knowing where and why they are doing things. So in one moment, we see them flipping coins in a sort of undefined space, and then in the next moment, they are placed in the King’s court at Elsinore being prompted to investigate what is going on with Hamlet. With this constant forward movement, with Ros and Guild being pulled in and out of scenes – onward to an inevitable end, Stoppard utilizes two big ideas to shape the overall narrative of the play.

Jean-Paul Sartre, a philosopher and literary critic (among the many other titles he claimed), was one of a small group of intellectuals who popularized the idea of Existentialism. With many philosophical ideas, it can get a bit confusing and overwhelming, but to simply put it, Existentialism is the idea that people give meaning to their lives by utilizing their free will and making independent choices. If there is an ultimate meaning to life, it’s one that you can’t figure out. Thus, we are left to give meaning and purpose to our own lives. For Ros and Guild, Stoppard places them in a sort of Existential crisis. On the one hand, they have the ability to make their own choices throughout the play. For example, Ros and Guild had the option of choosing not to escort Hamlet to England, especially after they discover that he is to be executed. The other side of their problem is that they appear to still be left to the hands of fate – destined to reach the same, tragic end. This is also due to a sort of passivity that they embrace as well. Even when realizing the options available, they choose to passively continue down the path that they already find themselves on. As Guild points out:

Where [they] went wrong was getting on a boat. [They] can move, of course, change direction, rattle about, but [their] movement is contained within a larger one that carries [them] along as inexorably as the wind and current…

Guild realizes this Existential crisis that they find themselves in, but as before, they passively continue on to their untimely end.

The other idea that helps to shape the play is the idea of the Absurd. Particularly with theatre, Absurdist works express the belief that human existence does not have a purpose or direction, thus leading to a break down of communication. This obviously conflicts with the Existentialist ideas that are present in the play as well — further deepening the crisis that the title characters find themselves in. In addition to the lack of purpose to human existence, Absurdist theatre also features characters caught in hopeless situations, nonsensical wordplay, cyclical dialogue and plots, parody/dismissal of realism, and a broad sense of comedy — all of these aspects, even in the slightest, applying within the play. For example, in the opening scenes of Act I, Ros and Guild are betting on coin flips, with Ros winning consecutively 92 times for coins landing on head. In this instance, there is a suspension of the laws of probability since the actual probability of this event occurring is highly unlikely. It also clues Ros and Guild into the possibility of being in a space that is not normal, or one that is controlled by supernatural force (a thought which I personally find interesting because I link this idea to the famous quote from the opening scenes of Hamlet – “something is rotten in the State of Denmark“). Another example of Absurdist elements present within the play can be found in much of the dialogue between Ros and Guild because Stoppard utilizes nonsensical wordplay to color their conversation.

Stoppard’s play serves as a sort of inverse to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, presenting the story of Ros and Guild and in a way, giving more of a purpose to their characters in Shakespeare’s overall plot. Consider this, given that Stoppard allows Ros and Guild to discover the actual reason for their trip with Hamlet to England, should they have chosen to stay in Denmark, the story of Hamlet could have ended completely different. Thus it almost seems necessary for Ros and Guild to continue to England, because then Hamlet can escape with the pirates and return back to Denmark and exact revenge on his uncle.  The unfortunate end for Ros and Guild is just an aspect that makes the tragedy at the end of Hamlet even more complete — adding to the overall death count. Thus, with their characters seeming to have a specified purpose, it makes their end even more tragic in the Stoppard play. With Guild’s last lines in the play, he states that:

There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where [they] could have said — no. But somehow [they] missed it.

In this moment, you almost feel bad for Ros and Guild for not being able to change their fate. But so it goes, and their end had to come in this fashion for the plots to work in both plays.

Well, that’s it for this post! I’m debating on what my next read shall be. Donna and I have a book set to read, but she still has yet to purchase it because she hasn’t been able to find it. So I’m debating on maybe heading to the bookstore and buying a new read in the mean time, or just waiting. Either way, hopefully I won’t keep you all waiting too long for another post. Until next time!

Happy Reading!
– Charlyn

Breakfast of Champions – “Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease!”

I haven’t really read too much of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels. This is only the second book I’ve read, the first being Slaughterhouse-five. What I can say, however, is that Vonnegut’s unique writing style is definitely one that can somehow draw you into his strange stories. Now, saying that his stories are strange may be a bit of a stretch. It is probably more appropriate to define his works under the realm of postmodern literature. There are certain characteristics that makes works, such as Breakfast of Champions , stand out as being postmodern literature. First, there is the use of fragmentation which Vonnegut definitely uses in terms of his plot and story development. With traditional literature, the plots would typically follow Freytag’s beloved model of dramatic structure (you know, the basics. They teach it in elementary schools: stories have 5 parts – exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. Yup, that’s the one, except maybe with not so complicated terms for kids). With fragmentation in postmodern literature, you get a story or plot that is exactly that – fragmented. There may be no real resolution, the story may jump back and forth and not really follow a linear pattern, etc. This can make texts, such as Breakfast of Champions, harder to follow and comprehend, and it may even require having to go back and re-read moments or the entire book for that matter. Fragmentation, like any other literary devices, can be used by the author for a certain purpose…even if it may be to just frustrate the reader.

Another technique of postmodern literature that Vonnegut uses in this book is metafiction. Metafiction simplified is really “fiction within fiction.” (Confusing, right?) When metafiction is employed by an author, it sort of pokes fun at the fictional illusion that a book can create for the reader. So you would see instances where the author may interrupt the story, enter the story, or bring attention to what exactly is being written and why (or why not, if addressing omissions from the text). In both Vonnegut works that I’ve read, he is notorious for utilizing metafiction within his works. In Breakfast of Champions, he even inserts the narrator as a character much later in the text, giving this figure a more active role than just a standard third-person omniscient narrator. The best way I can describe it is that it is similar to the idea of breaking the fourth wall in theatre – where the boundaries and illusions of the play crumble and the actors directly interact with the audience. The same thing goes on in Vonnegut’s work — he sort of breaks the fourth wall between the fictional world of the text, the author, and the reader; allowing a more “inside” look to the text. The disadvantage of this, however, is similar to that of fragmentation. It can sometimes make a work harder to read and the reader can tend to feel removed from the text as well. Despite all of these technicalities, if we look a little further, we can see the larger ideas that Vonnegut explores. In addition, we can find some humor in the quirky little doodles that are unique to Vonnegut’s works as well.

With the text being sort of all over the place, It was kind of difficult for me to figure out what exactly I wanted to talk about for this particular post. Vonnegut tackles numerous topics throughout the book, but the one that stood out to me (and that is reflected in the headline quote) is the idea of…ideas. More specifically, how ideologies effect our overall lives and inform the decisions we make. InBreakfast of Champions, Vonnegut introduces the characters of Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout (who has actually made appearances/been referenced in earlier novels). These two characters are completely opposite from one another. Dwayne Hoover is a car dealer whose wife had committed suicide by swallowing Drano. Kilgore Trout, on the other hand, is a science fiction writer (and not a very successful one) whose works are featured in the most obscure and random locations — such as pornographic novels and whatnot. The only reason these two characters even cross paths is due to an Arts festival that is occurring in Midland City, where Dwayne lives, that Kilgore Trout is invited to attend. Interestingly enough, as a reader, you already learn this information and pretty much the outcome of the novel towards the beginning of the text. So how does Vonnegut get the reader to continue with the story? Why not just put down the book if you already know what is going to happen? Well, Vonnegut spends the book developing both characters and more importantly revealing the fragile mental state that Dwayne Hoover is in.

As we follow Dwayne Hoover, there are moments where it seems like elements of society are bombarding him with so many ideas. For example, when listening to the radio one night, Dwayne hears an advertisement about a deal on shrubbery. The narrator adds his own comments following this incident saying:

Almost all of the messages which were sent and received in his country, even the telepathic ones, had to do with buying or selling some damn thing.

Not only is this a comment on the advertisement, but the larger idea of consumerism within the United States. Vonnegut constantly satirizes the consumer culture, even in the naming of the book — the title being a registered trademark of General Mills, Inc. In a way, Vonnegut critiques the idea that consumerism plants within the minds of society: the constant need to buy certain products, or from certain brand names, etc. It’s just one example of how ideas control/influence our daily lives and the decisions we make.

The bigger example of the influence of ideas/ideology occurs, however, when Kilgore Trout and Dwayne Hoover finally meet. Dwayne gets his hands on a work by Kilgore Trout which basically claims that the reader of that particular work is the only person that has free will, and everyone else around him are just robots. For Dwayne, being mentally unstable and also waiting for some kind of change in his life, this was the moment that seemed to fulfill what he was waiting for. Thus, Dwayne goes on a rampage, beating up the supposed “robots” that are his co-workers, lovers, and even strangers, while exercising his declared free will. When in reality, such gruesome scenes would be seen with distaste, Vonnegut’s use of black humor helps to make the scenes more comedic. The black humor throughout the novel as a whole is what helps Vonnegut to tackle these larger, and even taboo topics. So if a finger gets bitten off – no big deal! The man has free will and the victim was a robot anyway, right?

Dwayne thus becomes an example of how blindly accepting an idea/ideology as truth can be problematic — a “disease.” His circumstances were obviously more on the absurd side and quite unrealistic, but Vonnegut seems to make his point nonetheless. Blindly accepting an idea/ideology as your own personal truth without exploring it further can be problematic, and in a way, you become a sort of “robot” as well.  You begin to live in a delusional reality where you believe you’re making your own decisions free of any kind of influences, but upon closer examination, it is those ideas/ideologies that are really controlling your life. You become a cog in the larger ideological machine, which reminds me of the 1927 film by Fritz Lang entitled, Metropolis. Lang also captures this idea of being controlled by a larger “power” and people being like smaller parts to the bigger machine. The film has many memorable scenes, but the one that sticks out to me the most and I think reflects this idea of being a sort of “mindless robot” to the larger ideologies is the scene of the shift change with workers leaving and coming into the factory. If you’ve never seen it, you can watch that particular scene here on youtube.

On a more humorous and entertaining note, I can’t talk about Vonnegut and not bring up his felt pen doodles that are unique to his novels. Vonnegut inserts these drawings into the text, and they can either be relevant or completely go off on a tangent. So when choosing a particular doodle to show you all, I decided to stick to one that is commonly associated with Vonnegut’s works and is even featured on the spine of his novels as well. I even had a professor who had this particularly doodle hanging on his office door. Thus, let me wet your feet with this Vonnegut doodle:

With that, we come to the end of another blog post. I’ve already got my next book to read, as well as a list of a few other books as well. Also, be on the look out for a joint blog with my best friend Donna (you can check her page out too!) We’ll be reading a book together, and I’m assuming she’ll blog about it as well. So, until next time!

Happy Reading!
– Charlyn

M. Butterfly – “Because only a man knows how a woman is supposed to act”

This is a rather interesting play to read, but that should come as no surprise given the class I was taking in which it was assigned reading. Just to give you a little background: I was taking a Major Figures in Literature class which, if you ask me, is just a facade for the professors. In reality, the professors have the flexibility to structure the course to focus on any topic they want — so long as they loosely meet the base requirements of the course in general. The particular class I was enrolled in was with a teaching assistant that was working towards his Ph.D and whom I’ve taken classes with before. He is really entertaining, but also very satirical and brutally honest. Perhaps that’s why I enjoyed his classes so much — it definitely wasn’t the typical literature class experience that one would expect. He had structured this course to focus on love, but not the kind of love that you would find in a Nicholas Sparks book. The love we focused on was strange, non-normative, and animalistic love – literally. The books and other texts that were assigned to read dealt with gender, sex, and sexuality and our discussions were centered around how the texts challenged a hegemonic “norm” — in other words, a sort of “normal” standard of what defines a good relationship, or how you are supposed to fulfill your gender role within society.

That being said, we turn now to the focus of this post: David Henry Hwang’s play, M. Butterfly. Written in 1988, the play pulls inspiration from an opera by Puccini entitled Madama Butterfly. In addition, the story is also loosely based on a relationship between a French diplomat by the name of Bernard Boursicot and Shi Pei Pu, a male Peking opera singer. Before going further, it is important to understand the story of Puccini’s opera as it carries a heavy significance and plays an important role in how Hwang’s plot develops. In the opera, a U.S. naval officer takes a 15 year old Japanese girl as his wife and she becomes pregnant. However, the officer leaves soon after marrying to go back to the United States where he intends to find a proper American Wife. After leaving, his Japanese wife is left with their child and is determined to wait until the officer returns to her. Unfortunately, when he does return, he brings his American wife who has agreed to raise his Japanese child as their own. When the officer finds out from a servant that his Japanese wife had been eagerly waiting his return, he admits to being a coward and cannot face her. The Japanese wife finds out from her servant, the American consul, and the officer’s American wife that they are there to take her child, she agrees to hand over the child so long as the naval officer comes to visit her in person. After saying goodbye to her son, however, she commits suicide by slitting her throat, and unfortunately the officer arrives too late.

It is this opera that unites the main characters of Hwang’s play. Rene Gallimard, a civil servant who worked with the French Embassy in China, narrates the story of his relationship with Song Liling in retrospect from his prison cell. When Gallimard first meets Song, he is singing the death scene from Madama Butterfly. Gallimard is so captivated by this performance that he seeks out Song afterwards and a conversation ensues. Of course, Gallimard was not aware that Song was actually a man, because just like during Shakespeare’s time — women were not allowed to perform on stage. Thus, you would typically find males dressing up as women for stage performances, as is the case with Song. It is in this first of many conversations between Song and Gallimard that the author presents the larger idea of the clash between the East and West — an idea which, to some extent, could still be applied in today’s world. Gallimard makes the comment that the death scene from the opera is so beautiful because of the sacrifice that the Japanese wife makes by committing suicide. Song is quick to criticize him for this, however, claiming that of course it would beautiful to someone from the West. In Gallimard’s eyes, the sacrifice is beautiful because in reality it is so hard to find a woman who would give herself so completely to a man. In criticizing Gallimard for stating such an opinion, Song points out what is problematic with Gallimard’s stance — he is feeding into a larger theory of Orientalism.

Literary theorist, Edward Said (pronounced “sigh-eed”), wrote a book entitled Orientalism which focused on Western imperialism and the depiction of the Middle East. In short, what Said points out is that people of the West had marginalized the Middle Eastern people and culture. Middle Easterners were depicted as being savage, unruly, unreformed — basically inferior. In addition, the West portrayed themselves as being a “savior” because they were the ones that were going to these savage countries and reforming the people and cultures while spreading Christianity. This theory is not only limited to the Middle East but can especially be extended further to include other areas such as the Orient. Song realizes the Orientalist notions that Gallimard had internalized. In seeing the suicide as an ultimate sacrifice for the officer, he automatically places the Japanese wife in an inferior position. Song does not stand for such viewpoints, and points out the double standard saying:

“What would you say if a blonde homecoming queen fell in love with a short Japanese businessman? He treats her cruelly, then goes home for three years, during which time she prays to his picture and turns down marriage from a young Kennedy. Then, when she learns he has remarried, she kills herself. No, I believe you would consider this girl to be a deranged idiot, correct? But because it’s an Oriental who kills herself for a Westerner – ah! – you find it beautiful.”

These Orientalist notions which Song points out not only demean the people of the East while legitimizing the superiority of the West, it also creates a sort of fetish for the submissive oriental as well. Being able to have an oriental woman to submit themselves fully to you is a sort of romanticized image that the Westerners long for. Unfortunately, as the story develops we see this clash between East and West in the relationship between Song and Gallimard — with Song playing the role of the submissive oriental.

Now, I hope you haven’t forgotten one big, important detail — Song is not a woman. So the question is: how can a man like Gallimard carry on a 20 year relationship with Song and not know that he is a man as well? Well, that is a good question my friends because it is not explicitly stated whether he is ignorant and doesn’t know, or knows and continues the relationship anyway. I mean, they did engage in sexual activities, but how would he still not know? There is even a scene within the play after he has been arrested in Paris where people question whether Gallimard ever felt/saw “it” during the 20 year affair. It seems rather odd, but that is just a detail that is strictly confidential to both the fictional characters, and the real life persons of the event. This relationship between Gallimard and Song raises numerous questions regarding sexuality. For example: According to Gallimard, Song was the “perfect woman.” So with that mindset, would having sexual intercourse make him gay when he honestly thought Song was a woman, but in reality he was having sex with another man? For Song, questions of gender roles also arise because dressing like a woman would not be seen as a typical “masculine” thing to do. However, we find out later, this whole performance is all for the Chinese government. So is he merely doing his job as a spy, or is he really a more effeminate man?

I don’t want to give away the ending of course, because I would like to encourage all of you to check out the books that I will be posting on. I will say that the way in which Hwang ends his play is very well done. Like I mentioned earlier, the Madama Butterfly opera is very influential to the text and even impacts the way in which the play ends. At the end of the opera, the Japanese wife commits suicide and makes this beautiful sacrifice for the one she loves. Hwang mirrors this death scene as well, but the character who ends up fulfilling the role as the submissive, sacrificing butterfly may surprise you. 🙂

On a relevant sidenote, another element to this text that I find interesting and is an aspect that gets commonly overlooked with books, plays, etc is the title. (I bet you didn’t see that one coming!) While people may sometimes refer to the text as “Madame Butterfly,” there is a slight significance to Hwang titling the play as “M. Butterfly” rather than the full-written title. There is a sort of ambiguity with the title. While people may call the play “Madame Butterfly,” in France, “M.” is an abbreviation for Monsieur or Mister. So this also ties into the overall ambiguity of Song’s gender role within the play.

Not bad for my first official book post if I do say so myself. Nothing too complicated and hopefully I’ve made it understandable for everyone. So next time you’re at a fancy party with some people you want to impress, hopefully you can take something you may have learned from this post and drop some knowledge on them. 😉 My next blog post should be up sometime within the next week, and it will be more about…robots, but not like Transformers or anything — something geared more towards a larger concept (of course).

Happy Reading!
– Charlyn

Greetings!

The infamous first blog post. Like most others, and also to just be direct, I guess I should follow the beginner outline of introducing myself and my blog. So, here we go:

Hello world, my name is Charlyn.
I’m a proud Filipino-American.
I loved dancing and watching dance.
I enjoy and have an appreciation for the arts (theatre, music, etc.).
I recently graduated with my Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature with a minor in Film Studies.

That last point serves as my segue into the creation of this blog. As I have told many friends before, or people I would get in random discussion with, I have a love/hate relationship with reading. I am far from being a speed reader. I read slow — now, whether that is by choice or just naturally how I read, I’m not quite sure. Either way, my defense is that I like to take in every last detail because, in my mind, it’s all important to the overall text. I mean, if the author included it in the book, it has to serve some purpose, right? (This is definitely arguable, however, when you encounter works by Post-modern authors such as Kurt Vonnegut — which I’m sure we’ll come across eventually.)

So, for someone who loves/hates reading, you may be wondering why I decided to pursue a degree in literature. Well, you’re in luck because I’m about to tell you! Personally, I really enjoy the discussion that can be had about works of literature. I was always intrigued by the ideas that can be tossed back and forth during a simple discussion about a book. By ideas, of course, I don’t simply mean those strictly relating to the text, but larger ideas that can be applied to the work and ties the text into the larger literary canon. Discussion that included literary theories and criticisms really helped to enrich my reading experience and made the texts I was reading more dynamic — plus, it really helped to deepen my understanding of these works as well.

Now that I’ve completed work as an undergraduate, I don’t want my education to stop when I leave the institution (an idea that should extend to anyone, really). Most of the books I’ve read in the past were due to school, so I never really read for pleasure — which ties back into the previous paragraph. However, consider this blog a step out of my comfort zone. Since school is no longer dictating what I should read, that doesn’t mean I should stop reading altogether. So as a side plan to occupy my post-graduate life, I want to read more for pleasure, but still engage in discussions about the texts I’m reading. Each post I make on this blog will be about a book I’ve currently read and will feature my thoughts with some literary theory thrown in (if applicable). I don’t want this blog to be “Oh I loved or hated this book” but rather something slightly more intellectual. I want to keep my knowledge sharp on all the more scholarly ideas, but hopefully you can learn a little too!

On a relevant side-note: perhaps I should address the title of my blog — A Room for My Own. In coming up with a title, I didn’t want something too simple or too overly complicated. I wanted a title that would be meaningful to the purpose of my blog.  This title is a play off of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. In this extended essay, Woolf argues for both a literal and figurative role for women within the literary tradition which, up to that point, had been predominantly controlled by men (like many other aspects). While Woolf’s text is generally seen as feminist, my blog does not follow in the same vein. Instead, my blog transforms the idea that Woolf is arguing for, and slightly adjusts it for my personal benefit. Where Woolf argues for a space in which women can actively participate in the literary tradition, my blog is an active space where I will be able to engage with the literary works I read.

Well, so much for keeping this post direct. I’m sure I’ve rambled slightly, but that is probably going to be a recurring theme in all of my blog posts. I am currently reading a book and am close to finishing it. However, my first official book blog post will be about a play that I read last week. I was playing catch-up from the semester because I was unable to read it for class, so I had set it aside to read when I had more free time.  So a new post should be coming soon. If you have any book suggestions, feel free to leave them in a comment and I’ll be sure to check them out. I look forward to this literary journey and sharing all my thoughts with you all. 🙂

Happy reading!
– Charlyn