20th century Yan blog

I've never thought too hard about love and what it means, I just assumed it was pretty much like all the other emotions, similar to happiness, sadness and whatnot. However, after reading through The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, it made me think much harder on this topic due to it being a main part of the plot as well as being "present" (more accurately, talked about) in almost if not all the characters in the novel. I first realized love is not exactly an emotion, so got me thinking: "what really is love?" Is it a feeling? perhaps an action? or something entirely different? The Oxford dictionary describes the word "love" as: "an intense feeling of deep affection." Even the official definition of the word is quite broad and confusing. Even with just affection, there are many different ways of showing it. In the novel, different characters treat love...well more like intimacy, differently. From Cohn towards Brett, Jake towards Brett, Rom...

During the in-class discussion on The Stanger  by Albert Camus on the seventh of November, we talked about a topic that was incredibly fascinating to me, we concluded that Meursault was one hundred percent guilty when he shot and killed the Arab man and should at least be punished lightly, but the question became when exactly Meursault became guilty? or to be put more broadly, when is anyone considered guilty and no longer innocent? I have concluded that there are three times a person can become guilty: when they decide on committing the crime mentally, the act of committing the crime, and finally, the one that actually matter in society, being declared guilty in court.  When a person decides they will be committing the crime, I believe already in that moment they are no longer innocent. Obviously, there will be no consequences to this, as no one have been harmed and no crime have actually been committed, but just by thinking about it and putting it in your conscience in my op...

     Forgive me as I speak upon a similar topic as I did previously. Had I known that we were going to read one of Virginia Woolf's novels (I did, I just forgot), I wouldn't have chosen mental health as my main subject in by previous blog. Virginia Woolf, in my opinion, is one of the most fascinating authors ever. From her writing style to her real-life experiences, the more I study her the more interested I get. Last year my English class read her essay " Death of a Moth " and my group decided to turn the essay into a "movie trailer" for our finals project (you can watch it here  if you'd like). Because the essay was quite vague, it was hard to have a lot of scenes with a moth (you can see in the trailer, the "moth" was made out of paper and drawn with a pencil by me), and most importantly, the was written close to her suicide (she actually died a year before this was published) and she expressed a lot of her own feelings through the moth. Thu...

    Howie, the main character and narrator of Nicholson Baker's 1988 novel "The Mezzanine", is on the autism spectrum. I mean that not as a slight at Howie as a character, or Nicholson Baker's writing, in fact, I believe this is more of a compliment to Baker's writing style as well as an observation of one of the most interesting parts of the novel: Howie's mind and how it works.       I'll be honest, when I heard the novel we were going to read was about "a man going up an escalator", I wasn't exactly feeling positive about if I'm going to be interested in the novel, and though it wasn't action-packed like the books I've usually read, one thing stood out to me and made me want to continue to read further: Howie's "rants". While quite a lot of his rants were relatable like plastic straws and things being stuck in the vending machine, a few were quite...unique and speaks about things I've never done or even though...