RMST Blog

Over the course, we have read many texts that have overarching themes of war, violence, and memories. We have even reflected on our own and focused on discussions of motherhood, growing up, betrayal, and context differences. My favourite conversation this far was when we talked about Amulet and connected mothers from the other texts like the Shrouded Woman or Time of the Doves. Some of the books I hadn't read but diving deep into motherhood, the different types of mothers, and values they held, and what it truly means to be a mother was very eye-opening. For example, one book that I didn't read had a mother who wanted to kill her children for their benefit, which seems very wrong in our definitions of motherhood. I loved all the books we read over this term, and connecting them was a great way to understand further what romance studies is and how you can connect themes and language styles to send a message.  Childhood was a big theme in many of the texts and growing up to adapt...

 After reading the first couple of pages of Louis Aragon's Paris Peasant, I did not understand what I was reading at all. All the previous texts I have read are novels. My first initial thought is to try and highlight words to understand the reasoning behind the author and their story. With Paris Peasant, this got me nowhere, and after watching the lecture and searching some things up about this text, I realized that the way I was reading and analyzing the book was all wrong. Even though I still don't fully understand it, Surrealism is a way of releasing our unconscious minds. Louis takes us on a journey of his small peasant town in pairs, describing the architecture, the types of people it draws and how we always have a perceived notion or underlying feeling about these places or things. One of the questions that Jon wanted us to think about was the notion of time in Aragon's text. I feel like the sense of time is lost and moving so fast before anyone can realize it's ...