RMST Blog

 In the text, Society of Reluctant Dreamers, Agualusa challenges the meaning and importance of dreams. In the book, they have the ability to appear in people's dreams, and one character, in particular, can dream about people he hasn't met and future things that haven't occurred yet. He can dream about the future. He uses this power to appear in everyone's dreams in Angolan to overthrow the government, a one-party state. This power over dreams is bizarre and not what we usually think dreams are. Dreams are funny, confusing, metaphorical tales that we become aware of in our sleep that don't always make sense and can arise hidden feelings or motives we would not know when we are conscious. In the Society of Reluctant Dreamers, this dreaming is not a mere confusion or weird story in our heads but a movement to defeat politics and the political authority at the time. This creates a collective dream among the whole population of Angolans and gives people the courage and b...

 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 ...