Author Archives: Geraldine Armel Lamboley

Blog #6

Now that I finished reading “Benito Cereno,” I found it really interesting how Herman Melville speaks about slavery. Through Delano’s eye, we can see that he wants to look at the slaves as normal human beings, which, back in time, was not the case. And I think he achieves it perfectly by making him blind to the real situations and making any event positive and turned with sympathy. During the 3/4 of the text, we feel empathy for the slave whose road went so wrong but still try to help the boat maneuver them far from the world they always knew. He thinks the slaves are not nice due to the scurvy, and the Spanish lost their power due to their sickness. But then the truth appears, and once you discover the violence and the torture that happened, then the empathy turns to Benito.

For me, the text brings two tracks of thought :
The first one: Poor Don Benito, who trusted the slaves to sleep free at night and got mentally torture and sick. The second: poor slaves, they never asked to be put on a boat and carried to a foreign country; they only tried to return to the freedom that has been stolen from them.

blog #5

I would like to offer my fellow classmates, and you, professor, a little games; some plot are so famous that I thought it would be interesting to try to describe them and see if you can recognize it.

1) My first story is written as a third-person narrator and tends to have an omniscient narration.
Plot: During a dark night, a young boy is dropped behind the door of his uncle and aunt, who will raise him with negligence until his 11th birthday, a day where his life will be changed forever, taking us with him for seven magical years.

2) for my second plot, I only saw the movie, so I could not describe the narrative style: Abord, a train stuck between Istanbul and London by heavy snow, a man is found dead, stabbed 12 times. A famous detective start tries to solve the murder. The plot twist is incredible as it is actually the 12 other passengers of the train who each stabbed the victim.

I agree with Jonathan Culler that story brings pleasure., teaches us, and develop our imagination. They bring a lot of emotions in a range of excitement, fear, sadness, and can carry you away to a full different world than yours. Throughout history, the narration has been used to share the news through the troubadours that were traveling from land to land, relating events and battle. They brought to sleep many excited children, who, later on, dreamed about slaying the dragon that kept the princess in her tower, and in a more awake state, they allow us, the narrates to escape this reality through the white page covered with ink.

Blog #4

In chapter 5, Jonathan Culler describes synecdoche and metonymy as using a word to refer to another bringing out the idea of it. I find this absolutely fascinating that thanks to milestones thought history, and even nowadays, in pop culture, so many references can be inferred. It brings the public to a closer relationship with the author. Like a secret hand check or wink, available to everyone, yet no one, if not cultured about the subject. Dereck Walkot uses many of them all along his poem to refer to historical events, only calling the name of an object appearing in biblical events or implicitly referring to history’s past actions. Jonathan Culler also teaches us about metaphors. How describing something can bring us to visualize something but actually refer to something else. Dereck Walkot uses metaphor in his first paragraph, referencing the sea as a ” grey vault” that would keep in “the monuments and the battles” the author asks to see. It can be easily visualized that the monuments are boats that sank from battles, trapped forever and preciously kept by the sea. For Adrienne Rich, her poem is full of metaphors toward her own introspection of her life, like we would dive into ourselves thought meditation or therapy.

Blog #3

The Saussure theory is based on the fact that the word we attribute to an object gives it importance and recognition. But as Shakespeare said, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” English not being my mother-tongue, I had to learn as an adult to attribute words to objects that were meaningless to me when I was reading or seeing them. Imagine reading a menu with fish listed at a restaurant. As much as salmon is almost the same in French “saumon,” I had to wonder what will arrive on my plate when I ordered the sea bass. Nowheredays with the language evolution, we can easily find words borrowed from other languages; English often pick some words from French when it comes to cuisine, literature, fashion vocabulary. But this is where it gets complex; does this word has been borrowed correctly, or as it lost its original meaning for a new one imposed? And I can assure you that it is the second option that applies, most often, losing all the roots and the original rhetoric of the word, unfortunately.

Finally, taking three words of an object with the same function but different values due to the name it has been given to show how language can be versatile. Let’s take a throne, a chair, and a stool. They do have the purpose of seating, but if we were to read that the king sat on his majestic stool, the image created in our mental projection would be less impressive than the one of a King sitting on his magnificent throne. What if when we decided the name of things, a throne was named a stool, and a stool a throne?

Blog #2 The paradox of literature

What is attractive in a text? Is it the wording? Is it the story? Its grammatical tournure?

In his paragraph ” the paradox of literature,” Jonathan Cullen argues that literature wants us to fill up specific codes to be considered as such. Yet it is when you do not follow them that you get praise. He states, ” Literature is a paradoxical institution because to create literature is to write according to existing formulas… but it is also to flout those conventions, to go beyond them.” In other words, the theory does not always follow the practice, and some texts considered as literature are far away from the more ” academic” sense of it.

Having words that follow each other and rhymes don’t necessarily make it a piece of literature. I join Jonathan Cullen on his thought that one of the major elements of reading anything should be the pleasure produced by it, it’s capacity to disconnect us from the real world for a second whatever the text can be.

Blog post #1

Is every writing of any type or any form considered as literature? During the first ten pages of the second chapter of the book “Literature theory,” Jonathan Culler tries to expose what could, was, or would in the future be considered as literature. We explore thought history, that not every type of text were, at start, considered as such and that theorist have been trying to define common ground to this term without success. I believe literature should stay open-minded to any type of text, except the phonebook, of course! But a haiku ( Japanese poem of 5 lines) can be as moving as the best Agatha Christie novel. And it is what, for me, matter in literature: that the reading we have bring something to us: knowledge, emotion, sensations, evasions…

The question that stayed with me the most is, “What makes us (or some other society) treat something as literature?” (p.23). People have different tastes and opinions regarding reading. Books I have been forced to read at school considered as “ classic of literature” were not as interesting as “classical ones” I was discovering on my own time. Indeed, these books are forever in the history of literature due to their writing style, history, or, I guess, success. But tastes are not the same to everyone, and between “ the middle-class gentleman” from Moliere and “ the lord of the ring” from JR Tolkien, I would much more happily read the last one.

Bonjour

My name is Geraldine Lamboley, but my friends call me Gerry.

As you might have guessed it I am French. In everyday life, I live with my dog, Luna, and cat, Selina, which are everything for me, I love to cook, play video games, and exercise ( Pilates and kick Boxing). I arrived in the USA 6 years ago, after a short carrier in hospitality, wanting to pursue my dream to become a circus performer. Unfortunately, after a bad injury I had to change my path again which led me to go back to university at 30 years old for physical therapist assistant. I never wrote or enjoyed to read in English until I took English 101 and I was terrified on my first day that my English level would not be hight enough. But I surprised my self loving to write the blog my Professor gave us and analyze the text we were given. ( If you wonder to see what I wrote: https://gerryllgcc.wordpress.com/)

I am really enthusiastic about this coming semester, even if we are in more than uncertain times,( this is definitely not how I expected my experience in American universities to be.) I want to discover more about how to develop my writing and dive into American literature.