Tuesday, March 5, 2013
Dreams and Reality: Separate but Equal?
I know this is a bit retrospective, but this didn't really occur to me until class. Dreams are something that, in our Post-Modern world, are again seen as an important literary subject of study. The difference, however, between the Romantic view on dreams and the Post-Modern view is the separation between dreams and reality. The Romantics try to establish a very clear difference between the two, keeping them as two different worlds which, while they coincide, are still separate. The Post-Modern period is often identified, by contrast, with the advent of Magical Realism, which weaves reality and dreams together to a point where they are often inseparable. The question then is which view makes the most sense or appeals the most to you? They both have credibility, as dreams clearly operate separately from reality, but equally, dreams and reality hold equal sway in many cases, and both are merely different shades of perspective. So which opinion on dreams do you all prefer?
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Interesting! DeQuincey is definitely trying to keep his dreams and his reality separate, but he finds this very difficult (his past memories are the fodder for his dreams, so all of the people he has known and things he has read keep appearing in his dreams). But think back to our conversation about Hogg: his story is very interested in the confusion of dream and real, and how these two realms might be connected. Perhaps there is an interest in combining dreams with reality present in Romanticism--but it always seems twisted by the gothic. This is a way of turning your question toward the problem of literary genres: perhaps dreams cannot work the same way in gothic literature as they can in magic realism because the conventions of the genre make it impossible.
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