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Moon Palace - 4th lesson

Hello everyone,
Our chapter on Moon Palace is coming to an end and we must enjoy the few classes left we have to study it. 

Firstly, we began the week  by defining Moon Palace's literary period. Paul Auster wrote Moon Palace during post modernism. Post modernism is a literary period that you can find in most of 60s/70s/80s literature. It contains fragmentation, paradox, unreliable narrators, often unrealistic and downright impossible plots, games, parody, paranoia, dark humour and authorial self-reference. Indeed, Moon Palace files up all of those criterias. We can find a lot of coincidences in the plot as Fogg meets his father and grand-father miraculously. Moreover, fragmentations have an important role in the novel. Indeed, this book loses the sense of being a linear story, Paul Auster drives us from a place to another. 

As some kind of conclusion, we were asked to hand back a personal book review of Moon Palace with the help of a requirements specification. In our book review, we had to explain the author, the plot, the genre and other elements such as the themes, the setting, the use of literary devices and the narration. Moreover, the point of a book review is to share our opinion, no matter what it is, so that part was unskippable. Finally, we had to share 10 words we didn't know their meaning while reading, 3 favorite quotes and to select an extract in order to translate it into French. Here is the link of our book review to give you a taste of what was asked :  

file:///C:/Users/AGATHE~1.LES/AppData/Local/Temp/Book%20Review%20-%20Armand%20and%20Agathe.pdf

To conclude the week, we worked on 3 extracts (the first one was from the beginning, the second one from the middle and the last one from the end) and focused on a technical approach of the novel. We discovered that Auster described his characters imitating realism which lead readers to deception as Fogg  wanted to show himself as a realistic and totally reliable narrator. Then, Auster chooses the words intellegently to emphasis on how vulgar Effing was and to highlight the hatred he had towards marriage. All of that surrounded by metaphors, repetitions and other literary devices.

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