While reading Michael Joyce\u2019s \u201cAfternoon\u201d I felt like I was being pushed by the author to leave behind all the preconceptions I\u00a0 have about reading and interpreting a text. Perhaps that is why I failed to conceptualize the story when I initially read it, since I was desperately searching for the different pieces of the story in order to find out what it\u2019s about, instead of enjoying the journey. However, once I left my inclination to search for any form of order in \u201cAfternoon\u201d \u2013 an impossible task, since \u201cAfternoon\u201d has numerous characters that live inside different times\/spaces \u2013 I began enjoying the fragments of the various stories.<\/p>\n
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I believe Joyce has a smile on his face every time he thinks about how \u201cAfternoon\u201d and its lexias ask the reader to learn how to unlearn what they have learned about reading a text in order to enjoy his story.<\/p>\n
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A story that is about Peter who may have seen is his ex-wife and their son die in a car crash, but which is from a thematic perspective is predominantly about sex and death. If you don\u2019t believe me, than explore Nausicaa and Lolly\u2019s relationship \u2013 \u201cOlympus\u201d is a good lexia to begin with \u2013 or find out if there was or wasn\u2019t a love quadrangle between Peter, Nausiica, Werther and Lolly.<\/p>\n
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If I\u2019m to be honest I was less concerned with the story\u2019s theme, than with \u201cAfternoon\u2019s\u201d declaration of war on closure. Yes, we discussed closure in class, but only after I had found out that the last page in \u201cAfternoon\u201d reads: \u201cWork in Progress\u201d \u2013 so does every link leading out of it \u2013 did I begin to think that the purpose of this story was prove that there can be closure without ending a story. I certainly felt that there was closure in \u201cAfternoon,\u201d since I was at peace with the development of the story\u2019s different fragments, and with the fact that it will never end \u2013 as the line \u201dWork in Progress\u201d proves.<\/p>\n
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Then again, do we truly want closure? If we do there wouldn\u2019t be dozens of prequels and sequels for all the movies and books that we love. I for one like the idea of having closure without, well, having closure in the traditional sense of the word. I think we always had this concept in our lives and \u201cAfternoon\u201d only points that out for us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
While reading Michael Joyce\u2019s \u201cAfternoon\u201d I felt like I was being pushed by the author to leave behind all the preconceptions I\u00a0 have about reading and interpreting a text. Perhaps that is why I failed to conceptualize the story when I initially read it, since I was desperately searching for the different pieces of the … Continue reading Learn How To Unlearn What You Have Learned<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[71,70,69],"class_list":["post-441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections","tag-closure","tag-afternoon","tag-michael-joyce"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=441"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":453,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441\/revisions\/453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}