ENCW 202 Spring 2022
Posted in Memory on Feb 28th, 2022
The Memory Police has a seemingly simple enough plot – a woman watches parts of her world disappear thanks to the mysterious Memory Police. She tries to hold on, but then as more things disappear, it becomes harder. One day she begins to disappear, and she does. But The Memory Police holds a special place […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 27th, 2022
“The Resident” follows an author who has been accepted into an artists’ residency in the mountains where she used to go to girl scout camp. At the beginning, she is elated, but as time passes she becomes increasingly uneasy. For much of this story, and even to an extent still, I was unsure of the […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 25th, 2022
The memory Police is a novel about a novelist who lives on an island that things often disappear from. These things are often random like perfume, roses, and photos but are also main staples in people’s lives that “disappear” and then are forgotten. This book shows how people often deal with the sudden loss of […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 24th, 2022
Real Women Have Bodies is a story about the unnamed Main Character and her girlfriend,Petra. In the story we learn that there is a strange plague that is making women fade. MC works at a dress shop called Glam and that is where she meets Petra, they soon hook up at Petra’s mother’s inn. At […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 24th, 2022
“Eight Bites” was a difficult story to read. The narrator experiences so much pain mentally and emotionally that I found it hard to continue. I think this is due to the fact that even though the point of view is in first person, we can understand the conflicts and struggles of the other characters (Or, […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 24th, 2022
The fifth story in “Her Body & Other Parties,” “Real Women Have Bodies,” is a vividly described, genuinely distressing narrative that showed how harsh speculative fiction can be. The story is told from the point of view of a young woman whose name or identity is never given. The imagery is as striking as the […]
Posted in Fairy Tale, Women on Feb 24th, 2022
“As my eyes adjust to the dark, the lights coalesce into silhouettes, and I realize the room is full of women. Women like the one in the viral video, see-through and glowing faintly, like afterthoughts. They drift and mill and occasionally look down at their bodies.” The fantastical qualities exhibited in a high quantity of […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 24th, 2022
“Eight Bites” by Carmen Maria Machado is a depressing read. It focuses on the narrator’s struggle with her weight/appearance and her difficult relationship with her daughter. I noticed that the reader doesn’t receive much information on the narrator that isn’t related to either or both of these topics. They’re both such negative topics, and even the […]
Posted in Women on Feb 24th, 2022
“Real Women Have Bodies” by Carmen Maria Machado is told in the present and from a first person point of view. In The Memory Police, the narrator is speaking using past tense because she fully disappears at the end of the book, whereas in “Real Women Have Bodies,” the narrator does not fade and relates everything as […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 24th, 2022
Carmen Machado’s “Real Women Have Bodies” is a beautifully written, deeply disturbing story. The story is told to us by a protagonist that never is identified with a name, which is an interesting choice. I feel as if this made the protagonist feel slightly more intangible and slippery to me, as if she too was […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 24th, 2022
“Real Women Have Bodies”: A mysterious occurrence has caused physical women to fade into simple oracles in this world, with some opting to remain current by sewing themselves into the fabric of garments. As her new lover begins to fade into the air, a boutique salesgirl romances the daughter of a big clothing supplier, resulting in […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 24th, 2022
This week we were given two stories to read by Carmen Maria Machado. I have chosen to write about the story “Real Women Have Bodies”. I feel like this story can have multiple messages and meanings, but this story for me represents how women’s bodies are viewed in modern society today. We are often judged, […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 24th, 2022
The stories “Real Women Have Bodies” and “Eight Bites” both contain central themes of bodies, specifically a woman’s body, and the practical and emotional implication of having a body. The voices of the stories are distinct, and the route in which they touch upon bodily issues differ while leaving reader’s with introspection towards their own […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 24th, 2022
“Real Women Have Bodies” by Carmen Maria Machado is a haunting story about a woman working at a high end dress store who lives through a strange epidemic of women becoming incorporeal. She enters a relationship with another woman named Petra, who is the daughter of the seamstress who makes many of the store’s dresses. […]
Posted in Alternative Worlds, Disappearance, Women on Feb 23rd, 2022
In “Real Women Have Bodies,” Carmen Maria Machado once again takes parts of the female experience and spins them together to create another horror story. A dress shop worker begins a relationship with the daughter of one of the shop’s biggest suppliers, Petra. Meanwhile, the world is facing an unknown phenomenon. Women’s bodies are slowly disappearing, losing their […]
Posted in Mothers on Feb 22nd, 2022
With “Selkie Stories are for Losers,” the story is simple enough and a fair parallel of “The Goodman of Wastness”: The wife is a secret selkie, kidnapped and forced to bear children, and then she finds her skin and runs away, leaving her husband and children behind. However, in “The Goodman of Wastness,” the story seems to end right […]
Posted in Colonization on Feb 22nd, 2022
Upon reading “The Goodman of Wastness,” I considered the possibility that the Goodman stealing the skins of the Selkie was a metaphor for colonization. I came to this conclusion after looking up that a goodman is a term for the male head of household, and wastness means desolation. This can be inferred from the words […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 20th, 2022
In “The Goodman of Wastness” and “Selkie Stories are for Losers” both of the authors talked about transformation from a seal to a human and sometimes a human back to a seal. Both men in the stories was walking around and found naked women swimming near the sea and in the pool and decides to […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 17th, 2022
I read the last 10 chapters of “The Memory Police” and there was a lot of details in those 10 chapters. The novel that the narrative is writing about gets a weird and dark turn. When the order from the memory police to get rid of the books, it was hard for the narrative to […]
Posted in Disappearance, Dystopia on Feb 17th, 2022
“And what will happen if words disappear?” This tale almost feels like a contrasting narrative to the short story “History of a Disturbance” in terms of the importance that words have in what each author is trying to convey. Ogawa relies heavily on word-building to recount and express what has been lost. (It just seems […]
Posted in Memory, Writing about Writing on Feb 17th, 2022
For this class we have been asked to read two novels. The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa is the first of the two. This novel tells the tale of an island that is affected by objects that disappear. Not only do objects disappear, so too do the memories and feelings that are associated with them. The narrator is […]
Posted in Disappearance, The Artist on Feb 15th, 2022
Yoko Ogawa’s beautifully fantastical novel The Memory Police describes a world in which people are forced to forget items little by little, until eventually they forget themselves. During each disappearance, everyone will wake up “[and] feel that something has changed from the night before.” (1) After this, they must get rid of everything remaining of that item, which […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 15th, 2022
The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa is a beautifully written political dystopian novel. To me this novel was reminiscent of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and Lois Lowry’s The Giver. All these works of literature take place in a dystopia in which the government has taken complete control of particular aspects of life or life itself. All of these […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 15th, 2022
“The Memory Police” by Yoko Ogawa is a dreamy dystopian narrative set on an unidentified island that’s enveloped by a forgetting pandemic. The cognitive burden of forgetting is depicted in physical reality in the novel: when objects vanish from recollection, they vanish from real existence. It’s a dreamy dystopian narrative set on an unidentified island that’s enveloped […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 15th, 2022
The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa starts off with a strong, intriguing first line that introduces the fantastical element of the story right away: “I sometimes wonder what was disappeared first—among all the things that have vanished from the island.” Right away, the reader is given the point of view, the tense, the basic setting, […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 15th, 2022
“The Memory Police,” is a thrilling novel by Yoko Ogawa. The unidentified narrator is a novelist who lives on an unidentified island off the coast of another large island with her mother, a sculptress. As the physical reality around her fades away (birds, ribbon, emeralds, candy, etc.) so do the people who can recall the vanished objects. Anyone […]
Posted in Disappearance, Dystopia, Memory on Feb 14th, 2022
Dystopians novels truly can be one of the most interesting forms of literature, and oddly enough, I find it slightly satisfying when its ending isn’t a “We won and defeated the bad guy” type of happy ending. But it doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be a complete downer ending. The Memory Police, while […]
Posted in Disappearance, Memory on Feb 14th, 2022
Going into this novel, I expected a political dystopia similar to that of George Orwell’s 1984. Despite sharing the theme of a surveillance state, however, the two stories have very little in common. Unlike 1984, The Memory Police, while undoubtedly being a tale about the pitfalls of totalitarianism, focused much more on the individual, existential […]
Posted in Isolation on Feb 10th, 2022
“In The Reign of Harad IV” examines how a craftsman’s advancement in his own skill leads him into a difficult life of isolation. Because the story is set in a King’s court, I think it’s safe to say that most readers would expect the story to be about the drama of either trying to please […]
Posted in Dissatisfaction on Feb 10th, 2022
“In the Regin of Harad IV” we meet a miniature maker for the King Harad IV. The point of view is in third person, and we are witnessing the story through the miniature maker view. The setting is in the maker’s room in the palace where work on his miniatures. He is getting bored with […]