Writing on...Realism

I am in love with Realism . . . especially realism a la Flaubert. Madame Bovary is home to my favorite quotation - the dancing bear quotation I included in an earlier blog. And here he goes with another one as a comment on the conversation between Emma and Leon:

That was how they would have liked to be: what they were doing was to dream up ideals and then refashion their past lives to match them. Speech is a rolling-machine that always stretches the feelings it expresses!" (pp 1229, Norton World Anthology, Vol. E).

That combination of mechanics and emotion is Flaubert's piece de resistance - the image of words being "flattened" and truth and emotion "stretched" like so many yards of sheeting through a mangle.

I am having such a wonderful time with World Literature. To have a job that involves in-depth reading of such classics as Madame Bovary, discussion of the same and then getting to watch sparks ignite in the lecture room...what could be better than that?