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Tell us about an intellectual experience, project, class, or book that has influenced or inspired you. (Max. 500 words)
I read Emile Zola's novel L'Assomoir in my French literature class two years ago, but it was only recently that I understood its nurturing influence when considering my project to combine the understanding of people with art.
Zola wrote his novels from life, using what he called "carnets d'enquètes" or "inquiries notebooks," in which he recorded his observations and researches concerning the different social environments of the Second Empire French society. He creatively condensed his work in a series of twenty volumes about the Rougon-Macquart family, and their flaws and weaknesses. When Zola describes Gervaise, Coupeau, or the street of l'Assomoir, the density of visual, auditory and olfactory details allows us to do more than to visualize the scene, but also to sense all its overtones.
I admire his ability to represent life not like we would like it to be, but how it is, with all its imperfections. This hyper-realist approach is similar to the one adopted by painters such as Courbet at the beginning of his oeuvre or Millet, in their representation of life. It is also the manner in which I chose to artistically work when depicting the human body anatomy using clay or paint, or in my still-life paintings. As an artist, I feel close from his words, which reveal the unpalatable truth about human nature, which is not the one of a social-scientist, but of a writer who has the profound desire to explicate truth by disserting it as no one has ever done.
The choice of this style, allows Zola to give life to the bottom of the Parisian society and its vices in L'Assomoir. He replicates the bustle and misery he observes from the streets' activity, and the despair, resignation and hatred he learns from the people who frequent them. I feel inspired by the relationship he has with the real framework of his novels while he writes them, and I share his desire to understand every pleasant or unpleasant aspect of a single, and often modest, area, and particularly of the behavior of the people who occupy it.
I am personally interested in understanding the world around me with its beauties and its darkness. To live in India, and to be confronted to the inconsistency of the growth environment with the traditionalism of its people made me realize the importance of such approach in the understanding of our world. I believe that Zola was not only a visionary in his writing style, but that he considered his composition the way we should consider anything that surround us in order to create new perspectives.
Tell us about an intellectual experience, project, class, or book that has influenced or inspired you. (Max. 500 words)
I read Emile Zola's novel L'Assomoir in my French literature class two years ago, but it was only recently that I understood its nurturing influence when considering my project to combine the understanding of people with art.
Zola wrote his novels from life, using what he called "carnets d'enquètes" or "inquiries notebooks," in which he recorded his observations and researches concerning the different social environments of the Second Empire French society. He creatively condensed his work in a series of twenty volumes about the Rougon-Macquart family, and their flaws and weaknesses. When Zola describes Gervaise, Coupeau, or the street of l'Assomoir, the density of visual, auditory and olfactory details allows us to do more than to visualize the scene, but also to sense all its overtones.
I admire his ability to represent life not like we would like it to be, but how it is, with all its imperfections. This hyper-realist approach is similar to the one adopted by painters such as Courbet at the beginning of his oeuvre or Millet, in their representation of life. It is also the manner in which I chose to artistically work when depicting the human body anatomy using clay or paint, or in my still-life paintings. As an artist, I feel close from his words, which reveal the unpalatable truth about human nature, which is not the one of a social-scientist, but of a writer who has the profound desire to explicate truth by disserting it as no one has ever done.
The choice of this style, allows Zola to give life to the bottom of the Parisian society and its vices in L'Assomoir. He replicates the bustle and misery he observes from the streets' activity, and the despair, resignation and hatred he learns from the people who frequent them. I feel inspired by the relationship he has with the real framework of his novels while he writes them, and I share his desire to understand every pleasant or unpleasant aspect of a single, and often modest, area, and particularly of the behavior of the people who occupy it.
I am personally interested in understanding the world around me with its beauties and its darkness. To live in India, and to be confronted to the inconsistency of the growth environment with the traditionalism of its people made me realize the importance of such approach in the understanding of our world. I believe that Zola was not only a visionary in his writing style, but that he considered his composition the way we should consider anything that surround us in order to create new perspectives.
