By the way, when looking through some Saramago reviews, it is clear that he takes liberties with sentence construction and has done some of this formatting in other novels of his as well. I’ve done some perception research in this area and posted some of my lecture notes (from EMI2) at the very end of this email.

We talked about how folks can read paragraphs, even when parts of the words are mixed up. The text was written without quotation marks and very few paragraphs, more like a “stream of consciousness.” Oh people spoke, but the volley of conversation was indicated by a comma separation and a capital letter. If you don’t get the attachment (or have problems downloading), please let me know and I can send it in text. The summary ended up being so many pages, that I added it as an attachment.

Now on BLINDNESS - There was so much symbolism, allegory, mysticism, I’m not sure I can capture all the richness of our discussion on the book, but I did select some meaningful quotes and sorted them (somewhat) into the questions we asked and discussed. What does it mean to see and to not see?'

Rather it uses whatever tool it may find – from media to violence – to hush these women and put them in their place.What do you think his writing style symbolizes (look at the text, the punctuation, the indentations)? Think about what kinds of 'blindness' we might have in our own lives, as well as what 'blindness' symbolized in this book. A masculine hegemony does not bear to sit aside while a woman or a group of women try to subvert it. In what follows these three models of femininity are being looked at closely to show that although Saramgo's women grow to join the protest femininity in Blindness, nonetheless they get repressed by their contemporary hegemony in Seeing. However, protest femininity tries its best to stand in the face of the set hegemony, it resists, it subverts, it fights, hoping to be able to make some changes. Ambivalent femininity is neither with or against the power structure of the time, sometimes it does what it is told and sometimes not. A femininity that never says no to what is thrown its way by the masculine hegemony. For Howson, emphasized femininity means a femininity that does what the hegemony of a society wants. Howson believes there are three major types of femininity: emphasized femininity, ambivalent femininity and protest femininity. Femininity and its different types have been introduced by Richard Howson in his Challenging Hegemonic Masculinity. This study analyzes the varieties of femininity represented in Jose Saramago's sequel, Blindness and Seeing.

Blindness / Seeing by José Saramago