Time flies like an arrow, especially for those who have had several dues in one week. Overall, I liked this course so much better than I expected. At the beginning of the term, remember we all wrote a blog post in which we expressed how we felt about the course and literature in general and I remember I wrote, “I am not sure if I can read between the lines”, which is something generally expected in a literature course in my opinion. As I was not really a big fan of reading and English was not my first language, this was challenging for me. The literature credits were much scarier than the science credits somehow. However, that the course allows me to fix my own reading schedule by trading off my grades relieved me enough to actually enjoy the readings without concerning my reading skill.

I would say Amulet by Bolano and W by Perec were my favorite books I have ever read in this course. Amulet was very interesting since the characters’ personalities are written in detail. To me, Auxilio was a kind of weird and interesting person. Her description of herself as the mother of something even though she was kind of single raised a very fun in-class discussion. Perec’s ‘W’ was something chaotic to me as a gen-z person. I was overwhelmed by each sentence of the description of life on island ‘W’. These are the two books I had a solid emotion, whatever that might be when I was reading. Also, I really loved how in-person classes were carried out. I even slightly thought I should have contracted a little bit more to read just because I liked the in-person class. Even though I only went to a few in-person classes as I only contracted the minimum and because of covid, it was easy to engage and get to know each other.

I have been thinking about the course title as I approached the final. If I remember correctly, Jon said it was not about love even though it said romance studies as he was showing us the definition in the Oxford dictionary over the screens. Although this remark still haunts my mind, now I can see it is not entirely love. But I think romance is still perhaps a composition of love and memory. Or maybe these two things are the requirements for each other to exist.

Here’s my question,

How do you now interpret the course title?

How would you describe it to your friends who consider taking this class?