January 2022 – RMST 202

Thoughts on María Luisa Bombal “The Shrouded Woman”

In The Shrouded Woman the story of our protagonist Ana-Maria is one of reflection on her life through the eyes of her corpse. She walks the reader through memories with people close to her throughout her life. Unlike our previous texts, I really found myself getting lost in the text. Right from the beginning, I felt transported into Ana-Maria’s shoes by the narrator with the eerie feeling prose. The way the author described the simplest things like opening your eyes with two or three lines of incredible figurative detail was captivating and made me want to read more.

I found it really refreshing to see death written differently as Ana-Maria is accepting and reflecting on the people around her saying their final goodbyes. “…she takes delight in submitting herself to the gaze of all, so perfectly still, serene, and beautiful.” (page 158) I found this closing sentence of chapter 2 a lovely example of this. Instead of presenting death as a dark disruption and chaos, through Ana-Maria’s eyes it’s seen more as a calm acceptance of life and reflection. Although she never seems quite content and faces hardship, conflict, and feelings of jealousy, this perspective gave me more insight into Ana-Maria because it seems as if she was able to somewhat accept death. Because she is also writing as a dead narrator, everything she says seems more intimate and personal. Perhaps she knows that her words will not be heard by anyone else which provokes genuine retrospection and emotions not censored by judgement from those around her. This made me wonder how the text would differ if she wasn’t writing as a corpse and had the opinions of others at her disposal. How do you think the thoughts expressed would change (or if they would at all) if Ana-Maria was writing as a living person? Because after all, books are written to be read, right?

When Ana-Maria begins talking about the men in her life she gives them a lot of space. I think this speaks to the role of woman at the time and how their worth and ability to take up space was determined by the men in their life. The women in the story were often pit against each other through envy. This archaic idea of woman constantly being jealous of one another was frustrating to read and I could feel that frustration coming from the author. No ones seems to be happy in their life which adds more significance to Ana-Maria narrating as a dead person.

Overall I thoroughly enjoyed this read and I can’t wait to hear everyone else’s thoughts! 🙂

Thoughts on Proust “Combray”

Proust’s Combray reads like an ever flowing stream of consciousness between the lines of sleep and wake. In true modernist fashion, Proust jumps from thought to thought often moving along before assuring the readers understanding. In this way I found it quite challenging to understand at first and felt as if the text dragged on toward the end. However, I really enjoyed the beautiful writing and descriptions in that I felt completely immersed into the world of Combray.

In order to fully capture the thoughts behind the text, I wanted to first understand the significance of the title of this section, Combray. Through his vulnerable words we discover that Combray was the home of his grandparents in which he spend much of his childhood. This is telling as throughout the text he is longing for his childhood in this dreamlike state. It makes me think of how the title of a work usually gives a lot of insight into the work and I wonder if this theme will be consistent throughout the course texts. He seems to use this state as an escape to a better time or as a way of coping with the loss of his childhood, thus making the title quite significant as his safety or comfort net almost. He even explained that through his troubling relationship with his parents he was able to turn to literature (as we are doing in this course as well) to escape reality.

I found Proust’s writing style very captivating and unlike anything I’ve ever read. The dreamlike haze that he is writing from is a universal experience that is hard to capture. That time when you are half awake half asleep often expose your most raw and genuine thoughts which I think Proust captures perfectly. The detail that he uses in describing these visions of childhood (such as the Gothic style architecture, churches, queens and saints) provided great insight and almost transported me into his mind/world. I loved the detail he provided of the architecture as it also gives insight into the time period and place that Proust was living in, truly transporting the reader into a historical era.

Proust encapsulates this idea that memory is what we make of it in the sense that it can be completely fragmented or distorted but we can recreate it through our own thoughts and attachment to certain places. Through Combray Proust idealizes his childhood through much detail and emotion through a dreamlike state.

Week 1 Introduction

Hello!!

My name is Anna Vukota and I’m a second year student majoring in Linguistics and minoring in Spanish. I love listening to music, languages, and reading.

Although I’m taking this course as a requirement, I’ve taken a few Spanish literature courses at UBC and wanted to expand on that through the romance world. Through these courses I was surprised at how immersed I became in the history, culture, and people of Latin America and Spain solely through literature. As a linguistics major, I’m familiar with the history and the structural aspects of romance language family and they have evolved overtime. It will be interesting to look at the languages through literature this time as opposed to through patterns and more logical analysis. I’m also really interested in translated works and how the language effects the ways in which themes are expressed, which will be interesting in this course as all of the texts are translated to English – a Germanic language. The third prompt in the introductory lecture touches on what I’m super interested in which is to examine whether these texts have much in common just because they fall under the same language family. Just because these voices shared the same empire long ago do their stories present commonality?

I’m pretty biased but I’m very excited to read the Spanish texts but also Catalonian. I feel like when it comes to romance languages, Catalan is pushed to the side because of its smaller speaking population and intertwinement with Spain/surrounding nations. It’s such a beautiful language but I don’t know much about the history or the people so I’m interested to read some famous Catalonian works. I’ve also always had a list of “must read” classics I’ve wanted to read but never had the time or energy to dive into such complex and “life changing” texts. I’m hoping that this course will help me check some of those off my list.

The format and structure of this course is really interesting to me but I love the freedom it allows to deep dive and enjoy the readings! It’s really easy to get overwhelmed in literature courses with copious amounts of readings that you aren’t even interested in, so I think the freedom is a great opportunity to get the most out of the course content.

So many questions and curiosities that I hope will be somewhat answered (or not) during this course 🙂 Hope to see you all soon!