ASTU 100A Class Blog G04 (2015-2016)

Hey readers!

As this is my last blog post I will be reflecting on our year in ASTU. My classmates have all written their final blogs, some describing their experiences in ASTU and some pondering more questions about the literature we have been reading and the concepts we have been discussing in class. ASTU is a course that has allowed us to expand our minds as students and explore an entire world of academic research and writing. Before this class I never truly understood the extent of academic writing that’s available to us, extending to every possible subject and idea you could imagine. Despite the seven literary texts we read and analyzed and the handful of academic articles we explored, we still only scratched the surface of what is out there. To highlight some of the interesting topics we explored in ASTU I’d like to draw from my classmates blogs, showing which ones truly stood out.

As the theme of our class was “Memory and Trauma”, many students reflected on how this particulate lens opened their eyes to current and past global situations. Isaiah mentions in his blog how he originally understood trauma as a phase, and a state which exists only in the saddest parts of a person’s mind and experiences. However, through reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, he gained a new understanding of trauma, “The realization that I came to more fully, however, was that trauma doesn’t exist only in your dark corners, it can become the dominating force in all areas of your life and personality”. This realization that Isaiah had contributed to a broader understanding of the process of living with trauma, and he concludes that “Getting past a trauma is about accepting that the trauma is a part of you but that it doesn’t need to consume you”. Through analyzing characters in Foer’s novel such as the grandparents, we were able to understand the all consuming properties of traumatic experiences and their impact on entire populations.

Along with the theme of trauma came the theme of memory, which wound its way into countless discussions and novels throughout the year. One novel that stuck out to a few students as having significant properties of memory was The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsim Hamid. Both Clara and Jackson read the novel and thought of their family’s and their own experiences of immigrating to a new country. Jackson’s blog compared his experience with Changez’s “As an international student who also studying in the continent of North America, me and Changez shares many similar experiences of living away from home regardless some differences in the setting”. Jackson was able to relate to the feeling Changez had when he went back to visit Lahore, Pakistan and saw his home as being shabbier and more run down than he remembered. Jackson said he had a similar experience when returning home to his apartment in which the elevators work slowly and are in need of maintenance and the smoggy weather made him sick. Just as Changez had realized that it was him who had changed more than the place itself, Jackson also stated “Me and Changez have found both of our birthplaces become unfamiliar but indeed is because we had changed so much during our adaption of western ethnics and culture”. He said that it’s not easy to blend into an entirely different society from what you’re used to.

Clara’s blog focused on her parent’s immigration to Canada from Korea when they were young. Her father moved to Canada when he was eleven years old and her uncle has tried to keep her in touch with her heritage. Clara relates to The Reluctant Fundamentalist in the sense that she has had questions of her own identity as a Canadian or Korean, like Changez’s dilemma between Pakistan and the US. In her blog, she asks questions such as “If I consider myself Canadian can I lay claim to being French, Korean, Deutsch and Scottish? Is it the the percentage of your ancestry that is from a certain place that determines whether you can claim that heritage?”. Hamid’s novel allowed us to explore questions of identity and belonging in our globalized world, to which the answers are blurry and confusing. Through the literature we have explored we have opened our minds to concepts we may have never considered before. I know personally that I have asked more complicated questions this year about memory, trauma, identity, grief and global citizenship than ever before in my studies.

Kate’s blog mentions another important aspect of our ASTU class which has been the practice of reading academic articles and writing our own. At the beginning of the year we read our first academic article “The Role of Interpretative Communities in Remembering and Learning”, by Farhat Shahzad and I can guarantee you that we all struggled greatly with reading it. Kate described reading the article “like I was reading a book written in a different language”. However, throughout the year we have developed the skills needed to interpret and analyze the articles, highlighting their important aspects and labeling the processes specific to that genre of writing. While learning the importance of genre we have adapted to the strange yet intriguing world of academic writing, and slowly dipped our feet into the pool of knowledge.

ASTU has been a truly amazing class, causing us to think on matters we never would have considered if not personally confronted with through literature and academic articles. I feel, like many of my classmates, that I am leaving my first year with a newfound love and appreciation for the world of academic writing and world literature. I’ve had a great year and I hope you have too!

Signing off for the last time,

Class blogger,

Mia Spare