Hello readers!

It is the end of the year now and it has been quite an experience to have this group of people together in ASTU. I think everyone contributed to this class in different ways. Our class members come from all corners of the world and that gives us insight to many of the great ideas we all had in discussing literature relevant in this concept of being a global citizen. In ASTU more than learning about scholarly writing and better and more proper ways to rephrase our ideas we, have learned to look at the world through a different lens. We have moved from being confused with the many lines of a text in front of us back in September to understanding the meaning of the different movements authors make in scholarly writing. We can now identify them a lot more easily and even compose our own scholarly pieces of writing. We have, throughout this year, learned from each other and we have in a way created a community in which we can look at relevant events of our time through literature.

Reading all of the class’ blogs was really interesting this year; it gave us a wide range of opinions and views. This last post was mostly about what we have learned this year. Alex for example tells us “exploring literary and scholarly works that have arisen from these events has most definitely allowed me to gain a better understanding and knowledge of what it means to truly be a global citizen.” We were exposed to different kinds of texts which have made us change the way wee see things just like Joseph explains in his last blog post “our scholarly musings generally functioned more like a magnifying glass on the densely compacted troubles of our time.”
It is nice to see some reactions like Inneke’s, which is very similar to mine, where she tells us that she wasn’t amused with the idea of writing a blog, but here we are at the end of this second term, finding this blog as one of our favourite things in this class where we can all share.
Just like Melissa I feel like many of us saw many changes in our writing style during the course of the year and with that came improvement.
After all we have seen and dome this year I think it is fair to thank every member of this community for making it special and for making it work the way it did.

Thank you once more bloggers,

Gabriel Nogués

Hey guys!

So the last few weeks have been really busy for all of us. Papers due, final exams stress and lots of works but we have also gotten the chance to experience different activities like the planned field trip for our ATU class.
The feeling I got from some of my classmates and myself included is that a field trip to the University Archives probably does not sound like a lot of fun, at least it didn’t to me. But the general feeling after the visit was completely different judging from the content posted on our blogs last week.

I personally think that getting an insight if the archives from the Rare Books and Special Collections in the Irving K. Barber Library was unexpectedly interesting and fun. Kennedy mentions that for him it was like “stepping into a time capsule…an organized time capsule” and for Olivea looking at one of the files on Kogawa’s fond was “filled with beautiful hand written letters from the 1980’s.”
To see so many original documents, letters of rejection, newspapers, personal notes, drawings and pictures sent to Joy Kogawa was really interesting. Exploring the contents of the fond was surprising to me and many others. One of the most unexpected articles found in the fond was a letter sent by an elementary school student to Kogawa saying ““Dear Mrs. Kogawa, I did not realy like the book because nothing realy happend in it.  Your friend Joel.” which included  drawing of a house, what seems to be the flag of the UK and a girl floating around. Go check out the drawing at Ryan’s blog.

The fact that our visit was guided by librarian Chelsea Shriver I think made my experience as interesting as it was. She made the whole thing so interesting explaining how the documents are collected and how they are organized to be kept at UBC.
Being able to access all of the primary sources like several drafts to Kogawa’s novel Obasan was like being witness to the process of the making of Kogawa’s work. She even included a title page, as mentioned in Magda’s blog, where she gave her novel the title “If I must Remember”.
Inneke says in her blog that going to the archives and exploring all of the content used in the writing of Obasan had her like “Wow.. this is what the book that I read supposed to be like..” That was exactly how I felt, the overall experience of visiting that section of the library was surprising and very intriguing.