I cannot believe that this is the last blog that I will be writing for Span 312. I have grown to be quite fond of this weekly ritual, and in some sense it has provided me some peace in the tumultuous nature of university workloads and schedules. In the beginning I did think the amount of reading might be overwhelming but in the blink of an eye, I have read more than 10 books, which is quite a feat. Im glad that I already surpassed my usual yearly reading goal!

Looking back at my first blog, I’m not quite sure how this happened, but every expectation I had has been met very firmly. I have now experienced literature across multiple cultural backgrounds, spanning across various themes and stories and styles. I got to read stories about all kinds of characters, from a cursed incest-ridden family to political activists or serial killers. Needless to say, I feel like my understanding of literature has enriched so greatly from the exposure to such diverse storytelling and I’m all for it, even though many of them were challenging reads. They certainly weren’t books I would pick up myself, and I’m glad to have found myself in a situation where I am forced to read them, and that I got to experience it with everybody else so we could help each either dive deeper.

Looking back, I feel like I had a good trajectory towards what I thought Latin American literature consisted of, and that’s largely because the books that I did read (Chronicles of a Death Foretold, The Bread the Devil Knead, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed) actually provided some good clues towards certain elements of Latin American literature, especially concerning the gender attitudes that come across. The machismo male archetype and the gender role that women fulfill often times were constructs that the novel we read in class all provided more context and evidence, that has now build to a more holistic knowledge of this notion. From Captain Pantoja, to 20 love poems, or even the underdogs, a plethora of novels has provided more insight into the overall cultural attitudes towards gender. But once again, this class did also affirm reading these books did break the box of what counts as “Latin American Literature”, as comparing and contrasting across the reading list, all of them provided something unique, and sometimes even contradictory notions of things, that a sweeping generalization is hard to make when the each offer something really different. What I can say is, I’m really glad that the overarching theme of this class was “play”, as I do think that is the biggest commonality across all the novels, so kudos to Jon to organizing it around something so clever.

It was an indescribable pleasure to come to class every week knowing that you guys would be there and we would get to talk about all of this together, as I truly believe that those are the university moments that we came to this institution for, and would remember back upon with great fondness. I look forward to being able to do this again this week, once and for all.

Cheers everyone!