Author Archives: katrina juliano

Conclusions

Hello! It’s crazy to think how fast this semester has gone, as I still vividly remember trying to put together my 400-word introduction post for this class (as well as all the other introduction posts other classes used as an icebreaker).

This class was definitely structured in a way that I have never really experienced throughout my years at UBC, or throughout my entire education even. It was great to be given a choice, know what’s expected of you, and know exactly what you’re going to get by the end of it. I really appreciated being given a lot of wiggle room on how much work I would be doing in this class.

A fair disclaimer, I am one of the students who opted for a lower grade since I had a full load of 5 classes while working full time hours most weeks. Paired with getting a new job as a step up in my career, I was really worried if I would still be able to pull off getting decent grades in all my classes. Being given a chance to lessen my workload for at least one of my classes, it was like a big sigh of relief. That being said however, it didn’t take away from my experience with this class!

When I first read about Romance Studies as a course, I thought it would be mostly on history. While some of the books did touch on historical events during the times it was written, it was mostly on the stories of people living during these events. It was also really interesting to be reading through the romance languages, as I’ve only read a handful of translated books before this class, and none of them have been from any of the romance languages. I loved reading through not only the different languages and regions, but through the different times as well. I will also be adding the many books I was interested in but haven’t read onto my reading list when I have the chance to pick up some reading again!

Lastly, I also really enjoyed the discussions we had in class, especially the one with Manea. It got me to really reflect and think about the layers of these stories that I never would have picked up on by myself, and the discussion with Manea was really an amazing experience to hear him speak about his writing and how he connected with his stories. Thank you to everyone in the class, the TAs, and our professor for making these great discussions possible!

My last question for the class is: What was your favourite take away from this class?

Amulet by Roberto Bolaño

4 Replies

Reading through Amulet definitely pulled me in many different directions than I expected! From the beginning it introduced fear and tension, then it quickly delved into a series of memories from Auxilio’s life and the different friends and people she encountered as she hid in the bathroom stalls of her university. It was different from what I expected, however it didn’t take away from my experience while reading it.

I thought it was really interesting how Auxilio was casually (and quite entertainingly) telling her life story, even while she was hiding from all the violence that was happening all around her for quite some time. I guess it also tied into the very first paragraph of the novel, where she clearly stated that it wouldn’t seem to be a horror story as she was the one telling it. She went into interesting stories about losing her teeth, her romantic/sexual partners, her adventures with her friend Elena, etc. They all felt very light hearted compared to the reality of her situation, and there was even a section where she was having a conversation that exchanged several F bombs with another character (I forget the name at the moment). Maybe it had to do with her being a poet and being creative in her storytelling that made her tell the story of her life’s history the way she did.

At the end of the novel, Auxilio escapes the university and makes her way towards a valley, and there she hears the songs of (ghosts? children? soldiers?) as they walk through the valley and towards the place of violence (possibly the university). She struggles because she hears their beautiful songs of love and peace and war, but she knows they’re marching and singing towards their certain death as they approach the area. It kind of reminds me of current events with Ukraine as well, how people who live with so much love and family, how so many young people have to live through war times despite not deserving it like how Auxilio described the young people of Latin America. At the last line of the novel, she reveals that this song they sing is the titular amulet; a song of war, but also love, courage, desire, and pleasure. I think it’s a very universal feeling that the world feels and wants during times of conflict.

My question for the class is: why do you think Auxilio told her story and history in the tone that she did?

The Trenchcoat by Norman Manea

4 Replies

Like some of my peers in the class, I also watched the lecture before reading the text, and I feel like I will continue to do so for the remainder of the readings. The context of the Romanian communism and the censorship that Manea had to endure to write and publish this story is something I wouldn’t have picked up on during the reading. With this in mind, it made the reading easier to understand.

Without the explanation of the lecture, I would’ve been really confused why everyone in the story was really sensitive about the appearance of a mysterious trenchcoat after a dinner together. It’s understandable that they may have been confused or even a little bit worried that a trenchcoat that no one’s claiming has appeared in their house, but the extent where everyone is paranoid, panicked, calling each other obsessively, and arguing with each other doesn’t make too much sense without the context. Knowing that is was a story told while facing the censorship of this place and time and about the fear that the people had to live through during communist times brings an entirely new perspective to reading this novella. It makes me wonder if the people from this time would have also related and caught on to what the story was trying to convey.

One character that really caught my attention was Felicia’s husband, who was never given a name but instead titles such as The Kid, The Guileless One, The Learned One, etc. He doesn’t have much to say in the beginning of the story, but later on he goes off on a long rant in a phone call with Dina as she was calling about the trenchcoat once again. It makes me wonder what his role is in the story, why he was never given a name, and what his different titles mean and why not a single one is being used consistently, but rather all of them were being used interchangeably. Does each title/nickname refer to a different side of him, or did it serve a different purpose?

In the end of the story, we never really got a good explanation about the trenchcoat and how it came to be, which is unsatisfying but leads to an abundance of theories and interpretations that I’m excited to possibly hear about during class.

My question for this week is: What parts of the Romanian communist era caused as much panic and paranoia that we saw in The Trenchcoat?

W or The Memory of Childhood by Georges Perec

1 Reply

Near the beginning of the novel, the narrator, Georges, explains that he has very little memories from his childhood. He has lived a very difficult early life, losing both his parents during WWII, and moving from different boarding houses to different family members as he grew up in a war-torn world as a young child. He also begins the story explaining that he created a story about a land called W told in pictures when he was just 13.

At first when reading through the two different storylines (W and the narrator’s reality), I thought that W was a way of escape from reality for the thirteen year old Georges. An island that has sports as its culture where jobs and way of living revolved around games at first sounded like a dream I would expect of a young teenager wanting to escape his harsh reality. However as I read on and slowly discovered the horrors of W, it became clear that the trauma that has been put into this young child has made its way into this story he created.

At first it was the existence of the Fortress that separated individuals who weren’t working with the sports that set red flags that W isn’t as whimsical as it first sounded. Then it was the big differential treatment between the winners and losers of the games, the weird and lenient laws that do very little to regulate and control the athletes and officials, to the horrific restrictions of female children being born, the way of conceiving children through the Atlantians, and Quarantine for young novice athletes to give a few examples. For someone as young as 13 to have created a land with so much living torture for everyone on this land, it’s terrible to even imagine what kind of things that young child has seen or even experienced.

As the narrator tells his story in the present about how he doesn’t have many childhood memories, at first I just thought “it’s normal, I don’t have too many memories as a young child either” and thought that his first memory at 3 years old was already quite impressive. However, aside from the passage of time, his lack of memory seems to also be attributed to the repression of the terrible memories of how it was like to live during wartimes as a child, and that can be seen through the story of W. He may not have many memories of it in the present, however those hidden traumas and horrible memories live on through the story of W.

Question: Something that kind of confused me while looking back was, what was the significance of Otto Apfelstahl travelling with Gaspard Winckler to look for a boy with the same name during the story of W? What did it add to the story rather than just introducing the island of W on its own?

The Shrouded Woman by María Luisa Bombal

2 Replies

Before I read texts for this class, I read the brief descriptions given for the class in the “Which Texts?” section of our course site to get an idea of what I’m getting myself into. The phrase “I think you’ll like it” was definitely an understatement because I really loved it! When I also saw that it was also about gender, memory, and how a life is lived, I didn’t expect the story to be told by a dead woman looking back on her life in a third person point of view.

One of the concepts I liked throughout this story was the concept of looking at our life as an “outsider” rather than seeing it while we’re in the moment. It allows Ana Maria to take a step back and look at the bigger picture instead of being caught up in the moment or current emotions, and really see the moments in life as an experience. An example of this is when Ana Maria recounts how she almost shot herself with a revolver after the failure of her first love with Ricardo. In that present moment, she really wanted to die. However she also recounts how she brought herself back up from that moment, and how she compared it like spring was coming from the cold winter. Even though she regrets not ending up with Ricardo even after death, I think she now sees it as a bittersweet moment of youth and love and loss, rather than the initial unbearable pain that she went through.

I think the story being told after death, rather than just a person looking back at their past gives a slightly different tone compared to ‘appreciate what you have’ or ‘enjoy life’s moments as you live through it’ like many other stories tell. At the end of the story, Bombal writes that Ana Maria “did not feel the slightest desire to rise again”. She went through hardships and pain with Ricardo her first love, Antonio her husband, her children, etc. that rather than celebrating her life, she just looks back and accepts her life experiences as they were. After coming to terms with all these moments in her life, she finally wishes to rest; to die the real death. I think that made this story stand out compared to others filled with hope and promising futures, as it tells a story of pain and acceptance. It’s melancholic, but I think it’s a beautiful sharing of Ana Maria’s life and what she makes of it.

Question: Despite Ana Maria claiming to have made peace with her life and moved on, which part of her life do you think she would have wanted to go back to the most to change the outcome?

Combray Pt. 1 by Marcel Proust

3 Replies

As the first text of the semester, it was definitely an interesting experience as it was, as I’m sure was the same for many, my first piece translated from a romance language. I can definitely agree with having difficulty reading through it, often going back through sentences and paragraphs to make sense of what I just read. Often times because of some words not usually being used (definitely had to pull up the google dictionary a few times), or the flow of the sentences wasn’t very smooth. I would probably attribute that difficulty to it being translated, as translated works often don’t have the exact words or descriptors between both languages to make it flow as easily as it did in the original language.

That being said, it was still quite an interesting read on memory, childhood, and one’s growth through the relationships they experience. Because it was a bit of a difficult read I may have misunderstood some of the points made in the text, but this is what I got out of it!

The narrator starts the story talking about his past memories and how they make their way into his dreams as he sleeps. Because of these dreams, he reminisces through some of his memories, especially of his memories living in Combray. He then talks about how a kiss goodnight from his mother would always soothe him as a child when he couldn’t sleep. As he grew, that became his norm. Until it was about time he outgrew it, he continued to rely on that goodbye kiss from his mother to be able to have a goodnight’s sleep. Even though his father disproved and his mother was reluctant, he continued to ask his mother to kiss him good night through delivering her letters through Francoise and asking her to come when his father was away. He also grows a dislike for Swann, because his presence meant his mother would not kiss him goodnight, though he later learns that Swann probably also shares a similar pain as his wife left him for another man. At the end of the story, his mother does come to help him sleep, but he feels so guilty he sobs, so his mother tries to read him a book.

Having a little bit of knowledge on childhood attachments, it’s no wonder the narrator constantly confided in his mother’s affections to help him sleep even as he grew older. Having that goodnight kiss as something so reliable and helpful and constant in his childhood, it was probably difficult for him to let go of it. However after he came to that realization and guilt at the end of part 1, he seemed to find a new way to help him sleep– and that is through books and reading. It kind of brings the whole part full circle, as he starts the story talking about how he falls asleep really early with a book in his hand, not even having time to blow out his candle.

Question: what was the initial cause of the narrator’s struggle to fall asleep?

Hello Everyone!

2 Replies

Hello! I’m Katrina and I’m currently in my final year at UBC as a Psychology major. I also currently work as an Early Childhood Educator assistant at a local daycare/early learning/childcare centre. Like many others, I also took this course for my literature (and final!) arts degree requirement. I was a little bit unsure and nervous going into this class since I haven’t taken a literature class since first year, however our first zoom session really piqued my interest in how the class works and functions!

I’ve always been into reading books ever since I was young and up until high school, but during university I felt slightly guilty reading books and novels when I had a whole list of readings to get through before I could indulge myself in a good book I was really interested in. I ended up reading one, maybe two books a year in my own free time so I’m quite excited to have a class where we could read novels for class! Looking through the descriptions of texts we have, there are definitely a few I have my eyes on; specifically the texts on childhood and memory as a Psychology major with an interest in childhood development. However I will be honest the thought of reading an entire book within a week intimidates me quite a bit, so I’m really glad we’re able to make our own choices on the texts we read, and at the same time manage the pace we go through!

Regarding the first lecture and getting a closer look at the concepts we’ll be looking through and focusing on what we want to take out of each reading, broadening our perspectives by reading about the ideas and concepts that were present amongst the romance languages sounded like something very different than what I’ve studied in most classes; those of which usually revolved around studies and theories. I feel like even though it is a class to fulfill a requirement, there are many things I can take out of the texts, and gain a wider understanding of the culture and concerns in our history. I know very little about the romance languages and have only a fraction of French language left from the 9 years I learned it until high school, so taking this class already looks to be a refreshing wave of new things to learn this semester!

Looking forward to the rest of the class with everyone!
Katrina