I don’t entirely understand what I’m supposed to write about in this conclusion. I can offer my overall feelings on the course and return to some of my early ideas about Latin American literature, but on the whole, not very much has changed. This isn’t to say that I didn’t gain anything, however, far from it: it was one of the most enjoyable courses I’ve taken in my five years of university. It was possibly the most I have ever had to read for a single-semester class, but it didn’t feel overwhelming at all. I’m somebody who likes reading anyways, but something about a book being assigned for a class usually seems to decrease its potential for enjoyment; here, however, there was a perfect balance between reading for fun and reading for academic achievement that made it more enjoyable than either on their own. This was aided by the option to choose between texts for most of the weeks and the fact that some I had already read either in whole or part (Borges and Campobello) or were on my reading list anyways (Carpentier, Rulfo, García Márquez, Lispector, and Lemebel). While my favourite of the books remains Labyrinths, which I loved long before this class started, One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Hour of the Star have also solidified themselves among my favourite books over the course of the class, and I hope to return to them and other books by García Márquez and Lispector in the future. There were times that I had trouble figuring out what to write about for blog posts (this one most of all) but, ultimately, I always managed to come up with something.

I feel obligated to return to my original statement about the playful, self-aware element of irony I have found in a lot of Latin American literature. Though there were obvious exceptions (especially Rigoberta Menchú, who was clearly divorced from any broader Latin American canon), this did seem to hold true for most of the books we read, most prominently those following Borges and García Márquez. I was never particularly attached to this claim, though; it’s little more than a vague generalization pointing to a recurring theme in a handful of well-known classics, a bit like how Russian literature is so often characterized as “depressing” or “existential.” A lot of this seems to derive from the huge presence of Borges and García Márquez (I couldn’t imagine Lemebel or Bolaño writing the way they did without their influence), but it also preexists them in writers like de la Parra and Carpentier, arguably finding its real origin in a mixture of the influence of Cervantes and the peculiar position of Latin America as an oft-forgotten bastard child of imperialism in the twentieth-century world. However, I do wonder to what extent this preconception influenced my reading of these books and whether I would have thought the same if any of them had been written by a writer from elsewhere.

Does anyone else have any thoughts on whether themes of irony or self-awareness play any special place in Latin American literature, or is this simply a matter of perspective?