Sorry for the late submission – I got a bit lost on the course website. My name is Owen Chernikhowsky and I’m an anthropology major with a minor in music. It’s hard to say which year I’m in exactly, but I started university at UVic in 2018, switched to UBC anthropology in 2020, and expect to graduate at the end of 2023. I’m taking this course for my second literature requirement since the topic is already an interest of mine. I first became interested in Latin America because of an ethnographic field school in Cuba that was set to take place in 2020 but was cancelled; thankfully, it will be this summer instead and I’m quite looking forward to it. Last year I took SPAN 280 on Revolution in Latin American Literature with Brianne Orr-Álvarez, and the region has also shown up in several anthropology courses I’ve taken. Additionally, I’ve already read some of the authors on the syllabus – Campobello, Borges (one of my favourite authors of all time), Rulfo, and García Márquez – while others I had been meaning to read anyways.

Since watching the lecture video, I’ve thought a bit about something that I said in class – that I associate Latin American literature with a kind of playful irony. This comes up against what Prof. Beasley-Murray said in the lecture – that we should not attempt to force any single overarching theme for a region that is already loosely categorized as a unity. Insofar as “Latin American Literature” is an arbitrary generalization, I agree entirely – but so is practically any presumed unity, all of which begin to disintegrate if prodded at. It seems as if it’s a duty for any arts course on a given subject to begin with the statement that said subject does not exist. While this point is always important to recognize, I don’t find it particularly interesting. Maybe “Latin American literature” is as arbitrary a category as the set of authors with names beginning with D, but is either really all that absurd? Obviously neither “Latin American Literature” nor “authors with names beginning with D” exist as unities unless we treat them as such, but both could serve as an excuse for a fun experiment, a way to extract through comparison themes that could otherwise be missed. I’m reminded of the critics in Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” who “often invent authors: they select two dissimilar works – the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights, say – attribute them to the same writer and then determine most scrupulously the psychology of this interesting homme de lettres…” Maybe we cannot reach any external, transcendent principle of unity through such methods, but we can produce new ways of looking at things – only, however, through constantly keeping in mind that the frameworks we use to do so are temporary and fluid. I accept any suggestions for further arbitrary categories to play with until they run dry and must be abandoned for something new.

As for a question, I’d like to hear others’ thoughts on the categorization of something like literature – do you find literary labels such as “Latin American Literature” more useful or restrictive?