I don’t think I’ve ever taken a course like this before, but I very much enjoyed both the content and the structure this term. Getting introduced to new literature was quite exciting, of course; and I think the focus on the “Romance World” or lack thereof made me even more curious about the languages, cultures, and periods of history that I have yet to study. I hope that I’ll be able to reread some of the works in their original language (probably French or Spanish) so that I can compare them with the translations. Course structure-wise, I thought it was nice to be able to choose between the readings, and once I got used to it, I liked that the requirements for the blog posts weren’t overly specific. The meetings sometimes made me nervous in the beginning, because I was used to discussing books in chapters or sections over a number of sittings, rather than as a whole in one session; but after going through the process a few times, I think the Romance Studies way ended up feeling to me like a much more natural style of literary discussion.

It’s difficult to say which readings I enjoyed most during this course, but the ones that currently stand out in my mind are María Luisa Bombal’s The Shrouded Woman and Roberto Bolaño’s Amulet. I love how each of these novels is written to play with the concepts of time and reality in certain ways, and I very much felt for the protagonists (Ana María and Auxilio) as I came to understand the challenges of their positions and the weight of their losses. There is a certain element of tragedy to both stories that I couldn’t help but be drawn in by, even as someone who often struggles to appreciate the tragic in literature. Maybe this tragedy just felt too true to be brushed aside.

Speaking of which: were you able to find truth in the fictional aspects of certain course readings? Did you prefer the works that stayed closer to facts (or seemed to)? And finally, has your understanding of “truth” or “reality” changed?