I really hate endings. They always feel bittersweet and usually end in tears for me (though book endings are usually a different story), but alas, everything must come to an end or something. When I get immersed in books, it’s like I experience the characters’ emotions for myself, so this course’s books gave me a whole array of emotions and experiences that I hadn’t explored before. It’d be impossible to pick a favorite, but I especially enjoyed The Shrouded Woman, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, and My Brilliant Friend.

Identity isn’t something that I’d thought about a lot before taking this course, but these works have all made me realize how vital and central identity is to every aspect of one’s existence, their place in society, and even in society as a whole.

So let me talk a little about my identity. Going into this course, as many others did, I considered “literature” to be something imbued with all kinds of hidden meaning, inaccessible, hard to read, and overall more of a homework assignment than art. Now, I see it as a much broader field, something that can be enjoyed and consumed similarly to any of the other books I’d normally read (though the boundary between the two has definitely become a lot less clear). I pay more attention now to what’s important to me, the ways that my experiences impact my identity, and the things that I want to define me.

I think I’ve learned to trust myself more with these blog posts: the grading scheme made it so I felt like I could say what I genuinely thought about books, and more often than not, it happened to align with what was discussed by other students or in the lecture videos. Even when it wasn’t, I still trusted that what I took away from the readings was valuable (especially since no one has the same experiences, so what’s important to them in a book is going to differ).

One of the things I mentioned in my introduction was that I was curious about translation and the ways it impacts a work, and how language/culture creates different experiences. However, part of what I’ve learned in this course is that so many experiences transcend any linguistic or cultural boundary. There wasn’t a single book in this course that I read that I wasn’t able to relate to in one way or another. It’s interesting, I went into so many of these blog posts absolutely having hated a book, and by the end of it, I would have to rewrite my introduction because actually, the things it had to say were super interesting, and maybe it wasn’t so bad after all.

I’m really gonna miss this course, it’s been one of the most interesting and impactful courses I’ve taken in university, and I’ll miss having an excuse to read a book every week. I’m curious how your perceptions of “literature” have changed over this course. Until next time!