Conclusion: Farewell to Romance Studies (or not…?)

I know everyone else is saying this, but I can’t believe this term is actually ending. I enjoy reading a lot, I love it, but in recent years I’ve exclusively kept it to either fanfiction or Chinese/Korean novels, which are vastly different from the novels that we read for class. So, it was a bit of a learning curve to get back into formal novels like this! Especially with a doozy like Proust in the very first week… I think my head was spinning by the end. I think over time, I learned that though novels can be a tough read (either emotionally or literally), even that can indicate something about the novel – why did the author choose to write in this style? Does this say something about the narrator? Or perhaps the time period and context? I’m normally not used to taking notes while reading but sometimes things got so jumbled in my head that I’d have to make a separate memo for a list of characters, or specific quotes that stuck out to me, or something from the lecture/conversation video that stuck out to me so I could revisit it in the novel. But most importantly, I can’t believe I actually read one novel every single week! Even though I would push off starting the novel until Friday or Saturday…

I think some of the most prevalent themes to me across the novels I read were war, bigotry (racism, misogyny, classism, the whole lot), and poverty. Even if some of these weren’t explicitly mentioned as a problem in the novel, it’d leak through background details or interactions between the characters. One thing I’ve been thinking about is that despite being called Romance novels, I quite despise the ‘romance’ depicted in most of these. I hated the men! Not many of them were redeemable, barring poor Antoni from The Time of the Doves. I also learned a lot from my classmates’ blogs, since they would occasionally point out a connection they made to a previous novel (and if that wasn’t the novel I chose that week, the connection piqued my interest in it).

Like the final lecture video said, I’m not sure when the next time I pick up a Chilean, Brazilian, Romanian, or Catalan book will be, or if I ever will again. But for now, I think I have some interest in the books I hadn’t chosen to read for this course, as I perused through my other classmates’ blogs. I’m not sure how far I’ll get since I won’t have the looming deadline of a Sunday 11:59 pm blog post anymore, but I’ll certainly try my best!