After going through this course, what stood out to me the most was how consistently challenged I was in the way I think about identity and social structures. With all the different books I have read and going to class to discuss about them, I realized it allowed me to evolve how I question certain […]
After reading Love Me Tender by Constance Debre, it was a very raw and unsettling story of exploring identity, freedom and the cost of going against social expectations. What struck me the most was the protagonist’s rejection of traditional ideas of love, especially within family structures. Early in the novel, she questions why relationships such […]
After reading Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli, I learned that identity is not something fixed, but something constantly shaped by memory, imagination, and the stories we tell ourselves. The author shows how the boundaries between past and present or reality and fiction can be confusing to people so easily they can overlap. The narrator shifting […]
After reading this book, Piglia presents crime not as an act of violence but as a window into society’s values and contradictions. What I thought was really good about the book was that how the criminals burning the stolen money allows us to reconsider what wealth really is, as throughout the book, the bank robber […]
After reading “The Lover” by Marguerite Duras, the book is very powerful and emotional as the story center’s around memory, love and identity. The book is set in French colonial Indochina, where a young french girl begins a secret relationship with a rich chinese man. Moreover, through the narrator’s memories, the story dives into major […]
After reading “The Time of the Doves” by Merce Rodoreda, I enjoyed how deeply personal and intimate Natalia’s voice feels like as the novel throughout presents her life not only through dramatic events but through small, everyday struggles that slowly build into something heavy and overwhelming. I realized as well how powerful simplicity can be […]
After reading Deep Rivers, this book taught me how deeply culture, language, and environment can shape an individual’s sense of identity, as through Ernesto’s experiences, growing up is not only simply about age, but about becoming aware of social hierarchies, and cultural conflict. Ernesto’s connection to Indigenous traditions and the natural world made me realize […]
Reading Agostino was a very unsettling but yet eye-opening about growing up too quickly, as Moravia shows adolescence not as an exciting transition, but something that I believe a lot of people can relate to which is confusing, and painful. Agosto’s relationship with his mother starts out as a very close one as they would […]
After reading the Shrouded Woman, it allowed me to think differently about memory and story telling. Through Bombal, memory was shown to be something emotional and sort of fragmented instead of a clear sequence of events. From the narrators reflection on her life from her own wake made me realize how much of her experience […]
After reading Marcel’s prousts’s Swann’s Way, Proust was able to explore how memory works not as a clear and logical process, but as something deeply emotional and often triggered by everyday sensations. Much of the reading, I believe focuses on the experiences of the narrator, that shows how the bounderies between the past and present […]
