If this has been a journey, you now have a rough map, not of the Romance World (there is no such thing), but of the travels, digressions, displacements, and flows, the points of interaction, resonance, friction, and resistance, that set Romance languages and literatures in contact with and against other modes of expression and cultural forms.
We have put in a lot of time, and covered a lot of ground. This has not been a literary history: we have not been too interested in influence or inheritance, in the passage from fathers to sons, mothers to daughters, still less in the notion that historical context determines or explains a literary text. But our path has been historical, from the 1910s to the 2020s, and we have seen how stories help us make sense of the past, or acknowledge its senselessness, and perhaps rethink the future. We have also cast a wide geographical net: from modernization in Paris and Buenos Aires to working-class Naples and the New York subway, from the Caribbean to the Andes, Indochina to the Sahel, from Communist Romania to postcolonial Angola, from the Spanish Civil War to Mexico’s 1968, from a hacienda in Chile to a maid’s room in Brazil to a holiday home on the Côte d’Azur.
Above all, I hope you have been affected by what you read, and by our discussions of them. You may at different points have smiled or shuddered, laughed or wept, frowned or even yawned. You may have felt interest or curiosity, empathy or pity, anger or annoyance, unease or doubt, enjoyment or surprise, pleasure or pain, satisfaction or awe. What I hope you did not feel–or only fleetingly–was anxiety. Life is too short for that. Instead, be proud of what you have learnt, including what you now know we still have to learn.
A World of Difference
If the hallmark of literary representation is that it is an unfaithful representation of the real, then perhaps the most literary texts are those that betray (disclose or let slip) that infidelity even as they indulge in it themselves.
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- Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986.
- Moreiras, Alberto. Infrapolitics: A Handbook. New York: Fordham University Press, 2021.
- Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Trans. Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum, 2004.
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Beer is more a Germanic drink than a “Romance” one, though the world’s most ardent beer drinkers per head, by far, are the Czechs, followed by the Austrians, and Romania edges Germany from the top three. For the Roman historian Tacitus, beer was a barbarian drink, consumed to excess by unruly tribes “conquered no less easily by their vices than by arms.” The French and Italian words for beer (bière and birra) are not even derived from Latin, but German. It is wine that is associated with France, Portugal, and Italy (the top three nations in terms of per capita consumption), as well as Spain, Chile, Argentina. But beer is a more fully global drink, and breweries are more widespread than vineyards. Beer tends to be affordable, the drink of the working class. Despite the dominance of a small number of multinational brewers (Anheuser Busch, now part of the Goliath AB InBev; Heineken; Carlsberg . . .) and brands (Budweiser, Miller, Grolsch . . .), most countries have their “national” beer, and a proliferation of microbreweries has led to an explosion of local product and styles. You can even brew beer at home, in a cellar or cupboard. Beer will be the drink of our Romance Studies!
The Style Council - Walls Come Tumbling Down!:
The Book I Read (2024 Remaster):
Alice Cooper - School's Out (Official Video) (High Definition):
Introductory Questions
In your blog posts, lots of you have said that you are “not readers.” But I’m not sure I believe you. We are all endlessly reading, if not always necessarily from books. Many of you have also told us that you are taking this course as a requirement. So let’s think about what kinds of readers you are, and what might be at issue with requirements…
- Where do you read? On a couch, in bed, on the bus…?
- What do you read? Newspapers, comics, novels, tweets, FaceBook updates…?
- When do you read? Mornings, evenings, when you have time, when you make time…?
- Why do you read? To escape, to connect, to find our more, out of boredom, because you feel you should?
- What is the role of the body in reading?
- Is reading “literature” different? Why? Why not? What is literature anyway?
- Why do you think this university (like many others) has a “literature requirement”? Why should literature be required? What does it offer?
- What does literature require of us? What do we require of literature?
- Is reading translated texts different? Why? Why not?
- What is a novel? What is fiction?
- This course is not about “Romance” in the sense of love or affection. But what if it were? What is a “Romance”?
- Do you speak (or understand) a Romance language? What similarities or differences have you noticed between Romance and non-Romance languages or between Romance languages themselves?
The following questions are taken from your blog posts…
What are small things in life you find to be beautiful? I
If you found out that half the world also found your favourite book to be their favourite, would you change your favourite book? why or why not?
What book are you the most excited for and why? Or if you aren’t excited about any of them, which one were you the most set on avoiding and what was the reason?
What were your ideas of Romance Studies before starting this course? What did you think it studied?
How is the future of the subject going to develop and will it be more or less relevant to the world we live in now?
How does understanding and recontextualising the works of the “romance world” colour our worldview?
Are all categories and our attempts to divide expression, specifically within this instance literary expression, inherently arbitrary? How can we effectively divide context from the unnecessary stratification of our world?
Do you feel that the freedom we have in this course is helpful for your learning or do you prefer to have more structure?
From a stance purely about the texts themselves and the stories they tell, are we not risking losing meaning through translation?
How would you describe the Romance World?
What makes something influential? What has made the works we are reading influential to us now?
As we continue to translate texts and make and change their meanings, is it possible or likely we will revert a text’s meaning back to their original one? Could this have happened already?
Do you think analyzing the authorship and agenda of our course readings, asking who wrote it for what purpose, would help us better understand what Romance studies is? Or would it rather mislead us to an understanding that is confined to specific areas, which goes against the limitless nature of the Romance world?
Which Romance Language would you think is most likely to become a dead language and why?
How does the climate and environment shape the characters and what does that have to say about what we have learned in Romance Studies?
Are there any other disciplines similar to Romance Studies that are not bound to a specific field?
How can Romance Studies help us to explore and understand intercultural and intracultural relationships?
Did you associate it primarily with romantic relationships or did you have a broader understanding of the term “romance” in an academic context?
