Even though this doesn’t have much to do with summarizing what I thought of the class, I just wanted to ponder over something interesting that occured to me after reading Jon’s latest email about Blake’s blog. Some people have barely had anyone comment on their blogs, yet I’ve had quite a few comments on my blogs (and I’m not just saying that to toot my own horn). The thing is I never thought my blogs were particularily insightful, albeit I hope some of the ideas I came up with contained some value! What has been making people make comments on blogs? Is it easy access to just write a comment to someone who wrote in English, are people just being lazy and choosing the ones that are not as complex (aka my own blogs vs some that I have read). I just thought I’d put that out there.
Now on to what this blog is actually supposed to be about, the actual content of the class. I’m quite surprised how the class turned out. I was expecting to get and know right from the get-go that the books that I was reading were bad literature. I was quite unsure at the beginning when I did not know for sure whether or not Eva Luna was supposed to be considered bad literature by critics, scholars etc. After that moment it was almost as if we had this pressure put on us to make ourselves believe that each book we were reading was bad literature. Some books were obviously worse than others, but there were some books such as Mafalda that critically speaking, appeared to be perfectly fine “literature” for the genre that it is. I think as soon as this class was labeled Bad Latin American Literature, it filled us with preconceived notions of what we should be looking for, even though those ideas may have changed throughout the semester.
