SPAN 312

  Hi everyone! This week I decided to read Pablo Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems. I am normally not drawn to poetry as a whole as I find that sometimes I just get lost in trying to decipher a meaning from the words rather than just enjoying the art in front of me. However, I do still respect this art form greatly and am in awe of writers who can convey emotion and art so beautifully and effortlessly. Nonetheless, this collection of poems was definitely an interesting ride. Some of them I understood right away and others required a second or third read.       Right off the bat these poems go very in depth in describing the womens body. It did feel very much like the woman he was describing was somewhat of an object or physical thing to him rather than a human being. The many poems that were describing her body and breasts left an interesting taste in my mouth, as they felt very possessive and dominant over the woman. The lecture was describing this as well. The quote ...

  Hello everyone! I hope everyone had a good weekend and enjoyed reading the books for this week. I read Cartucho this week because the description given said that it was stories from the Mexican Revolution but from the perspective of a woman. This is what drew me in to choosing this book in the first place, and overall I found it a really fascinating read.  I found that the collection of short stories really kept me on my toes while reading, as sometimes the stories would connect with each other linearly and sometimes the timelines would be jumbled. At the beginning I thought that Campobello was just starting off with a small story about each individual character in the book in the section titled “Men of the North”. As I read on I discovered that the rest of the book would be filled with these short snippets of memories and stories from the men at war.  I think hearing these very violent and graphic stories from the perspective of a child was kind of mind boggling to me....

  Hi everyone! I found this week's reading rather interesting as I haven’t read a lot of memoirs in the past. I am not a very fast reader so this reading took me a while and I found myself doing it in shorter blocks of time, which I wish I hadn't as I felt like every time I began again I was reading something completely different. For next week I am going to try and read the reading in longer sit down sessions so I can truly absorb the content more and not feel so out of place when I start reading it again. That being said, I did enjoy this book as I loved its attention to detail, especially when discussing the hair or the features of her other family members. I always appreciate this attention to detail, as for someone who watches a lot of film and TV (being a film major) it helps me to paint a more detailed image in my head, which overall makes the story more interesting to me. I found the part where she was discussing in intense detail about her hair and how her mother fe...

 Hello everyone! My name is Jordan and I am a third year student in the Bachelor of Arts program majoring in Film Studies. I am originally from Toronto, Ontario and decided to go to UBC because I liked the environment here, as it's much different than Toronto. In my three years living here I have really enjoyed my time, especially the beaches and the ocean!  This is my first literature course at UBC. I generally do not read for pleasure during the school year as I feel like I don’t have enough time so I am very interested to see how I will be able to manage my time with this course. Being in film studies, I have a huge appreciation for Latin American cinema, ( Roma is one of my favorite movies ever!). With this being said, I don’t think I have ever had much exposure to Latin American literature, so I am very excited to expand my knowledge with this. Hopefully I can use some of the techniques I have gained in film studies and Latin American films and apply it to the analysis of...