Melika’s Span 312 Blog

  Hello Blog readers,   This week’s novel was Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges. Im not going to lie, I didn’t entirely understand what I was reading, but that is precisely what labyrinth means. As google defines, labyrinth is “a complicated irregular network of passages or paths in which it is difficult to find one’s way; a maze.” Thus, I acknowledge one of Borges’s goals was to confuse us and allow us to reanalyze what we know—to think again and try to put the pieces together as if they were a puzzle or maze.  I know I was reading a bunch of short stories, but they didn’t appear to fit together at all. It was a bunch of jumping from one plot to another without a deeper connection between the work. However, I liked how each story was relatively short, so we read various pieces. After watching this week’s lecture video, I know Borges wanted to make his work interesting by being real and raw and that legacy and inheritance are important to Borges. However, I couldn’t ...

  Hello blog readers, This week I chose to read Pablo Neruda’s ‘Twenty Love Poems and A Song of Despair. At first, I thought it was a beautiful and romantic read. I liked the storytelling narrative of the poems and how each poem guided us through the relationship from the poet’s eyes. For example, in the first poem, the poet is declaring his love to the woman, which at first glance, I found romantic. Then, by poem ten, the ‘lovers’ grow more distant from each other, which the poet mentions he is sad about. Finally, by poem 20, the relationship is over. The poet looks back on the relationship and mourns his journey to that point. Again, similarly to other novels we have read in this class thus far, I see themes of nostalgia as the poet says, “I no longer love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her” (49). The poems combined together have this story pattern through time, where these vivid descriptions take us through the journey of love and heartbreak—reminiscing the relationshi...

  Hello blog readers,        For this week, I chose to read Cartucho by Nellie Campobello. This novel was quite interesting as it was composed of a bunch of small stories. Written through the perspective of a child, the young girl's name I could not pick up on, but through snapshots, I understood she was a young child who lived with her Mama during the revolution .       The central theme of the novel is the revolution. We heard many stories of soldiers, generals, and men who were executed as if it was an ordinary everyday occurrence, which at the time it was. However, there was no emphasis on the horror of the revolution because it was framed through the eyes of a child. Instead, there was a lot of mention of many deaths. For instance, "the assault left more than three hundred dead in El Aguila alone" (p 26), and "more than three hundred men shot all at once, inside a barracks, is really quite extraordinary, the people said, but our youn...

  Hello blog readers, The reading for this week was Mama Blanca’s Memoirs by Teresa de la Parra. As my first official blog post for this class, I was unsure of what to write about, but the foreword of the novel led me to have questions I wanted to rehash throughout this post.  In the foreword, we are introduced to Mama Blanca and this young girl who ended up getting the memories after Mama Blanca’s death. This young girl then became the editor of the text as she and Mama Blanca became close friends, even though Mama Blanca was a much older woman, old enough to be her grandmother. Which made me question what made their relationship so special. This could be because the young girl truly enjoyed spending time with her, unlike her own kids. Mama Blanca and this young girl took walks together, played piano together, and Mama Blanca even passed down wisdom to the young girl with her memories and stories before giving her the manuscript. This confused me as the novel was ...

Hello Everyone, My name is Melika Niki, and I am pleased to be starting this course to learn about Latin American Literature. I do not have a large amount of background knowledge on the subject, but I was persuaded into this course over other literature requirements at UBC. I expect this course to be informative yet engaging in different ways due to the learning style.  I can not wait to make new friends, have thoughtful conversations, and get to know everyone else over the course of this term. For those wanting to get to know me, let me introduce myself. I am a second-year student majoring in sociology. I am from North Vancouver but grew up in North Vancouver and Coquitlam. My family is originally from Iran, but I was born here in Vancouver. My hobbies include figure skating and snowboarding, but I also enjoy games like puzzles. I finished five puzzles over the winter break this year, which was one of my favourite indoor activities.  This week's lecture was primarily an intro...