Overview

Looking back on the course now, it really feels to me like we covered a lot. We read a lot of different literary forms: short story, poem (I would have loved to have read more poetry, but I think that’s just because I enjoyed reading Neruda so much), novella, epic novel, etc… and we read authors from Colombia, Venezuela, Chile, Ecuador and the stories we read took place in those different countries. The theme of family seems like a perfect theme for a course like this one, because family is, for many, of such central importance, not just in literature but in life, and the idea of “family” is represented in a different way in each work, just as family means something different to each person. We have the dysfunctional family using objects as surrogate family members in an attempt to fill a need and a void in their lives in Las Hortensias. We have seen the multi-generational saga of Cien años de soledad depicts the cyclical nature of humans, especially the flaws and frailties passed from one generation to the next within a family. We have also seen the old (but in this case, a very sinister) conflict of feuding in-laws battling over custody rights in Piedra callada. We saw very different types of representations of families, but all united by the theme of family. I enjoyed the course very much, and I was really glad that we spent so much time on Marquez as it is such a rich text with so much to study and enjoy.