Span490: looking back over the first half of the course

(I wrote this blog last wednesday, but I forgot to tag it...) span490


This course is labled as Bad Latin American Literature, and part of its description (that I read before registering for the class) said/ says that we are/ were going to study works by 'famous' authors of Latina America and discuss them. I think that I wanted to take the class because I found this task interesting, and because I wanted a literature professor's opinion of why a book was bad, because it seems like we're always studying 'good' literature in school...even though the 'good' literature is usually just 'important' literature...and in my opinion often tedious to read (for example, some 'classic' English literature...it's filled with so many metaphors and references on top the difficulty of the old or middle english, that I don't think I was ever able to read any of it without somebody explaining it to me first, but then I would forget what they said a few months later, and I would still have no idea what I was reading. That's 'important' literature in my opinion, but as I said, it doesn't mean that 'important' is 'good', just like we're learning that just because a book is a bestseller, doesn't mean it's good. It means that for some reason it was decided to be part of the 'comercio massivo'. I honestly didn't know this before this class, because I didn't really pay attention to bestsellers, and I was surprised when I saw "Como Agua Para Chocolate" on the syllabus, because, even though I thought it was a stupid book because I saw the movie and I was really weirded out by the mixture of cooking and strange rules against marriage and the fire at the end, I knew it was a really 'famous' latin american novel, so I tried to respect it and accept it as 'good'. I'm not sure what we're getting at anymore in this class as bad literature, because it seems like even though Jon's doing an excellent job of communicating the aspects and examples of bad writing that we're reading, not many of us seem to agree that the books are really bad.....however, I wanted to point out a theme between the three books that we've discussed so far (Eva Luna, The Alchemist, Como Agua Para Chocolate), which I just realized from reading Jon's website, even though I pointed it out in the blogs of the first two novels, and this theme is exaggeration (which I ironically probably have done and am still doing in this blog...but it's a blog, not an edited bestseller, so I'm not going to feel bad). In my opinion bad literature is based on like or dislike, and I'm positive that exaggeration is what makes most people dislike something that they're reading. I know that some people in class said that when the author explains too much, the reader doesn't have anything to figure out himself/herself. Nobody wants to read the same thing over and over again, and I'm going to briefly give examples of exaggeration of each book. I might add more later.

I pointed out in my blog about Eva Luna that on top of the difficult spanish, there were too many details in each chapter, and it made the book even more complex than it already was considering all of the characters and their stories.

In The Alchemist, I started out liking the story, and I thought it was cool how such a young person could be so independent and happy with very little, and how he had this great knowledge and point of view of life...but it became very repetitive (which is good for many reasons such as emphasis, but only to a point), and it really exaggerated the capability of any human being, especially a "boy" when he was able to talk to the wind and the sun and in a way control them. I couldnd't stand the book at this point.

As discussed in class, and I read just now in Jon's blogs, "Como Agua Para Chocolate" is often too exaggerated in its metaphors, especially when Esquivel compares Tita's thoughts and feelings with food, and the mixture is too literal, for example, like John said, that Tita "had" to be born in the kitchen, instead of just explaining that her life was very involved in it.

That's all I have for now.