A Taste of Central American Literature
DISCLAIMER: I have never actually taken a literature class before, in any language. Keeping that in mind...
I'm taking today to crank out our assignment for the weekend, since we don't have class on Fridays during this module. A couple of the other girls and I were planning on going to San José to finish up souvenir shopping, but it didn't quite work out. Wanting to stay ahead in this class, I have settled myself at a small table at the café on campus and am staying here until I've at least got 90% of the homework done.
I love this class so far. It took me a day or so to get into the groove, because there's a lot of vocabulary that I need to translate as far as class terms go. This weekend we're exploring the Baroque period and one particularly influential writer during the 17th Century: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. To put her story in a nutshell, she had an affinity for learning from a very young age, and entered a monastery just so that she could continue her education. She wrote prose, some theater pieces, and poetry, which is what we are taking a look at in class.
I love reading for this class because when I hyper analyze text, it's not so weird. That's the point of the class: reading, but also going more in depth so as to discover more about the writer's background, personality, and even some history of the time. We were each given one of her poems to read and analyze this weekend, and it's definitely been a process for me. I wrote the poem in Spanish so that I could translate it into English (all by hand, not typing), and then broke it down, using three different pens to keep it all straight. I loved it. I loved that I was motivated to do it. If class continues this way, I'm going to wish that it was more than 4 weeks long.