Hasfariza Hassan

  I can’t believe that this is the final blogpost for Romance studies which is actually crazy to think about. When I was telling my friends (most of them either in STEM or are engineers) about taking a class for my elective called Romance Studies, they thought I was taking a class about romance books and that I was analyzing love languages in this class. I think it’s really funny because when I was younger, I thought romance studies was actually about romance and didn’t know that romance languages existed. I think it was interesting that the lecture touched on the theme of patterns of commonality and difference because I definitely did see similar themes throughout some of the books that we have read. For instance, Nadja and the Shrouded Woman elements of love were touched upon. However, it was from different contexts of love. The Shrouded Woman was following a woman who was in between life and death, and was seeing her loved ones come to visit her while she was in the funeral cask...

  Love Me Tender by Constance Debre was an interesting read and very different from the other books that I have read for this course. I found that the chapters were mostly a page long which made me think about how in life we have numerous chapters in our lives. However, after they have ended or once we’re going through them, it can be interpreted as moving fast. This is further reiterated when the book covers various topics, indicating that life is full of different experiences that we will go through as individuals. The series of dairy entries in the book gives a personal touch to the story and allows us as readers to feel a personal connection to the narrator. This is because diary entries recount what the narrator goes through, and we get the experience of the narrator’s life as they go through their experiences. In this lecture, Professor Beasley-Murray mentions that this book is an autofiction where it is “not quite [an] autobiography” even though it takes experiences from Deb...