RMST 202

 Hello All,  Thanks for reading my blog posts thus far. I had a lovely time in this class and I hope you all did too. This class for real saved me in its flexibility with being able to choose how many books we read. I loved being able to plan it out myself and I felt very fulfilled in the creative directive granted with the blog posts! Being able to choose how we respond to these books, instead of having to follow a specific format allowed for honesty and genuineness. The structure of having to read these novels definitely got me to read books I wouldn't have previously picked up and I am glad for that as I think they were worth reading.  I really enjoyed the various writing styles presented in this class and the ways in which they often challenged my reading. I also loved being able to hear everyones different interpretations on the novels and I especially found those insights to be helpful in navigating the content. The lecture videos also proved to be helpful in gaining both bac

Luiselli’s novel navigates the trials and tribulations of keeping her creativity alive while performing  her motherly duties. She also explores just how blurred the lines between reality and imagination can become when one becomes obsessed with their means of escapism, which in her case is the poet Gilberto Owen. Through her movement through different liminal spaces and the switch between first-person narration, we see how the obsession consumes her. Her navigation of these spaces causes the reader a sort of confusion at first wondering what is real and what is imagined. I found this a tad bit hard to follow but found that it only added to the narrative of losing yourself in escape. Her fixation on Gilberto points to how we can form these fixed ideas of people who we don’t even know. The mother fabricates this image of him in her head, creating these encounters that never really happened. This reminded me of the parasocial relationships that people tend to form with celebrities. I mean