Hi! My name is Chris Cardenas (they/she) and I am a junior double-majoring in QSS and Art History. When not at Emory, I live in central Florida with my big Mexican family of six where silence is never a possibility.
My relationship with reading and writing has been very prominent in my academic and personal life. In terms of writing, most of my high school and college career has called for serious, analytical, and argumentative essays/papers thus that is all I have focused on unfortunately. Though, I have dabbled a bit in creative writing, more specifically poetry, here and there. Reading poetry, short stories, and novels has been my favorite pastime since I can remember. However, similarly to my writing, I shifted from reading mostly fictional pieces of literature to purely focusing on nonfiction works and that is where most of my concern for this class lies, as I have not read fiction with a heavy analytical lens in a while and forgot many helpful literary devices and analytical techniques.
That being said, I am excited to delve back into the world of literature through this class, especially with a focus on queer issues, authors, and stories!
Hey Chris! Thanks for your post! My family is my mom and brother and silence is usually the reality, so I’m sure that, though it can be annoying at times, it’s reassuring to have so much living happening in a household! I’m happy you’re in the class, and I’m excited to see what you create throughout the course. We will have various opportunities for more creative expression in the class, with the expectation that our creative products still be rigorous, critical, ethical. I’m glad you’re excited about revisiting literary devices and analytical techniques, as one of my favorite things to talk about are figurative devices and the formal and rhetorical functions they serve. I also think there’s value in returning to “the basics” because there is complexity even in the fundamentals, so I’m looking forward to running through how interesting and unsettling things like metaphors can be.