Last time, with Finality!

So this is going to be the last post. Kinda sad, but hey, last post right? This class has been a really awesome and I've really enjoyed the opportunity to discuss all of the texts with you guys.

Through the semester we have read a good number of "feminine" texts and several neutral texts but very few masculine texts. Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises was easily arguable as a masculine text because the focus is almost exclusively on the masculine issues of Jake, the narrator. The most pervasive issue is that of Jake's impotence and how that effects his relationship with Lady Bret. His war injury makes it difficult or impossible to  *ahem* rise to the occasion, and this makes a relationship with the sexually vivacious Bret an impossibility, lending to the airs of depression that happen whenever Bret is in the same city as Jake. However, whenever Jake is separate from Bret and, most notably while he is on the fishing trip, is happiest when in the company of other men.

The other masculine text is our most recent one, Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. This entry is very interesting as I would call it masculine not because of it's content but the way it is presented, partially anyways. Most of the story is told by Yunior, and his style of storytelling is completely soaked in the unique Dominican hyper-masculinity that we discussed in class. This is embodied by the way Diaz describes female bodies, with the special emphasis on breasts. This is interestingly countered by the times that the story is told by Lola, which gives the story another perspective that compliments the hyper-masculinity by showing the repressed femininity that results from the pervasive masculinity that is essentially Dominican.