Introduction

Hello everyone! My name is Samantha Burton and I am a second year student in the faculty of arts intending to major in either Economics or Political Science. I was born and raised in Kingston, Ontario but I tell people I am from Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. This is because I moved there in grade 9 and stayed for all of high school, so about four years, before choosing to come to Vancouver to university. My parents still live there so I return back to work in Yellowknife during summers. While I was pretty unhappy to move so far up north at first, I learned to love it and am now grateful that I got to experience a new place and its culture. 

I loved reading in all my spare time as a kid, but as school and life got busier over the years I found myself reading a lot less. Now, I only pick up a book every once in a while, so I'm excited to get back into reading in this class. When I do read in my own time, it is always something that is current in pop culture, and it is never similar to the type of books we will be reading in this class. While the amount of books we must read does feel a little daunting, I am ultimately eager to get back into regularly reading and discovering more of this new genre. My expectations for the course are that, in a way, this course will force me to read books I would not normally choose, so it will expand my knowledge, and I am hoping I may even discover a new interest.

In terms of the lecture, I like the fact that it is chosen that we will only be reading novels, not plays or poems. I am not sure why, but I have always hated reading plays and poems in past classes and in high school, so books are my preferred form of reading. I also enrolled in romance studies without fully understanding what it was, so I learned from the lecture that romance studies entails reading literature that is originally written in languages that are derived from latin. Furthermore, latin was the language of the romans, hence the word "romance." I had never thought of a defined "romance world" but I did have the preconceived notion that Romance languages are French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc, thus romance studies would be looking at European places such as France. I appreciated that the lecture challenged this thought in that there is no defined romance world. 

Comments

  1. Daniel Orizaga12 January 2024 at 08:28

    Samantha, I really like that you don't know what Romance Studies are. Actually we will discover it together in the course. And there will be some pop culture, you'll see. Welcome!

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