{"id":3,"date":"2026-01-07T22:51:21","date_gmt":"2026-01-08T05:51:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/amyall02\/?p=3"},"modified":"2026-01-07T22:51:21","modified_gmt":"2026-01-08T05:51:21","slug":"introduction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/amyall02\/2026\/01\/07\/introduction\/","title":{"rendered":"Introduction!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Hello! I&#8217;m Ava. I&#8217;m a second year psychology student and have absolutely no idea what I would like to do with that degree! (I&#8217;m living in denial of having to figure it out). I&#8217;m currently taking five courses alongside work, so I&#8217;m admittedly hoping this course has some ebbs and flows to the work level. I was born and raised here in Vancouver, but would ideally like to do Go Global at some point during my time at UBC. In my free time I enjoy doing puzzles, listening to music, and playing volleyball.<\/p>\n<p>My course schedule as a whole required an overhaul and this course caught my eye, that being said, as such I came into this course with very little expectations beyond ideally not drowning in work. Though I enjoy reading and generally read a good bit, the amount of older translated literature I tend to read is rather low so I&#8217;m hoping this course may spark a bit more of an interest in that regard. Additionally, admittedly reading for enjoyment has taken a bit of a backburner for me as of late, as the swaths of schoolwork and textbook readings have prioritized my time, and made me dread having to read any more than I already have. Despite all of this, I have decently high hopes for this course&#8217;s methodology, as contract grading seems like an interesting idea to keep expectations clear and reduce grade anxiety (of which I have much). Ideally, this will be an interesting and engaging course which allows enough freedom to not seem stifling, but enough structure to explore various ideas and perspectives I don&#8217;t tend to naturally interact with. I don&#8217;t personally enjoy writing literature, which has stopped me from persuing a large portion of other English or Literature courses, which also may have facilitated interacitons with a wider variety of viewpoints, so I hope that this being more reading and discussion focused will fit me a bit better.<\/p>\n<p>In regard to the question &#8220;Where is the Romance World?&#8221; found within the lecture, I would argue that the romance world cannot be a physical place in any sense of the word. Though the romance languages are a language family\/group, that doesn&#8217;t give it physiological substance or a &#8216;world&#8217;. In this case, my instinctual response to the question of &#8220;Where is the Romance World?&#8221;, is that the question should instead be &#8220;What is, or would be the Romance World?&#8221;, should it exist in any medium. If essentially every boundary separating entities of all kinds, including land, is fiction, then how could the &#8220;Romance World&#8221; be truly separated out from any other? Who would, in theory, decide what that entailed? Rather, I&#8217;d argue it is an abstract if anything, accessible by those who wish to explore it linguistically, through any means, but not physically.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hello! I&#8217;m Ava. I&#8217;m a second year psychology student and have absolutely no idea what I would like to do with that degree! (I&#8217;m living in denial of having to figure it out). I&#8217;m currently taking five courses alongside work, so I&#8217;m admittedly hoping this course has some ebbs and flows to the work level. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107621,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3,2],"class_list":["post-3","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-blog","tag-introduction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/amyall02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/amyall02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/amyall02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/amyall02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107621"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/amyall02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/amyall02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/amyall02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3\/revisions\/5"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/amyall02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/amyall02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/amyall02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}