Hello!!
My name is Anna Vukota and I’m a second year student majoring in Linguistics and minoring in Spanish. I love listening to music, languages, and reading.
Although I’m taking this course as a requirement, I’ve taken a few Spanish literature courses at UBC and wanted to expand on that through the romance world. Through these courses I was surprised at how immersed I became in the history, culture, and people of Latin America and Spain solely through literature. As a linguistics major, I’m familiar with the history and the structural aspects of romance language family and they have evolved overtime. It will be interesting to look at the languages through literature this time as opposed to through patterns and more logical analysis. I’m also really interested in translated works and how the language effects the ways in which themes are expressed, which will be interesting in this course as all of the texts are translated to English – a Germanic language. The third prompt in the introductory lecture touches on what I’m super interested in which is to examine whether these texts have much in common just because they fall under the same language family. Just because these voices shared the same empire long ago do their stories present commonality?
I’m pretty biased but I’m very excited to read the Spanish texts but also Catalonian. I feel like when it comes to romance languages, Catalan is pushed to the side because of its smaller speaking population and intertwinement with Spain/surrounding nations. It’s such a beautiful language but I don’t know much about the history or the people so I’m interested to read some famous Catalonian works. I’ve also always had a list of “must read” classics I’ve wanted to read but never had the time or energy to dive into such complex and “life changing” texts. I’m hoping that this course will help me check some of those off my list.
The format and structure of this course is really interesting to me but I love the freedom it allows to deep dive and enjoy the readings! It’s really easy to get overwhelmed in literature courses with copious amounts of readings that you aren’t even interested in, so I think the freedom is a great opportunity to get the most out of the course content.
So many questions and curiosities that I hope will be somewhat answered (or not) during this course 🙂 Hope to see you all soon!
Hi Anna 😀
First of all I’m very excited to see another linguistics major haha. I’m also pretty excited to be reading Spanish texts, while I’ve been learning it for years now the culture section in language classes is usually awful so I’m interested to see what I can learn from the readings. Along with this I had the same thoughts about things changing through translation, I really wonder if it will have a significant affect on the way they are interpretated. Hope you have a good start to your term!
Hey Anna!
I totally agree with your point about the flexibility of this course as an opportunity to find pleasure in the readings we choose to do without the pressure.
Your note about the Catalan language is interesting to me, I hadn’t considered the way that different Spanish dialects may also have their own particular themes and literature choices, you have inspired a new area of curiosity for me now!
Thanks for sharing your initial thoughts, I look forward to working together this term 🙂