Hello all,

My name is Suroor Mansouri and I am a Psychology major in my third year, trying to cover avenues outside the scientific and neurological domains of my field. I have been taking numerous creative writing and literature classes to study how moods, themes, and senses that we study in psychology intertwine in prose. I am quite a fan of current and past pieces of text that are written in the languages of romance as I find they translate complicated feelings and thoughts through text so elegantly. I wish I could say I had a familiarity with the genre enough to recommend authors but I welcome that nonetheless. My expectations for this term and this course is to gain a more holistic and intersectional approach to my understandings of Psychology. I feel as though everything and anything can be tied to each other. The way we interact with people and our food can be tied into mathematics but also, poetry. Everything in our lives can find their ways into other domains of our lives to the point where I want to surprise myself. I took this class to fulfill my literature requirement but to also throw myself into an environment that would challenge me and give me an avenue to question, think critically, and investigate subjects I know very little about.

In terms of my thoughts on the introductory lecture, it doubled any interest I had entering this class as I was suspecting a geographical element to the course teachings. The idea that the Romance World exists but doesn’t at the same time. In the lecture, Professor emphasized that “It has no geographical pinpoint. It is tied to no territory, deterritorialized.” I find this point incredibly intriguing because many times to come across as experts on certain subjects we tried to contextualize and gain control over it somehow. Whether it be pinpointing a location, origin, date, name, etc; we always try to gather details on a subject in a way to conquer it. In the Romance World, we would not even be able to begin this process. We are all strangers to the concept but also forever learning and aspiring to understand it and I think that is a beautiful thing. 

One question I would put up for discussion is how would one categorize a citizen of the quasi-fictional Romance World? Let’s imagine it as a concept and therefore, the citizen as a concept. What would they look like? Are we citizens of the romance world? are the authors?