Hi Everyone!

My name is David and I am a 2nd year Arts student, living in the Greater Mainland of Vancouver. I picked this course because I like the idea of sharing perspectives through stories. I also like how we are free to add and build our own concepts into our interpretations! If not for the email sent to me regarding this course, I would have never decided to register for it and probably would have found an alternative to fulfill my literature requirement towards my degree. I am very thankful!

For me personally, I don’t read as often as I should and if I do, I can sometimes carelessly breeze past important details that could reveal some counter-intuitive theme or idea as to my focus. I find it hard to put works into a genre as some novels/novellas can have a foot in multiple clusters among the literature community, which has captivated my interest as to understand it or even misunderstand it better. Romantic Studies is no exception. Nonetheless, I am looking forward to the reading list and spending more time in getting through it. I am also nervous about my choices for the readings as I do not know for sure if what I decided to read is exactly what I want to read, but I guess I will find out! Furthermore, I would rather ask and be left on more meaningful questions than to seek and end at the answers and interpretations.

In today’s intro lecture, it was brought forth into the light that Romantic Studies is not as straightforward as a discipline to be described as “Romantic” in particular, but an anti-discipline that is tied to escapism, rebellion and betrayal. Furthermore, the idea of a “Romantic World” does not exist. I was surprised to come away with a different norm for my expectations on my learning goals for this course. Romantic Studies was also described as something that cannot be close to anyone, even those who read or even studied it, making everybody a stranger to its real source. There is no clear way to define its concept because it is like 2 opposites and nobody can exist here and there at the same time. It seems that everything related to it can only be experienced by what we are capable of making it, which both attracts and repels us. I am curious and excited to find out what unfolds as we move through these interesting texts. One question I have is: How does the climate and environment shape the characters and what does that have to say about what we have learned in Romantic Studies?