Week 1 Introduction Post!!!!!

Hello, hello, my name is Jon. I am from North Vancouver, BC, and at the moment, I am a second year student hoping to do a double major in political science and economics. Nice to meet you all! I will not lie. I have not read a book for my own leisure in about 3 years, so it is safe to say that I am not that much of a literature enjoyer. I definitely would like to get into reading more books, so I think that this class will give me the nudge that I need to get over my apprehensiveness to start reading. Judging from the first class, my expectations for this course are that it is going to be a lot work for me to keep up. I have looked into the authors and the synopsis of the texts that we will be reading and they all look very interesting, so I am excited to discuss the readings with you all! This week’s lecture was very interesting to watch! I was not aware that the field of romance study was so abstract. One thing that I found very interesting that Professor Beasley-Murray talked about, was that literature in romance studies is meant to be read in translation and not in it’s original language. To me, I would think that this creates a loss of some meanings that can only be understood in the original language. Some words have significant meanings that cannot be translated into English well, so initially I would have thought it to be better to study texts in the language it is written in. This week’s lecture has opened me up to a new idea of breaking away from traditions in order to find new ways to analyze text. Another thing that I did not understand previously about romance studies was that it is about the interconnectedness of various texts in the language group. Going into this course, I thought that this would just be like a regular literature class, but with a Latin spin. I think that this small, but significant difference makes the subject a lot more interesting and leads way to many more interesting conversations. Although I have nothing against other literature classes, I am very glad that this class will be a different experience. Overall I am quite excited to start reading literature and conversing with everyone about these texts, and I am looking forward to the coming semester with everyone!!