Hello!!

I’m Maya! I’m in my second year majoring in psychology and minoring in law and society. I’m thinking about going to law school but who knows. I was raised in Calgary but was born in Dubai. I’m excited to take this class to read more books out of my confort zone and from all around the world and exploring new authors.

I would consider myself a reader. I mainly read literary fiction and contemporary novels  but I’ve started exploring some non-fiction/memoirs. My favourite books are Normal People by Sally Rooney (still haven’t seen the show). To answer a question in today’s class, I personally read becasue I love the escapsim aspect. Even if I’m reading non-fantasy books, I still find elements of escapism. Reading is my personal form of self care.

A few fun facts about me:

• Valentines Day is my favourite holiday
• I love cats but I’m so allergic
• I really want to go to Ireland

I find the categorization of Romance Studies very interesting after watching the introduction video. While these romance languages of French, Italian, Spanish… are all very different in their modern form and have different cultural aspects they all come from the same roots. When asked ‘what is the Romance World’ my mind goes to France and Italy as those are often seen as ‘languages of love’ and have a very romantic scenery to them. But I really like the ‘correct answer’ of ‘I don’t know’. That the ‘romance world’ can not exactly be defined geographically due to its expanse around the world, nor linguistically due to the differing dialects. But as stated in the video, the unknown of Romance Studies is what makes it so exciting and it is something that I’m excited to learn this term: bluring the lines of traditional literature and language and allowing the unknown to prevail when reading. I think another important aspect of the Romance World and Romance Literature is the aspects of colonialism. Since many of these empires such as the French and Spanish had colonies and influenced their (the colonies) language and cultures, the stories of the colonies are completely different than the stories of those in the empire. Which leads to a different understanding of the ‘Romance World’ depending on where you are looking at it from. This is also found in reading these texts in translation, which allows for a further loss of culture and language within the story and the real-life context.

My expectation for the semester is a lot of reading but hopefully finding some that I really love!