Hi everyone! My name is Michael, and I was born in and lived my whole life around the greater Toronto area. I’m in first-year science and want to major in physics; the dream is to do research in theoretical physics one day. I wanted to take this class mainly because the reading list seemed really interesting. English was one of my favourite subjects in high school, so I wanted to explore more novels this year. I’ve always been pretty interested in issues of power and oppression, and a lot of texts like Black Shack Alley and Amulet seemed like they would provide a unique perspective on them. I don’t really have expectations for discussions; I’m mainly excited to try new books and talk with other people who are reading them, and to see how that goes. In my spare time, I like to read and play Minecraft with my friends, and I also really like hiking, although I haven’t done as much of that recently.
On the first lecture:
Where is the “Romance World”? When signing up for this course, my idea of the Romance world consisted of all the geographic area in which people spoke a Romance language. This included countries like France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Romania, but also Latin America and places like Quebec. I felt that even the voice of a Romance language-speaking resident of a predominantly non-Romance country could be an object of “Romance Studies”, and that the actual “world” itself consists of the geographic and cultural elements associated with these people. It seemed arbitrary to draw the line of people not being part of some ambiguous “Romance World” because they live in a place too sparsely-populated by Romance language speakers. It’s not immediately clear to me that there is some significant, deep link between all of the Romance world apart from linguistic roots, but maybe the goal shouldn’t be to find some simple but profound connection: I mainly want to enjoy the complexity and contradiction that comes with the idea of “Romance Studies.”
I was also interested in our preliminary definition of literature as something that can compel us to pay attention to mechanisms of representation. I especially want to pay attention to authors’ representations of their own cultures and the diversity within them, because the selection of literature is geographically diverse, but beyond that, I don’t know much about the extent to which the authors try communicating specific elements of their cultures or tell stories about specific subcultures and underrepresented groups.