Hello,
My name is Miranda and I’m a 3rd-year psych major. I’ve lived in East Van my whole life and I have a dog, older sister, and younger brother. Post-grad, I’m aiming towards a career caring for children whether that’s through child psychology or teaching. Coming into this course, I’m very grateful for the flexibility offered that I often don’t experience with the rigidity of my recent classes. I don’t have much experience in literature so far but I’m hoping to change that.
To start off strong, I don’t know much about the Romances. When I see Romance studies or literature, the only things I can think of are the Latin languages, Europe, sophisticated writing, and not much else… so I found the discussion on the Romantic World quite interesting in the first lecture video. Actually, I found everything up to now to be really fascinating, probably because I’m starting from scratch here. Something that was particularly striking was the conversation in class about what literature is and its connection to society. It’s a topic I’ve felt strongly about especially around how exclusionary literature can be and how it’s been weaponized against certain demographics. As well, as someone looking to work in education and just a person on my phone nowadays, the ongoing literacy crisis and overall lack of awareness in the power of literature concerns me.
Contradicting what I just wrote, outside of school, I haven’t willingly read a book in years. Maybe a better way to phrase this is my reading has been quite limited recently so I guess I’m challenging myself this semester! I’m not sure what to expect in this course yet since I don’t really have a solid grasp on romance literature… yet. Despite this, I’m excited for the literature in this class since all I’ve done in my university life so far is analyze or write historical and scientific articles. I’m a bit nervous about keeping up with the amount of reading, but looking forward to the change of scenery! This is a pretty universal experience, but I used to be very into reading when I was younger and it tapered off sometime around high school, so I’m excited to maybe forcibly reignite that in this course.
Regardless of my lack of recreational reading, I’m very excited to begin this course and welcome this change of pace from my usual schedule.
Thanks for reading. Can’t wait to meet everyone!