I’m Nandita, and I’m a third year Philosophy major who has accidentally finished her major and is now exclusively taking electives until graduation. I think I saw this course in an email sent out by UBC suggesting courses and RMST 202 caught my attention. I don’t know anything about Romance studies, which prompted me to impulsively register myself in the course, but it’s the description that really pulled me in.

Specifically it was this sentence:

“…all these authors and texts push at limits, question the past, and break free to construct something new…”

I took philosophy as a way to push the limits of my understanding and expand my learning, so it was very easy for me to decide after skimming the course description that I would take this course. That’s the only context I’m entering this course with, and I’m excited to meet fresh and invigorating voices and explore the unique obscurities of each perspective and story.

 

First Lecture:

I found this lecture to be very interesting. I really like the fact that romance studies is ‘deterritorialized’.

I have two questions that popped up:

First, what makes something influential? What has made the works we are reading influential to us now? I wonder if it is that we can recognize a perspective that may have been outlandish then which speaks to universal values we can acknowledge now, or if simply the lack of any such static or recognizable values make the works that much more thought-provoking and hence influential.

Secondly, I wonder if it is the spawning of these Romance languages from Latin as mentioned in the lecture, that ties them all together and categorizes ‘Romance Studies”. Maybe the stories and perspectives all inhabit some rebellious or individualistic nature/narrative, that whether intentionally or consequently, aim to speak from a voice of their own creation and capture centrally the specificities of their spawned identities in conversation with their language and the culture that arise together, from Latin or any other attempt of familiarization.