Hi all welcome to my blog! My name is Farahnaz and I am a third year student studying International Relations. I will be honest I definitely thought that this class would be all about the world of romance in a black and white sense, so when the professor said it would be more complex I had second thoughts. However, I’m still here and hope to expand my views of what a romance studies course ought to be. What I appreciate about romance and emotive writing in general is that the authors emotions can be felt beyond the paper that we hold and these emotions validate what we sometimes as humans feel we must contain. I appreciate how real the authors feelings are expressed especially intertwined by anecdotes of appreciating small life occurrences. Some more about me is that I am the biggest cat person even though I pretend not to be. I admire how they mind their own and don’t beg for attention (no offence to dogs and dog people).

I expect that this course will challenge me and bring me back to some what gruelling days of elementary school and reading contents. However I hope this time around I will take the time to enjoy what I am reading instead of pushing to speed through the pages. Further from the actual challenge of reading a book a week, I look forward to having an excuse to read during school. It has been a while since I’ve been able to dedicate enough time to read novels. I expect that this course will teach me about the different mechanisms that writers in the romance genre use to portray their message. Other then that I really don’t have too many expectations, I hope I can learn a lot and expand my knowledge. In terms of the first lecture what stuck out to me was that some of the books we will be reading are translations. I find it interesting that I may have a completely different interpretation from what the author intended because of certain language phrases that are difficult to translate. But that difference in interpretation is just a consequence of reading in general and everyone has a unique perception of what we read.

One question I have for the rest of the class that they can answer is that if they were a character in a book what would you be famous/trademarked for?