Week 1: Introduction

Hi, my name is Prathyush. This is my second year at UBC in the faculty of arts. I plan to major in History, with a minor in Law and Society. I’m an Indian international student from Dubai, UAE with an unwavering passion for all things art. My favourite things to do are larp as a cinephile, and listen to every possible kind of music under our sun. Through this course, I am hoping to broaden my horizons and expand my passion for consumption into the field of literature. Prior to this course, and as I write this, I would not call myself a reader. I am hoping to change this and foster, a hopefully, undying love for reading and novels. I am currently a huge fan of comics, manga and more generally all kinds of graphic content, evidently lacking a strong connection to the literary medium. This background allows me to enter this course with a sense of where my taste and sensibilities lie, with the goal of building on this and learning how to navigate the extensive world of literature, primarily narrative. As for my background as a reader, historically I was never one to pick up a book through my own will and motivation, usually requiring external stimuli (my parents or teachers) pushing me to read and expand my vocabulary. This has created a negative relationship of sorts, with reading, for me, where I only read when I am required to. I have long tried to find the internal motivation to pick a good book on a rainy day and read at least a chapter or two, but have been consistently unsuccessful in this endeavour. Through the ‘choose your own adventure’ portion of the course, I am hoping to combine the pressure of coursework with a passion for growth, arts and culture to, at the very least, change my relationship with reading. With regard to the first lecture, there were two points that stood out to me – firstly, the question of what is the romance world and second, the similarity between the perception and versatility of the romance languages and the various languages found across India. When posed the first question, my initial thoughts were – France, Italy, Spain? However, after watching the lecture, I am now privy to the deterritorialized nature of the romance world and how the ‘romance world’ is more a product of freedom of expression and is shared by cultures and languages everywhere. Moreover, this correlates with the interconnectedness of many of the European languages, such as France, Spanish, Italian, etc, and how fluency in any one of these languages can allow you to communicate with someone with fluency in another. This is similar to the interconnectedness of languages across India, where how fluency in Hindi, for example, can allow you to communicate with someone only fluent in Punjabi or Urdu. This concept heavily coincides with the idea of the romance world existing in a plain above our conventions of geographical and linguistic borders/barriers, and more as a testament to our innately human ability to express ourselves and our emotions, rather than products of our race, nationality, gender, etc. I am extremely excited to approach these works from both the lenses of pure expressionism and as products of their environment, and therefore debate the influence of these perspectives.