Hello, my name is David, and I am a first year student at UBC. I am currently planning my major in either Linguistics or Spanish. I was born in Canada and I live in Maple Ridge, a small town east one hour east from Vancouver, although I spent some time living in Puebla, Mexico, with my extended family. Some of my hobbies include consuming popular media, writing, socializing with interesting people and spending quality time alone.

I decided to take romance studies because of my love of languages and literature as well as to gain further skills in analyzing specific linguistic and cultural texts. I am very excited to take romance studies 202, for new perspectives and to give me an excuse to read some realist fiction. Regarding Jon’s lecture, I was interested in the perspective that he gives for what is the definition of the Romance world, I had already attended his research seminar which covered this topic in October of 2021, and it somewhat inspired me to take this course. I generally agreed with the conclusion that Jon provides us, in that the Romance world is an artificial construct with no definitive answer to what it is. Instead of asking us to define the Romance world, Jon instead asks us to examine the possible definitions of romance.

To give my own understanding of the Romance world, I believe that culture has played a more important role in the formation of a general romance identity, than language. Even though the works written by the authors taught in this course all wrote in different languages, there are many commonalties found between them, such as themes of social inequality, love and sexuality, spirituality and betrayal and guilt, as a few examples.

I am interested to see what happens next!