Hi everyone! My name is Avery, I’m in my second year and I’m in Arts planning to major in visual arts,   I’m also in the B+MM program so if you are in either of those let me know because I love meeting people in my program! I’m a North Van girly so I’m into all the classic North Shore things like snowboarding, hikes, and all things nature. I enjoy travelling and being immersed in different cultures, my favourite place so far is London and I am hopefully going to be visiting more places in Europe this year! (if anyone has recommendations let me know!). I also love music, and can often be spotted walking around campus with headphones on, if you stopped me to ask I’m most likely listening to SZA.

I’m very excited for this class because I enjoy reading (mostly fantasy, as a guilty pleasure) and I expect that by the end of the term, I will have expanded my bookish horizons as well as possibly learn some new strategies for analyzing texts. During the school year I never really have time to read, so this will be a change for me. I’ve also never done any sort of course like this (literature studies/language studies), as my degree contains mostly visual aspects, so I’m very curious to learn what it’s all about. I’m expecting to develop my reading abilities and engage in conversation with others about all that we are learning, hearing what others see that I might not. Another expectation of mine is to get better at analyzing texts, I’d say a weakness of mine is analyzing deeper meanings in texts, questioning and taking information further, a weakness I am hoping to improve on.

Watching the lecture video and conversation video I first of all learned that I know nothing about what Romance Studies actually is (!) and I’m sort of going into this blindly. The conversation of similarities and differences in works of literature that are all grouped under the “Romance Studies” category was very interesting to me and something I want to keep in mind while reading our novels. The idea brought up in the video lecture that “Romance studies belong nowhere, and it finds a place everywhere” and saying that not one person is closer than another to the source of “Romance Studies” allowing for expressive freedom and there is no language or way to speak “Romance”, to me this was almost reassuring as it felt like it levelled the playing field a bit!