RMST introduction blog

Hi everyone! I’m a 3rd year student currently pursing a major in Economics and a minor in Commerce. This being nothing related to those fields, I’m taking this course to mainly to fill the literature requirement but at the same time felt like this course would be an interesting time. It’s not everyday you see a course named romance studies. The first thing I felt was cool about the class was the contract grading. Like the professor mentioned, I believe that this takes away a lot of stress on grades especially when studying for the exams. As long as you do what you say you will do, you will receive the contracted grade which I think is very fair. I will say that I’m not a big fan of reading but regardless it is a very valuable skill to learn and we have the option to read shorter texts which I like. My goal is to read a little bit everyday instead of pushing it to to the last minute but we’ll see how long this lasts 🙂 Going to one of the first lectures it was quite different from what I imagined. I thought we would only be talking about the book we read about but this was not the case. The main focus of the class was an abstract theme or idea and then we related this to the book. Another unexpected part of the class was how discussion heavy it was. I kind of expected the in-class days to follow a lecture format where the professor just sits there and explains things but now I know that you are supposed to watch the lecture before hand and then you come to class for the discussion. Watching the first lecture was interesting. Besides the housekeeping things, the way he explained what romance studies is was quite puzzling. The lecture made me think more about how academic disciplines are kind of constructed rather than natural or fixed. I found it interesting how the professor argues that Romance Studies doesn’t belong to any specific place or “Romance World,” and that this is actually a strength rather than a weakness. Overall watching this first lecture helped me make the connection that the course is less about learning a specific tradition and more about questioning things. I hope to have fun in this class