Hello everyone!
My name is Yuna, and I’m a fourth-year student majoring in Psychology at UBC. I come from an East Asian background but was raised in Canada my whole life, which should make me bilingual, but that’s highly questionable at this point (feels more like bye-lingual). Not to mention, literature can sometimes add on to this feeling. This is my final undergrad semester and to be completely honest, I originally decided to take this course to fulfil the literature requirement for my degree. My experience so far with literature courses have not been too fantastic due to many reasons (I actually have a strong urge to rant about this…hint: Jane Austen), but after this first week of lectures, I’m actually finding some fun in it! One worry is that I am VERY introverted and sharing my thoughts openly will be a big challenge. But oh well…I’ll get used to it. I can already feel that our class has a warm atmosphere where I could become more comfortable in sharing my thoughts, so thats a big relief.
From the first lecture this week, I remember one of the class question being “How should literature make you feel?”. This question made me a little confused, especially because of the use of the word “should”. I believe literature could make me feel in certain ways, but I never thought that I should have to feel a certain way. As mentioned in class, much literature includes a message or carries an intention of the author for readers to interpret, so does this mean that readers should be feeling a certain way? If I do not feel a certain way, it is my failure to understand the literature, is it the author’s failure to evoke that feeling, or is this just normal at times? It was a simple question, but it actually made me think for a while.
Continuing on, I’m usually drawn to non-fiction novels and more used to reading/analyzing research articles rather than “literature”. When it comes to literature, I have a preference on certain topics on certain backgrounds/cultures within specific historical periods, but aside from this small range of literature, my interest has been quite limited. To a certain degree ,this is because I feel that my understanding and engagement with literature has to be accompanied with knowledge of cultural or historical backgrounds, but my interest in this area has yet to be much extended. Therefore, I hope to gain some knowledge in the Romance-speaking world throughout this course as well.
Looking forward to an interesting semester!
3 replies on “RMST 202: Introduction”
Hi, this is a comment.
To get started with moderating, editing, and deleting comments, please visit the Comments screen in the dashboard.
Commenter avatars come from Gravatar.
Hi Yuna! I’m also definitely intimidated by the thought of sharing my thoughts openly, especially in live discussion, and I’m hoping this class will help me feel more comfortable!
I liked the angles you considered the question of how literature should make you feel from, and the idea of it not necessarily being the fault of the reader for not being able to understand it. I think a lot of the time when reading literature I find myself trying to figure out how I should be feeling about a book, and your reflections definitely gave me a lot to think about how I approach literature.
Hi Yuna! I feel like we have lots in common (east-asian, psych, literature requirement, frustration at times with jane austen, and looking forward to expanding our literature). I’m really excited for our upcoming semester!