Hello all,

I’m Ross obviously a second year English Lit student from the frozen wasteland that is Edmonton. I would consider myself a fairly well read person but I have not really expanded my horizons from traditional American/English literature and am I’m really excited to do so. As far as personal readings go I’m a huge Ursula K Le Guin fan and love most if not all fantasy.

As far as my expectations go I am very excited to work within a discipline that has very few boundaries. Although the so called romance world is such a broad geographical category I would say that one thing it is not is centered around North American cultural and literary norms. I am really excited to explore the differing cultures of the romance world and see these differences highlighted in the texts. With other literary studies that I have done the worst part to me is being constrained to a certain genre or location for the texts. Even though obviously Romance literature is a category it is fluid and I am excited to learn about its commonality and just how diverse the prose really is.

In response to the lecture and these so called mongrel fields I believe the most important starting point is a discussion of our ideas of categorization. Are all categories and our attempts to divide expression, specifically within this instance literary expression, inherently arbitrary? How can we effectively divided context from the  unnecessary stratification of our world? Honestly I am not entirely sure, with the Romance world’s unifying characteristic being their languages evolved from a common empire who’s heyday was almost 2000 years ago, the scoreboard is showing Arbitrariness 1, Categorization 0. Yet I have not read any of the texts so to continue the previous metaphor were still in the first quarter got a lot of game left to see if this whole Romance world thing isn’t just some made up hoopla.