Hi everyone! My name is Tamara Vukota and I am in my second year here at UBC. I am the Arts faculty as a Psychology major and am still figuring out what I’d like to minor in. I grew up and have lived in Downtown Vancouver my entire life. I love the city life and would love to do a graduate degree somewhere with a busy environment. A dream of mine would be to fulfill this degree in New York City.

I took this course because it seemed like the most interesting one to fill my literature requirement. However,  I am really looking forward to it! I don’t consider myself to be a big reader but it has always been something I have wanted to get into more. When I am able to make time for reading, I gravitate towards young adult fiction as well as non-fiction, mainly circulating around the ideas of self-help and society. I think this class will push me expand my literature content and will force me to make more time for reading. I have not explored compositions of different cultures/languages, so that is something I am looking forward to learning more about and seeing if I enjoy it. I definitely think this class will open my eyes to many new readings I never would have picked up otherwise which is exciting, but also makes me a little bit nervous haha. Reading books that have been translated from many different languages into English is really cool but also strikes my curiosity to see how well I will be able to interpret them. RMST will challenge me outside my comfort zone for sure.

The introduction lecture explained the Romance world to be very open ended and without true concrete definition. I found this to be really intriguing and captivating. Since we will be analyzing many different texts, I am curious to see how different authors interpret this world with the lack of structure. The common theme of the ‘betrayal’ of tradition amongst the romance languages was something I did not expect. Initially going into this course, “romance studies” from first glance I thought would contain more lighthearted and joyous cultural literature but evidently, I was mistaken. That said, I think this theme makes it even more interesting than I expected and I am excited to see what happens! Hopefully we will safely return to in-person learning soon! : )