Introduction

Hi everyone! My name is Olivia Wong and I am a third year sociology major at UBC. My goal is to hopefully get into Law school (anywhere) after I graduate. I grew up in North Vancouver (so pretty close) my whole life and I would love to live in at least two more countries later on in my life. I decided to take this course to fulfill my literature requirement but I am excited to be able to expand my knowledge and take on a different lens in reading as well as learn new concepts deriving from the Romance languages.

The word literature has always been a little frightening in my eyes and that is because I was not exposed to it a lot and I never was fully able to grasp it completely but I am hoping that throughout this semester these pieces that we will be reading will really expand my horizon and open up my mind to ideas that I never really thought of before and make the term literature seem more small and familiar. I think the structure of this course will enable me to enjoy reading the pieces even more because of the fact that we get to choose which piece of literature we get to read and aren't "forced" to read everything and it goes by our own schedule. This enables us to go at our own pace in a way which makes it more enjoyable for sure. I am looking forward to the class discussions and really diving deep into these pieces of literature to get a full grasps and discover other people's ideas that I may not of thought of when I was reading it first. 

Going back to the question "where is the romance world?" my first instinct was to say Italy or Romania or somewhere in Europe. But because "romance studies belongs nowhere & it finds a place everywhere", I find this a cool concept because as defined and specific I thought this term was before, it is now very open to variation and is not restricted  which allows for more freedom of expression. Which I can kind of tie back to our discussion in class today about translations of different works. Even when you are translating from one romance language to another, you are still getting different interpretations when they are derived from the same thing. So there is so much meaning and room for interpretations through literature that people will come up with different ideas about something after reading the same thing. Which shows its diversity and beauty in freedom and interpretation!

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