Blogs

My name is Mai (Pronounced May). I am a third year psychology student and I live downtown. I moved to Canada at the end of 2019 so right before the pandemic hit. The first year of the pandemic was definitely strange for me. I was in a new country completely on my own and not even allowed to go outside or socialize! Actually, getting to do school online may have saved me from losing my mind! Vancouver is such an incredible city. I am often in awe at the beauty and accessibility to nature. I love being close to mountains and water and here I get to be close to both! I am still definitely adjusting to the cold, does it ever get easier?

  Before I moved to Vancouver, I lived and worked in Vietnam for 3 years before I decided that my passion lay somewhere outside of the career I had chosen and decided that I needed a career shift so here I am! I grew up in Cairo and so my first language is Arabic but I have always been fascinated by the English language. I certainly prefer, and always have, reading novels in English. Yes, the Arabic language is incredibly rich so I can’t exactly explain this. I also really enjoy reading books from different parts of the world and comparing perspectives, lifestyles and being inside the minds of characters. Russian literature and specifically Dostoyevsky has had an impact on me figuring out what I want to do and what I am passionate about – the human mind or as he refers to it, the human experience. No matter how many times I read a Dostoyevsky book, I am always blown away by the complexity of his characters and how real their thoughts and experiences feel to me. So I have a deep love and appreciation for literature and I don’t read nearly as much as I would like so I’m excited for all the books I will be exploring in this course this semester. I am excited to compare and draw parallels not based on where geographically the books are from as they are not tied to a specific territory. I never knew that! I guess when I signed up for the course, I didn’t really know what to expect. I did register for it to meet the lit requirement but I’m glad I did. I am very interested in how the course is structured too.

Hi, I’m Jessica Keir but Jess is perfectly fine. I am from about an hour away from Toronto, Ontario. I am a second-year student in Arts studying Sociology.

I took this class not only because Arts students have a literature requirement but because it seemed like a very interesting course to take! I love reading good books and subconsciously analyzing their meanings so to be able to share my thoughts on the pieces of literature we are given in this class sounds like a decent time to me. 🙂

In the lecture, it was brought up how we are reading these pieces in translation which is a given since they are all in English but I did not think about how that impacts the way the readers would take in the words. So blatantly obvious but very interesting to think about!

I really like the structure of this course and think it is super helpful to accommodate our busy, personal lives so we can choose when to do the work and essentially pick our grade. 

Looking forward to the rest of this course!

Hello, my name is David, and I am a first year student at UBC. I am currently planning my major in either Linguistics or Spanish. I was born in Canada and I live in Maple Ridge, a small town east one hour east from Vancouver, although I spent some time living in Puebla, Mexico, with […]

 Hello! 

My name is Aquila. I’m a first year student here at UBC student and I’m hoping to double major in Political Science and FNIS. I decided to take this course orignally as I was looking for classes that would fufill my literature requirement, and this course stood out to me. I think the course structure is very interesting in terms of grading but also as it gives us as students a lot of freedom in our learning while also giving us the chance to interact and share with others our thoughts on the literature. Growing up I was always surrounded by books and literature of all kinds, so I’m very excited about this class. I think it a good way to get out of my comfort zone and challenge myself with new texts. Many of the texts are unlike those I have read before and I’m hoping they allow me to expand my views and the variety of what I read.

The fact that all of these texts are translated adds an interesting layer to this course. I have learnt Spanish for the past six or so years, and so I have an understanding of some romance languages at a very basic level. Along with this I can appreciate the complexities that come with translating a text, and reading a text that is not in its original language. I think this will be an interesting thing to keep in mind during the course. I hope to learn more about the connections between Romance languages and cultures; to explore why Romance languages and culture are connected outside of their shared heritage. In its own way, I think this can help us to understand why other groups/languages throughout the world have been condensed into a single category such as, “Romance/Romantic”. 

Building off of this, I thought about the question: how can Romance Studies help us to explore and understand intercultural and intracultural relationships? As I understand, while similar, Romance cultures are still unique from each other. Their similarities are what cause them to be grouped together but they still all have their own seperate identities. They are not the only culture/language for which this has happened, so I wonder if exploring Romance Studies allow us to, in turn, understand other cultures/languages that are categorised similarly.

I look forward to being in this class with everyone!

Aquila

Hi! Despite us being online, I hope everyone is having a great start to the New Year. 2022 Woop Woop! My name is Marie, and I am a 4th-year international student pursuing a degree in Sociology. Born in Khartoum, Sudan raised in Geneva, Switzerland, I hope to use my knowledge and upbringing in creating empathetic […]