Introduction

Hello everyone! My name is Arissa Naumann. I am in second year arts but this is my first year at UBC after transferring. I am planning to major in Environment and Sustainability. As someone who commutes an hour and a half to get to school, I appreciate how this course is set up. I was expecting that the readings would be mainly historical so I was pleasantly surprised to find out that we will be reading books front the 21st century as well as older books. 

I don’t think my personality is well suited for books; I am someone who needs to find out the ending of the story as fast as I can. As a result I often speed through books and miss finer details in the writing. My hope for this class is that I can learn to be a more careful reader so I can make connections or see differences between the readings. Despite my speed reading habit, I enjoy reading (though I don’t get around to it often outside readings for class). In my free time, I like to watch movies from my never ending watchlist. I also enjoy hiking and listening to music.

I know a very small amount about books originally written in Romance languages from having taken CENS 202 last semester. Though the course spanned works mainly from Eastern Europe, we read a few books from French authors such as Albert Camus and Heinrich von Kleist. The selection of books I read were fairly gloomy and I am curious to see how they compare to the books we will read in this class. My prediction is that books in the Romance languages will have a slightly less depressing tone. 

From the lecture, the idea that what connects the Romance languages is that they are separate from Latin was interesting. I was not aware the Romance languages had such a revolutionary past. I had the impression that each Romance language is very tied down to the country that they are mainly spoken in and was surprised at how the languages have evolved from its origin and are actually placeless. Hopefully I can manage to use my lack of knowledge about the history of Rome or the Romance languages to my advantage to truly take the texts out of context. 

I am excited to take this course and read some books I would not have chosen myself. Thank you for reading!