Introduction (First week)

 Hi everyone, my name is Marcus and I am a third-year computer science major.

I was born and raised in Vancouver and have lived here my whole life. I enjoy playing soccer, skiing, and making/playing video games in my spare time.  I also have a cat. I used to read a decent amount when I was younger but I just kinda stopped as I grew older.

To be quite honest, I am taking this class to fulfill my literature requirement but out of all the options this one seemed to be one of the ones that interested me the most. Also, French is my second language, and am excited to read some literature originating in French (And any other language for that matter :) ).

I am excited about this class because I think it will be a good break and change of pace from the mostly math-based/math-adjacent courses that most of my undergrad so far has been comprised of and am excited to have the chance to study something different in a university setting. Even though I'm ultimately taking this class to check off a requirement for my degree, I also do not want to pass on the chance to improve my skills in literature comprehension, writing, and learning something new.

As for my expectations for the course, I don’t have very many but I would like to be able to read something I enjoy or maybe find a new appreciation for literature from the texts that are assigned or that I can choose to read.

For my expectations for myself, I am probably going to aim for an A-, not only for the sake of the GPA but to challenge myself to do something I am not completely comfortable with yet and to hopefully get better at reading challenging texts, analysis, and writing while doing it.

From the lecture videos, I found it very interesting that the idea of romance studies focuses less on how the romance languages relate to Latin which is what all the romance languages have evolved from, but rather focuses on their similarities and differences because they have evolved from Latin. Also from the conversation lecture when it was mentioned that by knowing a language in a certain linguistic family you are essentially learning a small part of the same large language. I found this interesting because I also understand some small bits of Spanish just by being able to speak French.