INTRODUCTION

Hi! My name is Hasfariza Mohamed Hassan and I'm a third year political science student. I'm from Malaysia, but I grew up in between Malaysia and the states. I moved to Vancouver because I wanted to pursue political science at UBC. I'm really passionate about Southeast Politics, the imbalanced dynamics between the Global South and the Global North, and environmental politics especially relating to waste colonialism. I love reading books, especially thrillers and murder mysteries. I like being in suspense and trying to figure out who is the culprit. I also love writing stories and poetry. I hope to publish a book in the future. I’m a person who loves to try new things even though I may not necessarily be good at them. 

I chose to take RMST 202 this term because I’m interested in literature that is from different cultures and languages. I’m familiar with a lot of English literature and have taken literature classes at UBC relating to science fiction and indigenous literature. Therefore, it’ll be interesting to read about different literary texts from various cultures. Through learning about these different texts, I hope to form new perspectives. Before this class, I didn’t really know what romance studies consisted of and I’ve heard about it a lot before. I was surprised to hear that romance studies are not related to romance ( romantic love) , instead it is about romance languages. 

I actually only registered for this class today, so while I was on the way home on the bus, I listened to the lecture in a podcast-format. 

In Inventing Romance Studies, the question about where the romance world is located was asked and coming from a Southeast Asian background,  I had no clue at first where the initial roots of romance languages were from. After listening to the lecture, it made me realize that you didn’t have to be from places that spoke Spanish, French, and Portuguese to understand the nuance of romantic literature and relate with it. Even though I’m not very familiar with the romance world, it made me want to analyze and interpret the meanings of different romantic works. 

Listening to On Romance Studies, I found it interesting that there are similarities between romantic languages such as French and Spanish. Although I don’t have any background in French or Spanish, it made me wonder about the similarities of the portrayal of stories and elements within Romantic literature. Although the cultures and languages have differences, it made me wonder if these texts of literature ever influence each other.