Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

The study of selected works of Canadian literature written after 1920. Students with credit for ENGL 356 or 358 may not take this course for further credit.

COURSE DETAILS:

In this course we will read Indigenous orality, avant-garde poetry, cultural criticism, and a feminist novel in an attempt to un-settle (as Paulette Regan puts it) notions of nation-hood, literature, and colonialism as part of Canada's so-called 150th anniversary. We will begin with The Survivors Speak, a collection of testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Canada's Indian Residential Schools, asking questions about orature (or oral literature), decolonization, and reconciliation. We will then turn to Writing Class, an anthology of poetry from the Kootenay School of Writing, a Vancouver collective from the 1980s whose work brought formal innovation and politicized writing into Canadian literature. We will read my criticism of the KSW, as well as Jamie Hilder's Designed Words for a Designed World, an examination of concrete poetry in a global framework that dispenses with the nation-state as a modality for literary critique. Hilder will visit our class, and we, in turn, will attend a symposium on October 27 on concrete/visual poetry with poets Derek Beaulieu and Judith Copithorne, archivist Shyla Sellar, artist Kathy Slade, and Hilder. We will then return to the comforting embrace of CanLit with Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale, an account of gender politics given new life with a Hulu TV series and the disaster that is the Trump administration, without, I hope, falling back on all-too-typical Canadian smugness regarding the USA.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

To un-settle Canadian literature. Please note that "un-settle" here is not a euphemism: material covered may be difficult, both emotionally and intellectually. Come prepared to be challenged, upset, but also excited.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING:

RECOMMENDED READING: