CANADIAN STUDIES
CNS 391:
Special Topics, Summer 2007.
INNIS, THE
GREAT WAR, and CANADIAN SOCIETY & IDENTITY
Instructor:
Roman Onufrijchuk,
roman@sfu.ca
Prerequisites:
at least 40 credit
hours
Course
Description:
CNS
391 is a case study in the emergence of a distinctly
Canadian experience of,
national-political consciousness within, and
reflection on, technological modernity as seen through the
eyes of the Canadian generation that fought in the Great
War (WW I). The course will centre on the life, work,
and ideas of Harold Adams Innis (1894-1952) as emblematic
of that generation, its national aspirations and
motivations, as well as its response to the forces shaping
Canada and its intellectual life in the subsequent fifty
years. The course concentrates on the conjunction of
technology, war, struggles over and then shifts in global
geopolitical hegemony, and Canadian thought, as these met
and interacted in the First World War and its immediate
aftermath.
Required
texts:
Acland, Charles R., and William
J. Buxton, eds. Harold
Innis in the New Century: Reflections and
Refractions. Montreal: McGill-Queen's
University Press, 2000.
Eksteins, Modris. Rites
of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern
Age.
London: Bantam Press, 1989.
Watson, Alexander John. Marginal
Man: The Dark Vision of Harold
Innis.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.
Additional readings put on reserve.
Course
Requirements:
Midterm, in class: 40%
Briefing and documentation (notes) 20%
Final paper: 40%
Full syllabus posted in Week 1 of the semester
PDF:
CNS 391