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, and two novels, in an attempt to un-settle (as Paulette Regan puts it) notions of nation-hood, literature, gender, 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 then read two (perhaps feminist, certainly controversial) novels, separate by thirty years, to examine changing perspectives on gender and sexuality. Anakana Schofield, who is also the SFU Writer in Residence for Spring 2018, has in Martin John given us a troubling portrait of a sexual predator, forcing readers to ask, not, as Freud did, what do women want? but instead what do men want?  With Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale, that question may be foreclosed. This account of gender politics has been given new life with a Hulu TV series and the disaster that is the Trump administration, and so we will be able to ask what has changed since the novel's original publication in the 1980s, and what has not?

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: