English 470A: Canadian Literary Genres

For this assignment I have chosen to focus specifically on one recurrent feature of King’s  Green Grass, Running Water, which I, while reading the novel, believed to be symbolic but for which no apparent explanation was provided in Jane Flick’s “Reading Notes for Green Grass, Running Water“.

There are numerous central characters in King’s novel, one of whom is Lionel Red Dog. Early in the narrative readers are introduced to Lionel’s sister, Latisha. Though slightly peripheral to the story, by comparison, Latisha is continually held up to Lionel as the accomplished foil to his own life’s failures. Indeed, as the proprietor of the famed Dead Dog Cafe (featured elsewhere in King’s works and on CBC Radio), Latisha certainly represents success- in all but one respect, that is. The reader learns that as s younger woman Latisha was married to a white American man named George Morningstar who, as Jane Flick notes, is meant to allude symbolically to General Custer (146). George continually refers to Latisha as “Country”, a strange nickname for which no explanation is ever given in the book.

The strangeness of this pet-name struck me immediately, especially in view of the fact that, as Flick’s “Reading Notes” demonstrates, King rarely passes up an opportunity to embed meaning and symbolism in the naming of his characters  in GGRW.

Though George first refers to Latisha as “Country” on page 133, I have chosen to focus on pages 371-381. At this point in the narrative, Latisha has arrived at the annual Sun Dance, where she is confronted unexpectedly by her ex husband. Latisha, standing with her back to George, is aware of his presence before she actually sees him, because he addresses her, once more, as “Country”.

“‘Hello, Country.’ Even before she turned, Latisha’s arms instinctively came up and she stepped back, setting a distance between herself and the man behind her. ‘Hello, George,’ she said” (King, 371-372).

Over the course of the following ten pages, George attempts to take advantage of Latisha and her community for his own private purposes and thus the significance of George’s nickname for Latisha takes on clarity in view of their exploitative relationship. As Gillian Roberts states in Parallel Encounters: Culture at the Canada-US Boarder, “[George]… seems to think that he owns [Latisha] and it is now his responsibility to ‘cultivate’ her. George wants to colonize her,” and, in this respect, George “surely seems like an explorer and conquerer” (115).

The colonial subtext to Latisha’s nickname is expanded upon by Andrews, Davidson, and Walton in Boarder Crossings: Thomas King’s Cultural Inversions. Here, reference is made to Britain’s long standing political fear of American colonial influence over Canada, and the conclusion asserted by these authors is that King’s novel “ironically suggests that the same kind of aggressive colonization that nineteenth-century Canadians feared from Americans was, in fact, being perpetrated by Canadian settlers treatment of Natives” (164).

Thus, my research illustrates that George’s odd habit of referring to Latisha as “Country” becomes intelligible in view of a post-colonial analysis. Seemingly a term of endearment,  Goerge uses this name to affect emotional and physically exploitation of Latisha. This tactic  is particularly evidenced over the course of pages 371-381 depicting the climactic confrontation between George and Latisha at the Sun Dance; at this point in the narrative it becomes most evident that George’s naming and treatment of Latisha functions as both the literal correlative and symbolic evocation of white settler’s territorial colonization of lands belonging to Aboriginal peoples.

Works Cited

Davidson, Arnold E., et al. Border Crossings: Thomas King’s Cultural Inversions. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Web.

Flick Jane. “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water.” Canadian Literature 161/162 (1999). Web. March 18h 2016. Web.

King, Thomas. Green Grass, Running Water. Toronto: Harper Collins, 1993. Print.

Roberts, Gillian. “Strategic Parallels: Invoking the Boarder in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water and Drew Hayden Taylor’s In a World Created by a Drunken God.” Parallel Encounters: Culture at the Canada-US Border. Ed. Gillian Roberts and David Stirrup. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2013. Web.

In order to tell us the story of a stereo salesman, Lionel Red Deer (whose past mistakes continue to live on in his present), a high school teacher, Alberta Frank (who wants to have a child free of the hassle of wedlock—or even, apparently, the hassle of heterosex!), and a retired professor, Eli Stands Alone (who wants to stop a dam from flooding his homeland), King must go back to the beginning of creation.
Why do you think this is so?

In answering this question, it is useful to recall how, in response to his impatience at the circular progress of the narrative, coyote’s unnamed companion states simply, “it’s all the same story” (147).
In saying this, coyote’s companion is underlining the way in which all the stories told in King’s Green Grass, Running Water are fundamentally connected. Indeed, there is an echoing implication in this statement that ALL stories are in fact related; are variations upon a shared, universal narrative. I think this cyclic interconnectivity shared by all stories is a central theme in Green Grass, Running Water and, in seeking to develop this theme, King opts to tell the stories of Lionel, Alberta, Eli, and all the other endearing characters in his novel, with continual reference to the creation story about Woman, water, and the beginning of the world.
Cycles represent an important leitmotif in King’s novel. The story of the character known alternately as First Woman, Thought Woman, Old Woman, Falling Woman, and so forth, is a story about cycles, told in cycles. Woman’s story is delivered numerous times, retold again and again by various different characters – this represents a cycle. Within the story itself there are narrative patterns, such as the presence of water, or the problematic confrontation between Woman and Christianity, which resurface with every retelling – this represents another cycle.  Though the story about Woman is told by different people in different ways, it remains, fundamentally, the same story and it cannot be separated, either in its content or its formal characteristics, from the concept of cyclicism. By returning to and retelling this creation tale, King ensures that it’s central themes saturate the fabric of the novel as a whole, and colour the smaller constituent narratives. Thus, the creation story informs our understanding of Lionel, Eli, and Alberta’s own stories, by reminding insisting that we recognize an underlying structure of circularity, shared themes, and connection with the past. It is the prefiguration and recurrence of these themes in the creation tale which underscores their importance elsewhere in the novel.

Works Cited:

King, Thomas. Green Grass, Running Water. Toronto: Harper Collins, 1993. Print.

3 ] Frye writes:

A much more complicated cultural tension [more than two languages] arises from the impact of the sophisticated on the primitive, and vice a versa. The most dramatic example, and one I have given elsewhere, is that of Duncan Campbell Scott, working in the department of Indian Affairs in Ottawa. He writes of a starving squaw baiting a fish-hook with her own flesh, and he writes of the music of Dubussy and the poetry of Henry Vaughan. In English literature we have to go back to Anglo-Saxon times to encounter so incongruous a collision of cultures (Bush Garden 221).

It is interesting, and telling of literary criticism at the time, that while Frye lights on this duality in Scott’s work, or tension between “primitive and civilized” representations; however, the fact that Scott wrote poetry romanticizing the “vanishing Indians” and wrote policies aimed at the destruction of Indigenous culture and Indigenous people – as a distinct people, is never brought to light. In 1924, in his role as the most powerful bureaucrat in the department of Indian Affairs, Scott wrote:

The policy of the Dominion has always been to protect Indians, to guard their identity as a race and at the same time to apply methods, which will destroy that identity and lead eventually to their disappearance as a separate division of the population (In Chater, 23).

For this blog assignment, I would like you to explain why it is that Scott’s highly active role in the purposeful destruction of Indigenous people’s cultures is not relevant for Frye in his observations above? You will find your answers in Frye’s discussion on the problem of ‘historical bias’ (216) and in his theory of the forms of literature as closed systems (234 –5).

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In the closing chapter of Northrop Frye’s The Bush Garden; Essays on the Canadian Imagination a summation of themes central to Canadian literature is delivered. Frye places particular emphasis on his belief that is the fact that Canadian writing is often “literary” only incidentally, and it is, instead, an national awareness of history which we should associate more closely with the shaping of Canadian literature. He states:

“If no Canadian author pulls us away from the Canadian context toward the centre of literary experience itself, then at every point we remain aware of his social and historical setting… [Canadian literature] is more significantly studied as a part of Canadian life than as a part of an autonomous world of literature” (216).

Frye is of the opinion that the historical conditions of Canadian life, and a corresponding desire to depict those conditions, have proved to be one of the strongest influences upon the imagination of Canadian writers. He emphasizes that this central developmental connection, between the Canadian imagination and the Canadian relationship with the land, is inherently colonial, saying:

“like other forms of history… [cultural history] has its own themes of exploration, settlement, and development, but these themes relate to a social imagination that explores and settles and develops” (217).

Here, Frye seems to indicate a fundamentally mimetic quality in Canadian literature, in so far as the Canadian imagination and its literary expression has the capacity to figuratively mirror, in art, the romantic idealization and exploitative violations of physical colonization. It is this mimetic colonial quality, so central to Canadian literature, which renders the poetic hypocrisy of D.C. Scott irrelevant in the context of Frye’s conclusion.

From the broader perspective of a critical analysis of colonial violations within Canada it certainly is not irrelevant to note that Scott idealized and exploited the facets of a culture he simultaneously helped destroy. However, in this specific context of The Bush Garden‘s closing chapter Scott is referenced as a literary exemplar of the collision between colonial and First Nations peoples, his hypocrisy not simply as a beaurocrat but as an artist is a prefect illustration of the close connection between Canadian literature and the country’s colonial past. What Frye seeks to underscore at this specific juncture in his book is the way in which Scott’s poetry idealizes, exploits, and ultimately overwrites the reality of First Nations lived experience in much the same way as colonial settlements were built atop lands forcibly plundered and taken from the First Nations inhabitants.

Works Cited:

Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden; Essays on the Canadian Imagination. 2011 Toronto: Anansi. Print.

In The Truth About Stories, Thomas King juxtaposes two creation stories, one involving Charm, and one involving Adam and Eve, concluding this comparison by insisting that only one creation tale can be true, and that it is therefore up to the reader to decide which of the stories to believe.

As Dr. Paterson suggests in her unit question, King is enacting a kind of hypocrisy when he encourages his readers to participate in such a decision, because the division he established between Charm and Genesis, and the dichotomy between true and false which he proffers to the reader, all takes place within the broader context of a discussion that subtly but firmly warns against the type of black and white paradigm that, for example, is promoted in the Judeo-Christian creation narrative.

So, why does King insist that his readers participate in dichotomous thinking?

In fact, King’s is utilizing a clever rhetorical tactic: first, he illustrates the pitfalls inherent in dichotomous thinking. When King asks his readers to choose Charm or Genesis, he seems to undermine his own position, but in actuality he has simply primed his audience to fully recognize the absurdity inherent in this dichotomy, this decision. In this sense, king has “shown” rather than “told”; he has not relied simply upon informing his readers that dichotomies are irrational, and problematic as a result. Rather, King positions his readers in such a way that they are required to actively engage with the subject at hand, to experience and interact with dichotomous thinking and experience this irrationality for themselves. This method of engaging the audience is, in the end result, a much more impactful and efficacious method of communication and education.

Works Cited:

King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories. House of Anansi Press Inc, 2003. Print.

Paterson, Erika. “Lesson 2:2 Blog Questions.” ENGL 470A Canadian Studies, https://blogs.ubc.ca/courseblogsis_ubc_engl_470a_99c_2014wc_44216-sis_ubc_engl_470a_99c_2014wc_44216_2517104_1/unit-2/lesson-2-2/. Web. 2016.

In his article, “A Map that Roared and an Original Atlas: Canada, Cartography, and the Narration of Nation” Matthew Sparke recalls memorable words uttered by Chief Justice Allan McEachern while presiding over a court case regarding land claims made by the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en peoples.

The Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en presented a map in court, which was intended as evidence of sovereignty and illustrated their traditional land holdings. In response McEachern exclaimed, inexplicably, “We’ll call it the map that roared” (468).

Sparke goes on to offer a variety of possible interpretations for McEachern’s cryptic statement. While he notes that these words could reference the idiomatic phrase “paper tiger” (Tse-tung, 1956), Sparke ultimately asserts the belief that McEachern’s turn of phrase pays homage, perhaps unintentionally, to First Nations people’s powerful claim upon the lands, inhabited for generations by their ancestors, which were forcibly stripped from them with the arrival of European settlers.

It is possible McEachern’s use of the word “roar” suggests to Sparke the unconscious (and rather colonial) evocation of something powerful, aggressive, vocal. In any case Sparke ascribes to McEachern’s words an awareness and appreciation of ferocious, unwavering intent on the part of the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en people, who, determined to reclaim their homeland, chose to fight a long legal battle with the Canadian government.

Works Cited:

Sparke, Matthew. “A Map that Roared and an Original Atlas: Canada, Cartography, and the Narration of Nation.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Sept. 1998. DOI: 10.1111. Web.

Tse-tung, Mao. “U.S. Imperialism is a Paper Tiger, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung.” Marxists.org. 2004. Web

After reading from a variety of student blogs, I have composed a cursory list of the major themes, images, emotions and so forth considered by my peers to constitute home:

• Home suggests familiar physical surroundings and sensory perceptions. Sights, scents, sounds.
• Though home is often predicated on the physically tangible, many people make note of the fact that home is also an emotional state. An inward feeling.
• The physical and psychological reality of home is not anchored solely in the presence of ones private property, but within a broader community. Home is constituted by other people, in the presence of family members or friends, providing a form of “social capital“.
• Though home may be embodied in static structures, objects, landscapes and so forth, this is an orthodox conception of home which is oftentimes unfamiliar. Rather, home is, for many,  an unfixed site, a state of fluidity and simultenaety,  the locus of perpetual movement, growth, change.
• One of the most commonly cited perceptions of home espouses a location, whether physical or psychological or both, that one creates for oneself for oneself.

Ultimately, I identify strongly with the majority of these common associations. There are numerous qualities cited less frequently that I find equally central to my definition of home, such as a shared, familiar language. In foreign countries I often feel lost, not so much in unfamiliar geography as in an unfamiliar culture or dialect. At these times, discovering a fellow English speaker or material written in English functions like a welcome injection of “home” into a world otherwise composed of “elsewhere”.

Works Cited:

Lee, Chloe. “2.2 Home”. Chloe’s Blog For English 470. 28 Sept. 2016, https://blogs.ubc.ca/470chloe/2016/09/28/2-2-home/. Web.

Woo, Patrick. “Canada Is My Home And Not–Assignment 2:2”. We Are In The Same Boat. 28 Sept. 2016, https://blogs.ubc.ca/patrickwoo/2016/09/28/canada-is-my-home-and-not-assignment-22/. Web.

Preface

Chamberlain didn’t tell the right story. He told a story, or part of one, but he didn’t tell it properly. He says:

My godmother who with nice irony came from a settlement in Saskatchewan called Qu’Appelle. Whatsitsname.

The place I come from, the place I call home, is not so far from Qu’Appelle Valley, and there schoolchildren are taught that the settlement takes its name from a legend that tells of a man, paddling home in his canoe. The man hears his name called, ghost-like, upon the wind. He responds: Qu’Appelle? “Who calls?” but receives no answer, only an echo: Who calls? When the man reaches home, he learns that in his absence his true love has died, crying his name aloud with her final breath.

And so the valley is branded by this tragedy:

“Who calls?”

Qu’Appelle?

Home

Home is a river valley, in winter, with a heavy cloak of snow; a shroud of silence. The naked poplars and birch form stark, skeletal smudges against an endless white.

Home is a river valley, in spring, come late. Ice, still on the waters, is breaking; there is loud cracking and eager, flowing movement.

Home is a river valley, in summer, warm wind redolent with the scent of wolf-wood, prairie sage, sun-baked clay.

Here are ancient stones, older than the grasslands, older than the sea that once lay atop the grasslands. Their faces, split by glaciers, are wordless.

Home is a river valley, in autumn, painted every shade of harvest. See vermilion, viridian, see umber, ochre, dun. See a gold that touches everything, subtly, gilds everything.

These leaves, every leaf, is the colour of a memory, is a memory; my whole life, articulated in the language of these fading hues. As the season turns each leaf, each colour, turns dark, turns silent, drifting downward. Memory becomes a rich blanket, layered upon the earth, all the colours of time, passing, of roots, growing.

Works Cited:

Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This is Your Land, Where are Your Stories?: Finding Common Ground. Vintage Canada Ed., Vintage Canada, 2004. Print.

There was a girl who came from a small town by the sea, and what made her more happy than anything else was to watch waves. She would walk down to the water’s edge, passing the little white houses that speckled the foggy shoreline, until she was right above the water on a rocky ledge or a beach of little stones, and there she would stay for hours, alone, watching the waves rise and fall, crest and crash. The tide would come and go, the fog would roll in and roll out, and still the girl would gaze at the sea.

The other people in the town did not understand why the girl did this. They did not enjoy sitting and staring all day at the water. Instead they built boats, and fished, or they cut down great towering pines, to build their houses, while others cultivated little green gardens and pastures of sheep. The people in the town worked on the land and in the water to make a living, to make food and shelter and things to sell to one another and this was what their forebearers had done, too. But the girl who watched waves did none of this, she did nothing at all, so far as they were concerned, and so to them she seemed quite useless, quite strange.

Is it strange to stare for hours at the surface of the sea? Maybe. Is it less strange to haul fish or fell trees or hammer nails or kill sheep? Maybe.

In any case it so happened that a doctor arrived in the town. Doctors were considered very wise. They trained for many, many years, and became skilled at poking and prodding the living, at peering inside noses and ears and mouths and eyes and saying “this is what is wrong with you” and if you payed them they would tell you how to get better, how to change. Sometimes the doctors gave good advice, and sometimes they didn’t, but in the end very few people were willing to forgo paying for such advice, once they discovered they were sick. Everyone listens to the stories a doctor tells.

So the people in the town decided that they would ask the doctor to look at the girl who watched waves, and talk to her. She would not listen to any of them, but perhaps she would listen to the doctor. If he told her to stop watching waves and come work, then likely she would do just that. The doctor found the girl sitting by the seashore and he began to examine her. He checked her pulse and her temperature, he checked her reflexes and vision, he checked everything. He also talked to her, asking her many questions. When his examination was over the doctor told the girl a story about how she was healthy in her body but sick in her mind. Initially the girl ignored the doctor, and continued to stare out at the sea, untroubled by his words. But the doctor’s diagnosis had planted a seed of doubt. Before he went away the doctor told the girl that it was not healthy to sit apart from the townsfolk, to shun their company and way of life in favour of the grey churning water. Such behaviour was called “antisocial” and “melancholy” and these were characteristics of someone who was ill.

These words began to churn in the girl’s mind, just like the grey water. The slosh of waves upon rock seemed to say “sick! sick!” again, and again, while the wind that came reaching from the sea howled sadly, whistling through the ancient pines with a sound like “ill!” For some reason the girl could not sit and watch the water in peace any longer. The doctor’s story about sickness was all around her, in the very salt-air she breathed.

The girl knew, as the townsfolk knew, that it really would be madness to ignore a doctor and his diagnosis. So she got up and left the shore and returned to the foggy little town to work. She tried cutting wood, she tried herding sheep. She worked in the gardens and in the houses. But she was no good at any of it. She was constantly staring out to sea, from a distance, longing to be closer, close enough to watch the waves. But she could not watch waves anymore because the doctor’s words had changed everything. She was ill, now, and when she looked at the sea, she no longer saw waves she saw her illness.

One day the girl who no longer watched waves went out to sea with the fishing boats. She had no skill for other types of work. She tried her hand at hauling nets full of fish and crab and other sea creatures. However, though she had been used to staring at the surface of the sea she was unaccustomed to standing atop it. The waves rocked the boats and the the girl could feel them beneath her. She smiled, to be reminded of the presence of her previous waves, but as she paused she lost balance and slipped. She could not swim, so she was washed away and drowned.

The people in the town by the sea would tell this tale and say, in the end, that the doctor simply told his story too late. If the girl had never been allowed to watch the waves at all, perhaps she would have learned to work in the woods or the pastures or water, like the other townsfolk. But as it was her illness festered, she was too sick to be saved, they said. No one thought to suggest that the doctor should have never diagnosed her at all. Madness.

I regularly indulge in the use of online social media platforms, like Facebook and Instagram, and I frequently utilize functions that typify the virtual medium, such as hypertext. I feel certain that these online platforms have altered the way I express myself as a writer. How could they not? Over the course of my life I’ve experienced innumerable changes in the virtual domain.

As a child, in the late 90s, my family owned a computer and a handful of basic computer games, but we didn’t have internet until I was about 9 years old. We didn’t need it. Then internet became more accessible, more common, and suddenly my family was connected to the www. The internet got faster, I made a hotmail account, and I started to use msn messenger. I was aware “chat rooms” existed but they seemed rather distant and a little arcane. Hotmail, MSN, and Neopets defined my online horizons.

When I started highschool there was no such thing as Facebook, and I was the only kid I knew with a cellphone or a laptop, and this was only the case due to special circumstances involving a short-lived modelling career that necessitated such “high tech” equipment. By grade 12 everyone, including me, had Facebook and access to some sort of rudimentary cellphone with a tiny screen and T9 text messaging capabilities, while a few really lucky kids had heavy, angular Mac Books, the sort that have since become museum curio.

Though my high school days weren’t terribly long ago, in the grand scheme of things, it admittedly feels like an eon. I’m now 27 years old, I have an iPhone 6, a laptop and a tablet, two FB profiles, and accounts on Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr, Blogger, Gmail+, the list goes on and on. Compared to my 17 year old self, awkwardly hammering out text messages to the one or two other people I knew with Motorollas, totally unaware that there would eventually be an extensive lexicon of SMS Shorthand condensing whole sentences into tiny groupings of letters, years from ever hearing the word “selfie” let alone trying to take one, and likely convinced that Apple could never release anything more impressive than my Ipod touch, the current version of me, sitting here typing this rambling blog post for an online university course is far, far more connected to, well, everything.

I’m working from my home on Vancouver Island, but with incredible speed I can touch base with a professor or ask questions of classmates currently situated in Vancouver, miles away. In fact, I can do both those things at once. Meanwhile, I’m preparing to curate an Instragram takeover for an independent publishing house in Montreal, and I’m exchanging Facebook messages with friends in the US. Followers and friends on various different platforms are posting photos, videos, and status updates about life as it is a world away, or a click away, depending on how you look at it.

The www and social media platforms provide me with connectivity characterized by immediacy, and these are qualities reflected throughout the virtual realm, a great example being hypertext. In the same way i can use three characters in a Tweet to indicate three separate words (omg), or “share” one photo to multiple social media platforms at the same instant, hypertextuality enables one blog post to contain within it countless other online sources, all of which may be “summoned” immediately (more or less depending on the strength of one’s Internet connection). I’ve used variations on the word “immediacy” to emphasize how central speed is to these online processes: access to people, media, and information is instantaneous and I believe this emphasis on speed has greatly impacted how I write.

Though the context in which I’m writing leads to variation (am I typing a tweet or a 2500 word essay?), it’s generally accurate to state that a heightened awareness of the dimension of time pervades my consciousness as a writer. I place a premium on being brief and concise (can I say what I need to say in under x-amount of characters?). Readers are often scrolling past, surfing, skimming: getting my message across quickly is important in such a context, and it also becomes important to consider the role of other forms of media in drawing attention to my text. Graphics engage readers visually and also seem to play some sort of trick on increasingly microscopic attention spans.

Hyperlinks are another useful method of engaging or, perhaps more accurately, of entangling readers. Because they typically utilize colour coded indications hyperlinks involve the attraction of graphic variety embedded in the textual. But they also have the value of guiding the reader fluidly through a text, directing their movement through a multiplicity of virtual sources with comparative ease. Clicking a hyperlink embedded in a virtual text is much easier and much faster than the time consuming process of, for example, flipping through a physical book to locate endnotes.

Thus it seems to me that social media platforms, such as Twitter or Instagram, centered around continual access to immediate updates, impress a consciousness of time, its limitations, the need for rapid access. The value of immediacy is supported online by pervasive hypertextuality and ultimately, and environment is created which projects a (possibly false) sense of urgency. In such an environment, such urgency has certainly impacted my own approach to self expression, particularly in the virtual domain.

Works Cited:
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. Action. 1916, Free Verse + Futurism, Designhistory.org, 2011.http://www.designhistory.org/Avant_Garde_pages/Futurism.html. Web.

Hi,

My name is Anne and I am a 4th year English Literature major. I chose to take this course for a variety of reasons, though a particularly important factor for me is its online platform. Because I have health issues attending a normal, IRL seminar or lecture simply isn’t possible. I’ve been attending online courses at UBC for a few years now and in that time I have seen the availability and variety of courses online expand. To me, this growth indicates that educators are becoming more aware of the learning potential inherent in the virtual medium, not just as a useful method for accommodating students like myself, passionate about academics but prevented from attending typical classrooms, but also as a great tool for educating in general. To cite a brief example, some of my classmates have already mentioned the way in which online courses open up a previously underutilized space where many students who might otherwise have refrained from class participation feel more at ease interacting with their peers.

As I understand it, this course introduces to students the subject of literature in Canada. On a more specific level, my access to this overarching subject will be influenced and guided by considering themes such as “identity” and “home” in conjunction with an examination of the process of storytelling: how do the stories we tell ourselves and one another contribute to the definitions of situatedness and selfhood that shape our realities as individuals and as a nation?

This focus on story-telling, particularly as it relates to the construction of identity, is something I’m very interested in, and I am looking forward to seeing how this avenue of inquiry progresses over the course of the semester. I think it is a subject that will lead to many fruitful discussions. I am also excited by the emphasis placed on hyperlinking in Dr. Patterson’s introductory posts.

As an lover of literature I am fascinated by text in all its manifestations and, as an individual engaging regularly with the virtual medium, I am particularly fascinated by hypertext. Hypertext, as it functions in the virtual domain, seems so fundamental that it becomes easy to take for granted, but it is actually a really thought-provoking phenomenon in its strange psychospacial effects and ergodic nature.

In fact, I wrote a term paper for an English Honours seminar in which I incorporate hyperlinks and hypertextuality into a discussion of Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves. In the paper I underscore the resemblance between hypertextuality and labyrinths, a comparison I’m certain we will all be able to relate to by the end of this semester!

Works Cited:

“Introduction.” Hannah’s Blog, https://blogs.ubc.ca/engl470westerman/. Web. 2016.

Paterson, Erika. “Lesson 1:1 Blogging Guidelines.” ENGL 470A Canadian Studies, https://blogs.ubc.ca/courseblogsis_ubc_engl_470a_99c_2014wc_44216-sis_ubc_engl_470a_99c_2014wc_44216_2517104_1/unit-1/lesson-11/. Web. 2016.

Saward, Jeff. “The Chartres Cathedral Labyrinth.” Labyrinthos, http://www.labyrinthos.net/chartresfaq.html. Web. 2009.

Tastad, Anne. “The Hypertext House.” Blogger, https://the-new-library.blogspot.ca/. Web. 2011.

Salutations!