Sometimes I get involved with your dialogues and can’t help but to stop and add to the conversation. I’ll post on your blog when that happens, but I also post here snippets of our conversations; simply for your interest and my increased sense of connecting with you all.

Here is a conversation from this morning:

Assignment 1:5 The Young Girl’s Story of Evil

Thank you for a great story Maya, I too appreciated the conversational ‘a la King’ style – and couldn’t help thinking about the ‘second truth’ you talk about in your previous blog : The second truth is the formalities of expression, which are separate from us. King writes in a story-telling style, a conversational style – this is a ‘formality of expression – otherwise called a ‘genre’: the story-telling genre of literature. This is actually quite a complex conversation. Because categorizing, which is what we are doing when we ‘make’ genres’ and then expect writers and readers and story-tellers to stay inside of the ‘formalities of expression that each category we make requires in order to be ‘truthful’ or ‘correct’. A little like Chamberlin eating his pees with the fork (was it a fork?), at any rate, it was the ‘incorrect’ way to eat pees according to the formalities of that table’s eating practices. The point here being: genre making is a powerful tool which can both oppress and liberate ‘stories’. And as such, this is a good thing for us to be thinking about in the effort to understand colonizing narratives. Thank you.

***

“I am eager to learn much more about Canada’s indigenous people through the literature we will be engaging with.”

NOTE: Canadian / Indigenous-> both are proper names, and both need capitalizing. Of course, we often read material in which Canadians are capitalized but Indigenous, or First Nations is missing the capital, and this is a reflection of the power of language to oppress and discriminate (silently).