Lesson 3.3

 

Topics

  • Connecting the stories in Green Grass, Running Water.

Objectives

At the end of this lessons students will be able to:

  • Discuss the relationships between King’s fictional characters and the historical, literary, and mythological characters they allude to?
  • Discuss the intersections where orature and literature meet in Green Grass Running Water and expand that discussion to include other intersections in the text: literature and history, imagination and reality

Lesson Description

In the last lesson I suggested that there is no doubt that King wants us to work to get the story. His invitation is specific; it is up to you to bother to find out what the symbols mean. Reading this novel means you have to be willing to pay attention, to speak the words out loud, to listen up ––to look it up and, perhaps the most important reading strategy to begin with, is to be willing not to know. With this lesson you are going to look it up and make connections between the characters in the novel and the stories they bring with them.

Assignments

Assignment 3:6 / Please see due dates on the Course Schedule 

Students are required to read two student blogs and post a significant and relevant observation or question in the comment box and respond to at least one comment made on your blog.

Assignment 3:7/ Please see due dates on the Course Schedule

Write a blog that hyper-links your research on the characters in GGRW using at least 10 pages of the text of your choice. Be sure to make use of  Jane Flicks’ GGRW reading notes on your reading list.

Required Readings

Each student should select a section of Green Grass Running Water approximately 10 pages. The task at hand is to first discover as many allusions as you can to historical references (people and events), literary references (characters and authors), mythical references (symbols and metaphors). While I am suggesting a method to help organize your task — you should quickly discover that there is no method for making neat categories out of King’s numerous (and humorous) allusions and references. Instead of categories, what you will discover are connections, and inter-connections and cycles.

For example, Dr Joe Hovaugh is an obvious allusion to Jehovah if you say the name aloud, and he is a more subtle allusion to Northrop Frye (not all that subtle if you know about Frye): Frye studied the bible extensively as the source of Western mythology. Frye also wrote literary theory that celebrated and honoured the form of literature as a closed self-contained universe above all else, and in this way he represents a generation of western intellectual stories about literature and all that those stories imply. And now, you must ask – “who are those four old Indians that keep escaping from Dr. Joe Hovaugh’s institution in Florida?” What stories do they bring to the novel, and most importantly, “what are the connections?”

I will touch on one more example on how to look for connections. Susanna Moodie arrives at the Dead Dog Café and has lunch with three other characters, we know some of the stories that Moodie brings with her – but who are the other three characters? Why does King put these three characters together, what are the connections? And, why in the Dead Dog Café? What about the Dead Dog Café? Remember the dog gets it mixed up in the beginning and thinks he is God. What connections can you find?

I suggest that it is in the connections and interconnections between these characters in the novel that you will begin to uncover those  ‘uncivil’ stories of colonialism – and much more; the stories that western intellectual thought suggests that we put aside if we are going to appreciate great literature, the stories that our fictive ethnicity requires we disavow and forget, over and over again, and finally the stories that were outlawed and ignored – but not forgotten.

This is a collective effort to discover as many stories and connections as we can — inside and outside of the stories of Alberta, Lionel, Charlie, Latisha, and Eli Stands Alone – and Blossom Alberta.

Here is an example of what I except for this assignment:

HYPERLINKING Green Grass Running Water

Works Cited

Chater, Nancy. “Technologies of Remembrance: Literacy Criticism and Duncan Campbell Scott’s Indian Poems.” MA Thesis. U. of Toronto. 1999. Web. April 04/2013

Dragland, Stan. Floating Voice: Duncan Campbell Scott and the Literature of Treaty 9. Concord, ON: Anansi 1994. Web. April 04/2013.

Goldman, Marline. “Mapping and Dreaming; Native Resistance in Green Grass Running Water.” Canadian Literature 161-162 (1999). Web. April 04/2013.