Topics

• Presenting team research and dialogue.

Learning Objectives

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

• Create a research-oriented web-dialogue page
• Present a well organized collaborative website that fulfills the assignment guidelines See Conference Instructions for the checklist.This lesson provides instructions for creating a research dialogue web page. This is the final step for completing the Interventions conference assignment. This is your opportunity to synthesize ideas and summarize your perspectives and offer strategies for solutions and ideas for future research.

Assignment 4:5 / Please see due dates on the Course Schedule

1. Each student will contribute at least two times to their research team’s web- dialogue. See Conference Instructions for more details
2. Complete your research team website ready for the Conference launch
3. Term papers. Please see instructions at the end of this lesson.

Required Readings

• Instructor’s Blog
• Conference Instructions

Interventions

The way we dream Canadian literature forward depends on how we see the present and how willing we are to address the unsayable conflicts in our national culture.” Roxanne Rimstead, Canadian Literature 204

[T]here was a quiet call for generously connecting ideas and people, and for taking seriously the places they inhabit and the art they produce. Laura Moss, Canadian Literature 204.

In her introduction to the interventions in the journal, Laura Moss describes her experience at the conference where the interventions were presented as having prompted a sense of the importance of being “ethically grounded” (107). Talking about the interventions published in the journal, she writes

Three words keep reappearing in the interventions here: “grounded,” “generosity,” and “connections.” It seems relevant that in our gathering we made no giant proclamations about the future of Canadian writing, created no lists of key words or authors, damned no forms of writing as old-fashioned, and came away with no group manifesto. Instead, there was a quiet call for generously connecting ideas and people, and for taking seriously the places they inhabit and the art they produce (106-07).

This course of studies has explored a number of “calls to action.” Edward Chamberlin urges us that now is the time to “find common ground;” to listen to each other’s stories and in the listening discover that story is our common ground. John Lutz challenges his readers to “step outside and see one’s own culture as alien and to discern the mythic in the performances of ones own histories” (First Contact 32). Lee Maracle, addressing questions of nationalism in Native literary tradition offers a specific call to action: “We need to systematize our sense of knowledge acquisition in the service of our nations” (95). Thomas King, in his profoundly simple way, advises us: “want a different ethic? Tell a different story” (Truth about Stories p 164). And finally, a gathering of academics concerned with the future of Canadian literature call for more ethically grounded criticism and a larger sense of generosity encouraging connections between people and ideas – and again, to listen; “to take seriously” the places we inhabit, the art we produce, the stories we tell.

With these general calls to action in mind, the task at hand is to synthesize and summarize the dialogue on your annotated bibliography blog. As a team, you will edit your research dialogue on your annotated bibliography page, taking into consideration the perspectives offered by your partner team, into a web-dialogue to post on your team’s Dialogue page. Your editing and summarizing should follow the suggested format below and, of course, include hyperlinks.

1. An introduction of the team’s intervention strategy. Include some discussion on how your research addresses a particular call to action. State this clearly.
2. Use bullet points to highlight the central points, issues, or questions arising from your dialogue.
3. Provide some short quotations (3 or 4) with commentary from your research dialogue that demonstrates perspectives on the points you have highlighted.
4. Write a conclusion that presents possible strategies for taking action, or “intervening” in the future of Canadian literature.
5. Suggest specific areas to focus on and questions for future research.

Your dialogue summary should be 1500 – 2000 words.

Final Term Papers

Papers should be approximately 2000 words and formatted according to MLA formatting and style guide. Papers should be saved as a PDF file before emailing to the instructor.

You can choose between three types of papers:

• a reflective essay
• or, a literary essay
• or, a research paper

I do not expect extra research for these papers, rather this is an opportunity to spend time reflecting on the things you have learned this semester and to enlighten me with your new or renewed insights  in the style of your choice.  Please see the list with instructions below.

1. A reflective essay that summarizes and comments on this course of studies.
   • This essay should focus on ONE of the following:
     • Examining where story and literature meet and observing what happens in those intersections.
     • Reading for allusions and symbolic knowledge outside of the Western traditions – and in turn to learning to recognize colonizing narratives in literature and story.
     • Reflections on the possible futures of literature and story in this land we call Canada

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• A literary essay based on your reading of Green Grass Running Water. This essay should address ONE of the following questions, or formulate a question and present it to your instruction for consideration.
  • • Read the following quote:
      The lives of King’s characters are entangled in and informed by both the colonial legacy in the Americas and the narratives that enact and enable colonial domination. King begins to extricate his characters’ lives from the domination of the invader’s discourses by weaving their stories into both Native American oral traditions and into revisions of some of the most damaging narratives of domination and conquest: European American origin stories and national myths, canonical literary texts, and popular culture texts such as John Wayne films. These revisions are acts of narrative decolonization. James Cox. ‘All This Water Imagery Must Mean Something.’ Canadian Literature 161-162 (1999). Web April 04/2013.Explain what Cox means by ‘acts of narrative decolonization ‘ and describe three specific examples of acts of narrative decolonization in Green Grass Running Water.
    • Everyone is on the move in this novel, road trips abound and in
      order to hit the road what do we need‌ — A road map. Lionel, Charlie and
      Alberta are each seeking a new direction in life. The examples of mapping as a central metaphor in Green Grass Running Water are numerous and both obvious and subtle. Maps chart territory and provide directions; they also create borders and boundaries. There is more than one way to map, and just as this novel plays with conflicting story traditions, I think King is also playing with conflicting ways to chart territory. Write an essay that provides three examples of mapping metaphors in Green Grass Running Water and offer an explanation for King’s ‘preoccupation with mapping’ (Goldman).Marline Goldman, ‘Mapping and Dreaming; Native Resistance in Green Grass Running Water.’ Canadian Literature 161-162 (1999). Web. April 04/2013.
    • 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?

   

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3. A research paper based on conference research dialogues. This is an opportunity to use the research you presented for the conference to write a paper.