Hi all,

Prompt: “At the end of this lesson you will find detailed instructions for this assignment. Your task is to take the story that Kings tells about how evil comes into the world — and change the story any way you want as long as the end remains the same: once you have told a story, you can never take it back. So, be careful of the stories you tell, AND the stories you listen to.” – Unit 1, Lesson 1.3

This week, we were responsible for taking Thomas King’s retelling of Leslie Silko’s story of how evil first came into the world.  Silko’s story revolves around Witches, and I was inspired by this mythical aspect of her tale and decided to invent my own type of people, called the Dreamweavers.  I chose to base my story on the ideas of dreams and nightmares because I think they are closely related to stories and are an area that reveal the ways stories can resonate with us on a level past our day to day consciousness.

Here it is:

This tale begins a long, long time ago, when the first humans and animals first came to be and there was no bad or evil in the world.  Among all those roaming the land, there existed in particular, one small magical kind of people who inhabited an unknown island.  These people were known as the Dreamweavers.  Dreamweavers were those that were born with the gift to weave and create the dreams of every living being on earth. Each Dreamweaver family had their own unique and separate ability to weave different types of happy dreams, responsible for weaving the dreams that graced every child, teen, and adult in the world. One family was responsible for weaving dreams of hopes and wishes, one for weaving dreams of laughter, and many others for love, friendship, nurturing, and the list goes on and on.  Now the children of these Dreamweavers were meant to grow up and take over the specific dream skills of their parents, like families of blacksmiths or farmers or merchants that passed on their skill and line of job to their children. Children of each dream weaving family would follow on to fulfill the types of dreams their parents and grandparents wove for many generations before them.

However, there was one mischievous and restless little girl from the land of the Dreamweavers that we must learn about. Her name was Jay, and her parents weaved dreams of candy and lollipops. Now Jay was only at fault in that she was too eager. She was tired of being young and unimportant and waiting her turn because she wanted to start dream weaving now. But Jay’s parents told her there were no other types of dreams left to weave, and she must wait until her parents passed on their type of dreams to her one day.  Jay was fed up with being told she wasn’t ready yet, so she she called a meeting with some of friends and suggested they think up of their own dreams to weave. New and different dreams that hadn’t been thought of yet. They decided to tell some stories to inspire themselves of what kind of new dreams they could create. As the sun set, and the shadows of animals and plants and trees danced in the dimming sunlight, they were inspired by the darkness around them and thought of some of the most evil and dark stories that ever graced the earth.  They thought up stories filled with blood and tainted with violence, greed and disease, lies, and fear.

As the last light of day disappeared over the horizon, Jay began to feel a really bad feeling, a feeling she had never felt before, as if she had been poisoned by the words she had spoken and heard. She nervously said, “Ok, I changed my mind, I feel bad, I don’t want to be the Dreamweavers of these new dreams we thought of. Let’s take back these stories, and go home. But it was too late. For once a story is told, it cannot be pulled back. These stories released these horrible dreams loose into the world, and they became what we today know as the nightmares that terrorize each and every one of us from time to time.  So you have to be careful with the stories you tell.

The End.

After writing this story, I decided to attempt to tell it to both my parents and my boyfriend by heart.  Although I hadn’t spent any time attempting to memorize what I had written, I was surprised by how easily I could remember the setting, details, character names, and various other details.  It was a story I had made up, within a short period of time, and yet it had found its way so snugly into my mind and being.  When my boyfriend asked me to clarify a detail about the main character, I answered quickly and confidently. In many ways, the story had become part of my identity, and I was attached to it.

I think this is indicative of the power of stories, and how they resonate with us and influence us in ways we may not even notice.  It’s easy for us to assume we have the power in choosing the stories we tell and listen to, and thats true to a certain extent.  But I think its worth mentioning that these stories have an equal, often overlooked power over us, and for this reason, they are an indispensable aspect of our lives.

Works Cited

Cherry, Kendra. “Dream Interpretation: What Do Dreams Mean?” About Education. N.p., 2015. Web. 24 May 2015. <http://psychology.about.com/od/statesofconsciousness/p/dream-interpret.htm>

Wilkerson, Richard. “Common Questions About Nightmares.” International Association for the Study of Dreams. N.p. 2013. Web. 25 May 2015. <http://www.asdreams.org/nightma.htm>

Welcome back ENGL 470!

Prompt: Explain why the notion that cultures can be distinguished as either “oral culture” or “written culture” (19) is a mistaken understanding as to how culture works, according to Chamberlin and your reading of Courtney MacNeil’s article “Orality.

The idea that orality is a primitive precursor to written text is a concept that is deeply ingrained in Western thought and society.  Through our education systems, we are taught from a young age to value the beneficial advancements brought upon by innovations surrounding written text.  From the invention of the first printing press in the early 15th century Europe to the making of the first forms of writing paper during China’s Han dynasty, we are told that the development from orality into written text was vital in the birth and growth of many great nations.

Even in today’s society where our concepts of communication are constantly evolving due to the influence of the World Wide Web, these flawed beliefs still exist.  Cultures around the world who still rely on mainly oral forms of communication are often instantaneously labeled as undeveloped, uneducated, subordinate, and impoverished.  This is also fuelled by the way certain forms of communication are treated within North America, today, where oral communication is seen as lesser than the ability to read and write, and illiteracy is treated as a problem that plagues the poor and useless.  Orality is often framed within this ideology that those without a written text central to their society are not as well off, in need of help, and are part of a statistic that teaches us about realities of poverty in the US and Canada.  Furthermore, many respected scholars within the realm of communication support and advocate these same ideas.  In Courtney MacNeil’s article on “Orality”, the Toronto School of Communication places alphabetical writing as “absolutely necessary for the development of not only science, but also of history, philosophy… [and] literature…and of any art”.

However, there are undoubtedly many problematic aspects of this way of thinking that frames communication on a hierarchy.   As J. Edward Chamberlain points out in his text “If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?”, this way of judging cultures, where orality is always subordinated by the more desirable and respected form of written text, encourages a “blend of condescension and contempt” for those that fail to fit Western and European standards.  Furthermore, even when other cultures do have their own forms of “written culture”, they fail to be recognized as legitimate because they do not fit the confines of the syllabic and alphabetical understanding of writing that governs Western society.  This binary structure of orality vs. writing thus fosters an incredibly hostile and toxic environment where other cultures and minorities are appropriated to Western and European ideologies of what is significant, what is respected, what is REAL.

In reality, not only do oral and written forms of communication coexist in their importance, but the defining features of what constitutes as a “written text” are far from limited to Western and European ideals of letters, syllables and alphabets.  On page 20 of Chamberlain’s text, he notes that for some so-called “oral cultures”, a written text exists for them but in the form of “woven and beaded belts and blankets…canes and sticks, masks [and] hats and chests”.  Moreover, for countries like China that have a very rich and flourishing culture, written text comes in the forms of characters that do not fit the Western standards of a standard alphabet.  In fact, many of the original versions of these characters, that have changed from dynasty to dynasty, found their way to be from pictures and stories.  Thus, by seeing communication as a hierarchy with rigid rules about what constitutes culture, we are hindering ourselves from the potential benefits of communication that can only happen by seeing spoken word and written text as “mutually interdependent”.

The reality is that “our stories” and our cultures can not flourish successfully from only relying on written text and seeing orality as a thing of the past.  Instead, we must realize that all of us are “much more involved in both oral and written traditions than we might think”, and that the hierarchal understanding of the two must be abandoned for us to move forward.

Works Cited

Butler, Chris. “The Invention of the Printing Press and Its Effects.” Flow of History. N.p., 2007. Web. 21 May 2015. </http://www.flowofhistory.com/units/west/11/FC7>.

Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?: Finding Common Ground. Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2003. Print.

“Invention of Paper in China.” History of China. N.p., 2007. Web 19 May 2015. <http://www.history-of-china.com/han-dynasty/invention-of-paper.html>.

MacNeil, Courtney. “Orality.” The Chicago School of Media Theory. N.p., 2007. Web. 21 May 2015. <https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/orality/>.

Olmstead, Gracy. “The Death of Writing & Return of Oral Culture.” The American Conservative. N.p., 2013. Web 20 May 2015. <http://www.theamericanconservative.com/death-writing-oral-culture/>.

Hi all!

My name is Freda Li.  I’m currently in my fifth year at UBC as an English Literature major, and will be graduating in December 2015.  ENGL 470 is actually the second online course I’ve ever taken so for all you newbies out there, don’t worry, you’ll get the hang of it soon enough 🙂

To be honest, when I first started at UBC, I wasn’t too intrigued by the idea of studying “Canadian” literature.  It’s interesting because I am a Canadian born Chinese, born in Calgary and raised most of my life in Vancouver.  My Chinese is passable at best, I can speak and understand but I never went to school so my writing and reading skills are quite lacking.  I have and feel like I always will identify first and foremost as a proud Canadian, yet I have never felt drawn to the history of our nation.  So when I first started my degree at UBC, I immediately dismissed “Canadian Literature” as a “requirement” I would deal with later on in my undergrad.  However, as I’m sure most of my other peers who are in their final years will agree, I found that as each year passed, I grew and changed in many ways.  In fact, not only as an individual but also as a student.  Different classes that seemingly had nothing to do with Canadian history or literature had profound effects on the way I viewed the society around me.  Through a variety of classes in sociology, gender studies, and german studies, I found my true inner critical voice that made me more intuitive to the problematic aspects of not only Canadian society’s treatment of indigenous peoples but also my own attitudes as a subsequent product of them.

The reality is that many Canadians do not feel like indigenous issues are relevant to them.  Last semester, I took a CSIS450, a critical studies in sexuality class with Dr. Janice Stewart, in which we discussed the types of narratives that exist in our society, how they define the way we see history, and most importantly who profits and benefits from these narratives.  Although it was a gender and sexuality studies class, we touched on the portrayal of First Nations groups and the ways in which they are erased from our country’s history in various ways that are overlooked by many people.  One example is in the world renowned Canadian landscape art of the Group of Seven.  It wasn’t until I took this gender studies class that I realized there was criticism surrounding their art’s reinforcement of Terra Nullius, the depiction of various Canadian regions and land as untouched and undiscovered by humans when in reality, these areas had been inhabited by indigenous groups for many years.  This in and of itself reveals the problematic ways in which First Nations people have been written out of our nation’s history.

Recently, I also took ENGL 358, an english class in 18th century British Colonization literature, and found myself more fired up and interested in looking first hand into colonizing narratives and representations.  It was through this exposure to all these different studies that I experienced a shift in my attitudes towards Canadian Indigenous history and literature.  I came to realize the importance of understanding the significance of First nations stories, and the current lack of them in current Western literature.  What are their stories and why are we not hearing them?  Who decides the stories we read and hear?  Why don’t more events or movements in the news that attempt to bring more attention to First Nations narratives like #ShutdownCanada receive more attention?  I am interested in taking on all of these questions in ENGL 470 during this summer semester with all of you, and I hope we can help change the apathy that so many Canadians feel when it comes to First Nations issues.

Thanks for reading and please feel free to leave a comment!

^Growing up in Vancouver, BC.

Works Cited

Gough, David. “#ShutDownCanada: First Nations People Plan Nationwide Protests Friday.” Toronto Sun. N.p., 11 Feb. 2015. Web. 15 May 2015.

Varley, Christopher. “Group of Seven.” The Canadian Encyclopedia. N.p., 11 July 2013. Web. 15 May 2015.